eReviews Asian Studies

There is no shortage of authoritative voices affirming the conventional wisdom that Asia's importance to the rest of the world will continue to grow at an astonishing pace. For the most part, however, the publishers who seem most determined to satisfy the need for Asia-related information—bibliographic access, statistical data, primary source material, and peer-reviewed research—are less-well-known operations catering to niche interests that have been more or less overlooked by some of the major information industry players.

Bibliography of Asian Studies has been a crucial resource for scholarly research since 1971, as the Association for Asian Studies shows how much can still be accomplished outside the sphere of the major database providers. Asia-Studies Full-Text Online and the complementary Humanities section provide full-text access to an exclusive list of peer-reviewed research in the social sciences (particularly economics) and humanities. Researchers in a wide range of fields (but with a focus on China) stand to benefit from China Data Online, a database of proprietary statistical data made available via a unique arrangement between the China Data Center at the University of Michigan and All China Market Research, with the authorization of the Chinese government. And among the growing number of resources whose purpose is to make collections of primary sources accessible to students and researchers at all levels there is Asian Discovery Package, with unique, themed collections on America, Asia and the Pacific.

Asia-Studies Humanities International Information Services

www.asia-studies.com

CONTENT Asia-Studies Full-Text Online (ASFTO) holds exclusive rights to full-text reports, peer-reviewed scholarship, and working papers from over 40 research institutions in 55 countries across Asia, the Pacific Rim, and Pacific islands, along with Australia and New Zealand. The focus is on contemporary business, government, and economic and social issues, and among the Highlights at the time of this review were extensively researched and documented reports on organic agriculture, the Cambodia-Thailand conflict, nuclear power, environmental law, and the Chinese diaspora.

Study providers include Australia South Asia Research Centre, China Media Research, East-West Center in Honolulu, Monetary Authority of Singapore, and Philippine Institute for Development Studies. Among the full-text peer-reviewed journals are such titles as Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Harvard Asia Pacific Review, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, and Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs.

ASFTO also offers a range of statistical material, including key indicators from the Asian Development Bank, numerous multicountry studies from Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Secretariat, and Asia-wide statistics from Asian Development Outlook and Asia Economic Monitor. Compiled by International Information Services, it's updated weekly and currently contains 12,000 studies.

The economics and social sciences orientation of ASFTO is complemented by Asia-Studies Humanities. Nearly a dozen providers—including a mix of research institutes (e.g., Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies of Australian National University, German Institute for Japanese Studies) and academic journals and working papers (e.g., Journal of Global Buddhism, Taiwan Journal of Anthropology)—contribute to the Humanities section focusing on Asian arts, culture, history, language, literature, philosophy, and religion.

USABILITY The design of ASFTO serves users who know what they want and who regularly visit the site to discover new content in their areas of interest. The left-hand frame features links permitting the searcher easily to access the Humanities section, search the entire resource, or view the Highlights back to 2004. It also allows browsing by provider and permits ready access to the statistical content.

The main frame lists the current topics on a monthly basis with links to the full PDF. The Search link goes to a page featuring a single search box, augmented by a selection of tools for crafting a viable query. Pull-downs enable a user to search all of the words (AND, implicitly), any of the words (OR), the exact phrase, or Boolean (which permits the searcher to combine specific Boolean operations and nesting to achieve a precise search strategy).

Check boxes enable Stemming (an intelligent variation on truncation), Fuzzy searching (which compensates for misspellings), and Phonic searching (which finds homonyms). Another pull-down enables sorting by hits (i.e., the number of times search terms appear in a document) or file size. While the elegant, succinct Search Help page does an excellent job of explaining these options, the link to the page is a bit too subtle and might be more prominently located in the top menu bar where Help is conventionally found.

Results are relevancy-ranked and display the document title and provider name, a line or two of text with search terms bolded, and Relevancy Score, Hits, and File Size. While the uniqueness of the resource yields a number of valuable sources for the researcher, absence of a controlled vocabulary can lead to some imprecise search results. Senior thesis students at our school would have certainly benefited from the material on Chinese aid to Africa and on Chinese domestic adoptions—to cite two real-world examples—but the dual meanings of some of the search terms produced more irrelevant sources than relevant ones.

While the Humanities section may be browsed independently, the results list integrates content from both sections. Marking, emailing, and exporting citations to a bibliographic management application are absent from the resource.

