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

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

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

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: ???

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

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

Search Browse

Explore

Slide show Resource list

Navigation Menu (same as foreast.org) Interactive features

Monthly Statistics: Pageviews

Geographical origins of FOREASt.org visitors

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

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