Three Online Libraries: Hawai`i, Taiwan, China

vincent-k-pollard_80By Vincent K. Pollard

I have been teaching politics, Asian studies, and research design on three campuses of the University of Hawai’i System since the 1990s. My first book is Globalization, Democratization and Asian Leadership (Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2004). In revised form, two chapters of that book have been reprinted as journal articles. And one is being translated into Chinese for publication by East China Normal University’s Center for Cold War International History Studies.

My teaching and research have also generated three annotation-intensive online libraries, each of which is part of a larger Internet library. In chronological order, these ongoing online projects and their respective superordinate online libraries are as follows:

“Taiwan Cross-Strait Directory”
http://apdl.kcc.hawaii.edu/~taiwan/
Asia Pacific Digital Library
2001- present

“Chinese Cultures Abroad WWW Virtual Library”
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~pollard/chculture.html
China WWW Virtual Library & Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library
2003 – present

“Hawai’i Politics WWW Virtual Library”
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~pollard/Hawaii.html
Polynesia WWW Virtual Library & Pacific Studies WWW Virtual Library
2005 – present

The number of hits that the “Chinese Cultures WWW Virtual Library” and the “Hawai’i Politics WWW Virtual Library” get is substantial since of those two each is part of a larger unit in the WWW Virtual Library.

__________

Email comment by Claude Almansi on 31 March 2009:

claude80Your online libraries are really awesome, Vincent – both in their rich
content and in the userfriendliness of their organization.

I had suggested something far more primitive and in “perpetual beta”
to collect resources mentioned by people in the Innovate-Ideagora
network to Denise Easton, off the
<http://innovate-ideagora.ning.com/forum/topics/really-cool-tools-sites>
discussion: a social bookmarking group at Diigo: like
<http://groups.diigo.com/groups/images4education> whose feed is
integrated on the right – under  the “about” rubric – of
<http://images4education.ning.com/> .  Denise was interested but she
thought asking people to sign up for one more social tool would be a
bit too much.

She has a point there, of course. Yet the “images4education” Diigo
group grew without any formal announcement: members of the Ning
network saw the feed on the right, thought it was a good idea, and
joined to add their bookmarks to it.

Do you think we could consider something similarly informal for ETC?
Then if it doesn’t work, we could just scrap the diigo group.

Best
Claude

2 Responses

  1. Vincent,
    I agree with Claude that your libraries are awesome. I cannot imagine how much time they took to put together. Were these done for classes or by classes, perhaps? I think that these types of compendia are great learning tools for students to contribute to themselves.

  2. Aloha kakou.

    Thanks for the interested, generous responses earlier in 2009.

    From the very beginning, the intended audience(s) for each of the three online libraries has consciously included the following three types of prospective users:

    1) experts, 2) actively interested college and university students but not necessarily beginners, 3) members of interested communities outside the university, including journalists.

    With one partial exception, student participation and input — again by design — is not a major part of these three online libraries. Although students — and other users — are asked to inform me about dead hyperlinks, I’ve caught almost 100% of these nonfunctioning links myself.

    But in the case of the Chinese Cultures Abroad WWW Virtual Library, excerpts from longer student evaluations are quoted. And they are attributed to their respective authors. These comments sometimes differ from one another — and from me!

    But, yes, maintaining these libraries has been a huge amount of work!

    In addition, I have written about them and what they mean. (See my online CV for details.)

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