AAS roundtable on latest Asian Studies library projects

[Guest guest]

You are invited to an AAS open roundtable panel:

 

"Challenges and Opportunities for Information Access

for Asian Studies"

 

Saturday, April 2

1:00-2:30pm

Hong Kong Room, Hyatt Regency

 

This is a rountable presentation and online demonstrations for both

librarians and scholars, to showcase some of the latest

international collaborative information and library projects, and

the new research-support resources for Asian Studies that they are

creating. Asian Studies scholars who attend the panel will get a

chance to see first-hand some of the more exciting recent

developments in large-scale efforts to provide new bibliographic and

full-text access to important and unique research resources from

libraries and archives in Asia, and will learn how they can

immediately begin to make use of these non-commercial, freely

available online resources which they might not have heard of

before. Equally important, the roundtable will provide a forum for

scholars in different fields to give the librarians input that will

be useful in prioritizing and planning future developments in

projects like these. While the librarians representing each of the

Asian Studies sub-fields (South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia)

have occasionally organized similar presentations for their

respective constituencies, this roundtable panel will give us all a

chance to get the big picture for Asian Studies as a whole, and to

enable cross-regional input from faculty and scholars. Among

others, the panel will highlight the activities of the Digital

Library for International Research (DLIR), a collaborative project

of American overseas research centers in Cambodia, Mongolia, Nepal,

India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh (as well as a dozen other

countries), under the auspices of CAORC (Council of American

Overseas Research Centers). An update on activities of CSAL (Center

for South Asia Libraries) and DSAL (Digital South Asia Library)

projects will be included, as well as other projects such as the

South Asia Union Catalog project (to be presented by Jim Nye).

CAORC, which is sponsoring this public event, anticipates

participation in the roundtable demonstrations by AIIS, AIPS, and

other international partnership efforts with Asian institutions,

that have been quietly progressing behind the scenes and whose

results will be of great interest to the fields of Asian Studies.

There will also be time for open discussion of strategies and

priorities for improving access to Asian Studies materials (both in

the libraries of the United States and in Asia itself), and an

opportunity to share experiences among South, East and Southeast

Asian librarians and scholars, and their distinct projects.

 

Looking forward to seeing you there!

 

David Magier of Area Studies

Columbia University Libraries

and

Chair of the Roundtable (on behalf of CAORC)