Transcript But, can people find them? - The Council on East Asian Libraries

Open Access, Deep Web, and Online
Collaboration in Chinese Studies:
The FOREASt Experience
Tao Yang
Council on East Asian Libraries Annual Meeting
Philadelphia
March 25, 2010
FOREASt Experience
A great irony…
• Tremendous growth of free and open access scholarly
resources on the web
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Open access journals
Electronic theses and dissertations
Disciplinary and institutional repositories
Digital humanities & e-sciences
Mass digitization
Online government information
• But, can people find them?
– Library websites or OPACs provide only selective coverage
– Google may not be able to retrieve many free web resources – the deep
web problem
FOREASt Experience
Surface web:
Retrievable by general
search engines
Deep web:
Not retrievable by
general search engines
Deep Web: The Iceberg Analogy
FOREASt Experience
A radical proposition…
• What if we build a virtual library
– consisting entirely of free and open access resources
– selected and organized in the same way as commercial resources?
• Pros:
– Can be used by librarians to conveniently choose most relevant
resources to populate their subject guides
– Can be readily incorporated as a distinctive collection to supplement
local print collection and fee-based e-collection
– Can benefit users in all types of institutions, small and big
– Can be easily accessed by users anywhere, anytime, barrier-free
• Cons:
– ???
FOREASt Experience
First-generation virtual libraries: Lessons
learned
• First-generation virtual libraries: starting to fade away
– East Asian WWW VL: Last updated Nov 11, 1999
– Portal to Asian Internet Resources: Last updated September 14, 2005
– Internet Guide for China Studies: Last updated June 22, 2009
• Lessons learned
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Be very selective
Be interactive
Be collaborative
Keep it small
Be ready to adopt and migrate to new technologies
FOREASt Experience
Project timeline
• 2005: Involved in internal discussions on what free resources
to include on the library web site at Yale
• 2008: Started to talk about the idea with other East Asian
librarians
• 2009-: Implementation
– April: built http://foreast.wordpress.com
– June: public announcement to CEAL (100 resources)
– August: built http://www.foreast.org
• As of March 2010
– 300 resources (journals and databases)
– 20,000 pageviews (comparable to major East Asian library websites)
– incorporated into 20 library and scholarly sites all over the world
FOREASt Experience
Search
Browse
FOREASt Experience
Explore
FOREASt Experience
Slide
show
Resource
list
FOREASt Experience
Navigation
Menu (same as
foreast.org)
Interactive
features
FOREASt Experience
3000
2500
2000
foreast.org
1500
foreast.wordpress.com
1000
500
0
Apr-09 May-09 Jun-09
Jul-09
Aug-09 Sep-09
Oct-09
Nov-09 Dec-09 Jan-10
Monthly Statistics: Pageviews
Feb-10
FOREASt Experience
Geographical origins of FOREASt.org visitors
FOREASt Experience
Use cases
• Librarians select resources from FOREASt to populate their
own subject guides
• Librarians introduce FOREASt to their own users via web
sites, database lists, and/or blogs
• Scholars incorporate FOREASt on their own web sites
• Librarians use FOREASt in their instruction sessions
FOREASt Experience
FOREASt Experience
Final thought
If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.
--Proverb attributed to African origin