1. Council on East Asian Libraries Annual Meeting
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

2. A great irony…
Tremendous growth of free and open access scholarly resources on the web
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

3. Retrievable by general search engines
Surface web:
Retrievable by general search engines
Deep web:
Not retrievable by general search engines
Deep Web: The Iceberg Analogy

4. 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:
???

5. 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
Be very selective
Be interactive
Be collaborative
Keep it small
Be ready to adopt and migrate to new technologies

6. 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
June: public announcement to CEAL (100 resources)
August: built
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

7. Search
Browse

8. Explore

9. Slide show
Resource list

10. Navigation Menu (same as foreast.org)
Interactive features

11. Monthly Statistics: Pageviews

12. Geographical origins of FOREASt.org visitors

13. 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

15. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Final thought
If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.
--Proverb attributed to African origin