Concerning East Asia, a variety of organizations and individuals have contributed a large number of scholarly resources on the Internet, including:

• a tremendous amount of texts and images digitized by cultural institutions – libraries, archives, and museums, in both East Asia and the West;
• official documents and statistics provided by various governments under the e-government initiatives;
• online reference tools and other databases developed by individual scholars or academic institutions in the process of teaching and research;
• open access journals created by some pioneering East Asianists (graduate and professional students included);
• services provided by Internet companies like Google, Yahoo!, and Baidu as a way to increase online traffic. 

Because these resources are free, those organizations and individuals behind them usually do not have much incentive to “market” them, so they tend to be underutilized by both the library and the scholarly community. In addition, many of these resources use an underlying database structure, so their contents tend to be hidden from search engines like Google. 

By putting these open access resources in one place and presenting them in a meaningful and user-friendly way, FOREASt hopes to make a difference and help promote these resources as a viable alternative to commercial products. This endeavor apparently has become more compelling as library budgets are cut everywhere in the current global financial meltdown. That said, FOREASt is meant to supplement rather than substitute the collections, both physical and electronic, in the libraries of your own institutions. You may find a list of East Asian libraries in North America here.

Who is the target audience of FOREASt?

Anyone with the Internet connection can access FOREASt. Because FOREASt covers a large number of databases that are in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, researchers who are able to read one of these languages may find it most useful.

How do you choose “Free Open Resources”?

Currently FOREASt covers two types of free open resources:

• searchable databases: textual, visual, or numeric
• electronic journals: English-language, currently in publication titles only

This division is actually superficial because an online journal may evolve into a database as the contents accumulate over time and a search engine is added. So clearly FOREASt favors searchable databases over regular websites in terms of format. There are several reasons for the preference of searchable databases:

• most of these databases are developed and maintained by reputable institutions and renowned scholars, which is an indication about their quality, stability, and long-term viability;
• the content in searchable databases tend to be more substantial than regular web sites, which is why they need their own search engines in the first place;
• unlike regular websites, many (if not all) databases are not searchable by Google or other Web search engines, which make them part of the “deep” or “invisible web”, so it is necessary to make intentional efforts to bring them to the “surface” of Internet.

Please also note that FOREASt does not try to collect every free database available, very much like an academic library does not buy every book ever published. For example, it does not collect websites of individual newspapers–many of them are searchable, but there are just too many and the information in them overlap a great deal; for the same reason, we do not include all the online library catalogs. In both cases, we prefer aggregators, such as online union catalogs and news resources consisting of multiple titles.

What are the differences between FOREASt and existing directories of academic websites?

FOREASt is different for the following reasons:

• unique geographic coverage (East Asia)–the scopes of some existing sites are either larger (for instance, Asia) or smaller (China, for example);
• free content only–a couple of resources may have both paid and free versions;
• selective content–see answer to the previous question;
• flexible and easy to use–it provides multiple ways (searching, browsing, exploring by keywords) of discovery;
• interactive–both researchers and librarians are encouraged to rate orcomment on existing resources and recommend new ones (comments will be made public within 24 hours, and new titles will be added over the weekend).

What does a FOREASt database entry cover?

In FOREASt, every database has a dedicated entry, which includes the following:

• the web address;
• a brief description that is primarily based on the information from the website, but it will be updated based on user feedback;
• tags (keywords), also describing what a resource is about (but clicking on a tag there will take you to other WordPress blogs using the same tag, which has its pros and cons);
• comments box, which you can use to share your experience with a particular resource for the benefit of other researchers (the name and email part can be skipped if you prefer to remain anonymous).

How can I find something that is not on the main page?

In three way:

• using the search box on the right if you know what you are looking for;
• exploring the tags (keywords) in the tag cloud, also on the right;
• browsing the three database lists and one journal list, listed on the top bar.

Imitating the physical layout of many East Asian libraries in North America, FOREASt has five main sections (see also the navigation bar above and in the left column) that you can easily browse:

• Journals Room, displaying over 30 open access, English-language, currently in publication journals;
• Chinese Studies Collection, including both online reference tools and digital collections (but the resources focusing on Taiwan or Hong Kong are listed separately);
• Japanese Studies Collection, including both online reference tools and digital collections;
• Korean Studies Collection, including both online reference tools and digital collections;
• General Collection (for resources covering the whole East Asia and beyond), including digital collections, online reference tools, and miscellaneous services.

Who is behind FOREASt?

FOREASt was conceived and developed by Tao Yang, the East Asian Librarian at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He brought to this project six years’ professional experiences, first as the reference librarian for the East Asian Library at Yale and then the East Asian Librarian at Rutgers. Members of the Council on East Asian Libraries and Tao’s colleagues at Rutgers also provided important help and support. More information about the FOREASt community is available here.

For more information about Tao, please go to his personal homepage. He can be reached via email: taoyang@rci.rutgers.edu. You may also follow me on Twitter for FOREASt updates.

How can I contribute?

The simplest way to contribute is to rate a resource by using the stars on top of the entry. You may also leave comments on an entry to share your experience and insights, which will benefit other researchers; if you want to remain anonymous while commenting, you may skip the name and email part (which is a WordPress thing) and just write your comments in the comments box. Recommending additioanl resources has been popular among FOREASt users. To suggest a database, you may use the comments box, or write to Tao via email. Thanks for your contribution in advance!

About the banner image

The banner image is modified from the original (http://www.flickr.com/photos/45688285@N00/3056709/ under the Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 2.0). The trees in the image imply FOREASt (pronounced "forest") while the cloud symbolizes "cloud computing".