The employee directory of the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office contains valuable materials for researches on Taiwanese history. These printed directories provide indispensable resources for recognizing illegible handwritings in various governmental documents and private manuscripts. However, these highly useful records had been held in different repositories in Taiwan and Japan. The Archives of the ITH hence began to collect all the scattered volumes and launched a digital system project in 2008.

Now, the system, Taiwan Sotokufu Personnel Directory, is available online, enabling an easier, more convenient and more efficient access to the documentation. With its full-text platform and standardized metadata, it not only serves as a great tool for reading and deciphering official documents of the Japanese government, but also covers organizational, personnel and payroll information of the colonial administration throughout Taiwan between 1896 and 1944. In addition to browsing and searching the catalog, e-books and data export or comparison functions are also available. There are about 950,000 entries in the database.

The Taiwan Sotokufu Personnel Directory system can be found at [who.ith.sinica.edu.tw].