PRICING Pricing for an annual subscription is based on type and size of institution, as well as on location. Academic subscriptions range from $495 for institutions with fewer than 1000 FTEs up to $1,195 for institutions in the 3000–6000 FTE range. Colleges with FTEs above 6000 would pay $1,395 (and multicampus universities are charged according to their aggregate FTE). Community college rates are discounted 20 percent, and high schools are charged just $295. Independent research institutions with 50 or fewer employees may subscribe for $395 annually. Government, educational, and public sector institutions in developing countries are eligible for discounts of 35 percent; subscribers in the least developed countries get 75 percent off. Subscribers to Asia-Studies Full-Text Online also receive the Humanities component.

END USERS With all the unique content here, Asian studies researchers across the spectrum should find a lot to like about ASFTO and the complementary Humanities section, particularly given that it's 100 percent full text. With a design geared toward making new content accessible at a glance, however, the Asia-watcher who makes regular visits to the resource to discover what's been freshly added will be the one most rewarded.

Adam Matthew Digital

www.amdigital.co.uk

CONTENT Adam Matthew Digital provides access to nearly 30 impressive digital collections of primary source material for institutions of all sizes. Each collection is well suited to concentrated scholarly research, allowing for in-depth study of exceptionally rare material not readily accessible to the general public, while also offering amazing opportunities for undergraduate research, with its numerous interactive features, teaching aids, introductory scholarly essays, and valuable contextual material. Three themed "Discovery Packages" permit institutions to broaden their holdings of digitized material at a greatly discounted rate.

Asian Discovery (AD) includes over one million pages of material relating to countries throughout Asia, as well as specifically commissioned essays to support the vast range of events and topics covered, affording a more comprehensive approach with the inclusion of five unique collections. The first, America, Asia and the Pacific—A Social and Cultural History of Meiji Japan, was created from the personal and professional papers of natural historian Edward Sylvester Morse, documenting life in Japan before its Westernization. Digitized in its entirety (99 boxes), the collection is arranged in 15 main series, with coverage of Morse's papers from 1858 to 1925. In addition to the illustrations within the series of material, 200-plus specially selected illustrations and photographs are viewable in a slide show gallery. The collection also includes maps, a chronology of Morse's life, biographical material, an extensive bibliography, and external links for further research.

China: Trade, Politics, and Culture, 1793–1980 is based on English-language collections of unique manuscript materials held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the British Library, with material from additional libraries. This collection documents nearly 200 years of pivotal events with emphasis on the varying perspectives of British and American politicians, diplomats, missionaries, businesspeople, and tourists in China. Examples of content include fully searchable runs of three missionary periodicals: The Chinese Recorder, Light and Life Magazine, and The Land of Sinim: The North China Mission Quarterly Paper; documents on the Opium Wars, the Japanese seizure of Taiwan, the Communist Revolution led by Mao; and Nixon's famous visit in 1972. In addition, this project offers 400-plus paintings, photographs, sketches, and ephemeral items; 84 historical maps; an interactive map using current regional boundaries; biographies; a chronology of major events; and scholarly essays.

Empire Online features thematic essays by scholars in the field of Empire Studies, introducing students to source material within a broader historical, cultural, and literary context. The collection includes thousands of unique source materials like maps, manuscripts, pamphlets, paintings, drawings, and rare books. All items are included in their entirety within a structure of five thematic sections selected around the key topics: Cultural Contact, 1492–1969; Empire Writings and the Literature of Empire; The Visual Empire; Religion and Empire; and Race, Class, Imperialism and Colonialism, 1607–2007. The project also includes biographies based on the source materials, chronology of events, and teaching and classroom resources. A sampling of content includes Record of Sir Francis Drake's third voyage to the West Indies, A Lady's Diary Before and During the Indian Mutiny, Religious Trends in French West Africa, 1956, and Native Races in the British Empire.

Foreign Office Files for China, 1949–1980, from The National Archives, Kew, includes three sections covering the period 1949–80. Part of the Archives Direct portal, this project addresses a fundamental era in Chinese history and covers political, social, and economic developments and analysis in Communist China during the 1950s, with detailed reports such as the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek in 1948, the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, the arrest of the Gang of Four, and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.

