Chinese Canadian Library Weblog

Small world! The largest research group of MS is in Beijing, and the most UW school friends work for MS. The headquarter campus visit is like a library school reunion party. When Linda Shaw reminded me our group study back at school, all those gentle smiling faces came to my mind again. Besides profs and co-workers, my kind classmates helped me through the MLS program. They tried their best to make sure I understand all the lectures and discussions, and to guess what the poor Chinese girl struggled to express in English.

I am so happy for Linda who built the way up to the head librarian in Microsoft. Jennifer, as 学妹， Xia as 学姐，luckily work together and hang out together. They all like where I settled, and will drive up soon. Linda’s happy receiving our name list from Zhijia and told me the challenge to hire for Beijing. Intel tried recently.Microsoft employees do read books. They often find books online, then request for print copies. The 12,000/month circulation rate is high. Mr. Dirks from External Research delivered a passionate PPT on applied projects to enhance academic prodctivity by evolving MS scholarly communication offerings.

Like UBC, UW faculty hasn’t got to buy in. ( Blue Angels just flew by and made the noise. ) Librarians try to help Graduate School on Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Relevant work is being handled by committees and subject librarians.

About 80 web authors across the system, look and feel is handled by the system, although a variety of content management systems are being used, Plone, Drupal, Moddle, Joomla, iSite.
Then Jennifer showed us her Facebook with bunch of Web2.0 integration: RSS Feed (of new Japanese arrivals), Del.icio.us and Flickr and Flickrvision.

OpenURL is transferring the information about an item from the information provider via a Link- Server. OpenURL can embed CrossRef DOI’s, and CrossRef DOI’s can be used to send OpenURL to libraries. This helps publishers and libraries collaborate to optimize the services for the ultimate consumers of their information.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) offers a simple technical option for catalogue and repository services to make their metadata available to other services. The OAI framework distinguishes between data providers and service providers. Data providers have metadata that they wish to make available, service provider grabs metadata regularly from data provider, but original full-text sits in the repository.

The basic concept of image and the workflow of scanning is covered by Prof. Chen’s PPT.

Chinese Medical Association Journal bought by Wanfang created the first ejournal publisher, and traditional publishers started to withdraw from the Big Three and transform to e-publishing. Is this the main reason of missing titles and issues from CNKI?

Prof. Madeleine Dong, Professor of History and Chair of the China Studies Program at UW thinks that Chinese historical studies is influenced by Sino-American relationship, not really history itself. Unlike Japan, China was studied as a model of failure. Its starting point is China’s reaction to Western influcence. Social history was developed a great deal in 1980’s with extensive field research. The focus shift from intellectual to social history is based on different primary sources and different locations. After 1989, public space, local elites, religions, government vs. citizens in China have gained attention. City history is one of main fruitful areas in recent Chinese history studies. Tani Barlow’s Colonial Modernity has evolved from and into unique forms throughout Asia. Dong uses Tian Min’s book about Mei Lanfang’s Peking Opera in Shanghai and the US as a sample.
Information technology has brought online searching to the field, especially the early history. Minguo study has been speeding up by e-resources, but still leaves out many subjects, such as, the beginning of 19th century. Of course PRC period is the weakest with limited methods. Scholars are going to the countryside and minority areas, which could be political and national sensitive. Libraries are lack of minority materials. Manchuria studies became an interesting globalized phenomenon, which attract scholars from Japan and Korea. Besides, economic and political studies suffer from lack of reliable resources.

Religious studies need primary resources from China, not only from the European missionaries documents. Why French missionaries in Northeastern China is particular interesting? Some of them went with Kangxi, and made advanced maps. P. Jartoux discovered Ginseng; F.Lafitau started the business between Canada and China. Sino-US Ginseng trade was really started by the French in mid-18 century.

Zhaohui’s question is excellent! How does Prof. Dong consider scholars like herself? comparing with the Western. She thinks Chinese students are familar with Western theories, and they tend to choose Western popular topics.

Dong mentioned the difference between her book on Beijing and Yeh Wenhsin’s Shanghai. She depends on archives and folk traditions in Tianqiao, but sounds like to get stuck with unoffical or folk history. I don’t agree with the criticism on Shanghai studies and doubts about whether or not Shanghai can represent China. I think the boom is resource related, Yeh’s studies not only depend on archives, but also radio show, movies, Tanci, newspapers, etc, wow, already multi-media. Dong agreed and told us her own miserable story with NLC.

Prof. Dong doesn’t encourage us to buy large sets, but interlibrary cooperation.

