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– 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

Deep Web: The Iceberg Analogy

Surface web:

Retrievable by general search engines

Deep web:

Not retrievable by general search engines

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– 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

SearchBrowse

FOREASt Experience

Explore

FOREASt Experience

Slide show

Resource list

FOREASt Experience

Navigation Menu (same as

foreast.org)

Interactive features

FOREASt Experience

Monthly Statistics: Pageviews

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