Prof. Joyce Chen shifts her topic to technical side today. Stanford made Guomindang archive into 35 mm microfilm first, microfilm readers can make into digital files. Ming archives with colorful seals should be scanned directly. Workflow includes:

Metadata, digital objects and handle system
Ontology, clustering, etc organized information
Searching, browsing, portal, Web2.0

Digitizing text needs to save the original file first and then convert it to HTML, PDF or RTF, etc; Manuscripts need re-enter or OCR; image if full-text searching is not required. E-books use XML files (OEBPS structure). The format (TIFF, JFIF, GIF) is decided by the usage of preservation, download or just preview. Prof. Chen touches on av digitization technology as well.Deep link between different digital content products are based on OpenURL. It’s not free for DOI, at least $1. Unique identifier is needed at the very beginning, such as the National Cutural Heritage Project names its all artifacts.

Tim Berners-Lee’s semantic web is still a concept. Is Clusty representing this concept? or there should be more possibilities? Yunshan showed me Cuil, which was developed by Google Veteran, really Cool!

UW worked with Cornell for a few years serving users on both campuses, until they both joined the national program. Now virtual reference is marketed on all subject web pages. UW is assigned 10 hours a day for the national virtual reference work and UW users get help 24/7. QuestionPoint has Chinese interface now, but can not handle multi-language?

FTE/Head Count
UW has 42,000, but for Chinese e-resources, Size, nature of programs should be the right model. Concurrent User is another one, and may save some money, but not good for course reserves. Tiers, Carnegie classification, works for resources on broad subjects such as JStore and Mute. Budget or Resource Budget and Custom quote are other models.

Bundling and big deals like Elsevier was developed with publisher goals as build market share and decrease transaction costs. What we want to do is to limit price increases, add content and retain flexibility. Platform examples: Ebrary, EBL may not give perpetual access. Serial Solutions has moved into ebook management. For consortial buying, all libraries should do better through group, and libraries don’t subsidize others.Case Studies:

Korean Studies librarians from Korean Collections Consortium of North America is flexible. But people here think the vendor set the price too high. What prospects for consortial buying of China Studies resources? Tim advises us to be patient, since it’s a time consuming work.

Very impressive! Taiwan U’s 淡新档案，National History Museum’s art works can be searched by image (content-based retrieval). Prof. Chen used searching butterflies as an example. National Repository of Cultural Heritage has tons of old photos, ancient contracts and multi-media resources.

Yunshan was telling me how difficult to find anything like this from the Mainland, such as modern dance, which reminds me about the request for paintings sold recently by auction. Chinese government protects the competition among digital content providers for profit making, not encouraging cultural heritage preservation and digitaization, lacks of high quality and free digital projects for its 1.3 billion people and the rest of the world. Taiwan’s success, I think, is because of its wide social application and open attitude.
Mr. Wang and Ma followed up my question. Prof. Chen said that she didn’t care about money at all, and is happy to see those projects, if not growing, still exist. Library school students no longer care about traditional operation, but keen on working for .com companies or digital projects. She only picked graduate school students who are innovative or creative. Huayi, Hanzhen and Bokelai are all commercial providers. The challenge is how to balance between OpenAccess and commercialization. Taiwan spent 5 billion purchasing overseas, but not selling its knowledge and publications out. Taiwan has about 20,000 ebooks ready by the end of this year.

Diane emphasized the importance of license as that “Contract or license is over the copyright.” The license needs to request for perpetual access, but how the vendor delivers the access may change over time. The six “terms of death” are practical:
Indemnification, Don’t indemnify a provider
Don’t take responsibility for user behavior
Unreasonable termination
Jurisdiction: governing law and venue
Disclaimer of warranty
Alteration of terms without notification

On UW’s e-resource page, Responsible Use of Electronic Resources lists Dos and Don’ts. We should have something added to our page like that at UBC.

C. Wang, asked a good question again on CNKI. Sounds like Tim has never run into this situation for Western databases. Lucky Chinese librarians! Both Diane and Tim suggest to take it up, make supervisors responsible. ERN License mapping sounds helpful too.

The practice license assignment is short with lots of bad things. No terms on course reserves, ILL or downloadingThe following sentences or points from the sample license indicate 6 terms of death accordingly

1. 3c (indemnification)

2. “Customer shall be responsible ensuring that any users accessing that applicable sites are notified of, and abide by, the terms of this license, and customer.”

3. 5b. unreasonable termination

4. 1a. which copyright law? Chinese or American? 7e, not clear

5. 3a. & 6 Disclaimer of warranty

6. alteration of terms without notification