Finally, India, Raj and Empire, covers the history of South Asia between 1615 and 1947, with original manuscript material, diaries and journals, official and private papers, letters, sketches, paintings, and original Indian documents containing histories and literary works from collections of the National Library of Scotland. Material is organized within nine thematic areas, including The East India Company: Government and Administration; Society, Travel and Leisure; Indian Uprising; The Raj: British Government and Administration of India after 1858; and India: Literature, History and Culture. Additional features include a slide show with paintings, illustrations, and sketches in the collection; reference maps; search topics; a detailed chronology; and external links for additional research.

Libraries can create their own themed package from the list of titles; smaller institutions can choose Archive Secure, a five-year payment plan to secure perpetual access, with no additional hosting fees.

USABILITY Although these are five distinct collections, AD is an outstanding package, offering institutional access to a broad range of rare and extremely diverse material. A great little federated search tool, "Archive Explorer" allows users to cross-search all collections, and can be embedded on a web page for easy access.

Exploring the individual collections by browsing allows researchers to find the unique gems, and we quickly discovered beautifully illustrated manuscripts, personal narratives, and eyewitness accounts of important events with this approach. We also found the search options to be first-rate for specific queries and all but Empire Online offer Simple and Advanced modes. There are numerous browse methods for those of us who like to scan, including "Popular Searches," "Search Topics," "View Names," and "Searching Aid."

We first used the search tool for "indian mutiny." Users can browse through all retrieved records or organize by collection. Our results included documents from four of the collections, such as Narrative of the Indian Revolt (Empire Online), The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal, Vol. 24 (China: Trade, Politics, and Culture), and Transcript of the Proceedings at James Stuart's Court-martial, 12 December, 1780 (India, Raj and Empire). Results can be emailed from the Archive Explorer interface, and once a document is selected, the user has full access to the native interface from the particular collection.

Navigation is straightforward, and paging through a document is superfast. Images can be downloaded/saved as PDF files; users can view the transcription as well. Several of the collections also offer bibliographic export options to RefWorks or EndNote.

For those collections with the Slideshow Gallery, users can create a custom slide show of visual material by selecting desired images from a thumbnail list and selecting the "run slideshow" link. Slide show selections in each session can be saved and selections can also be exported as multipage PDFs.

PRICING Details of the pricing model can be found online, and one-time purchase prices are negotiated on an individual basis owing to institutional size and funding. There are no annual maintenance or cost-per-user fees. An annual access fee is available to community colleges and smaller institutions.

END USERS With such an immeasurably diverse resource, this review barely skims the surface, so we highly suggest a trial to one of the individual collections or the Asian Discovery package. Designed to incorporate content in coursepacks or to project images for classroom use, the collections provide researchers worldwide access to rare manuscripts, detailed illustrations, travel diaries, and more. The additional features and functionality of the interface and thematic essays allow students to study original documents in context with historical and cultural events.

Association for Asian Studies

www.aasianst.org

CONTENT Considered "the single most important record of research and scholarly literature on East, Southeast, and South Asia written in Western languages," the Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) contains more than 760,000 records in the humanities and social sciences published worldwide from 1971 to the present. Coverage also includes the natural sciences that have strong human elements, such as medicine, public health, geology, and the environment. The database contains all of the printed editions of the BAS issued from the 1971 to 1991 editions, along with citations compiled since. Published annually since 1941 (BAS ceased print publication in 1998), the resource included citations to Western-language periodical articles, monographs, chapters in edited volumes, conference proceedings, anthologies, and Festschriften of scholarly interest that dealt with the countries and civilizations of East, Southeast, and South Asia, or with the overseas Asian communities in North America, Europe, and elsewhere in the world. Monographs published since 1992 have not been added to the database, allowing editors to allocate more time to updating and adding to the periodical entries.

To handle any inconsistencies in coverage from 1991 to the present, BAS editors have identified the most important 100-plus ("fast-track") periodicals in Asian studies and indexed them on a priority basis for comprehensive coverage. A complete list of these core titles can be found online; a brief sampling includes Asian Survey, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Indian Anthropologist, and Vietnamese Studies.

Most important for scholars of Asian studies, BAS includes index access to many journals, particularly ones published in Asia, that are not indexed anywhere else. Updated quarterly, the database continues to include new and previously excluded journals as staff work toward eliminating gaps in the coverage of previously indexed periodicals and standardizing names of countries and country codes.

Scholarly journals that focus on Asia are indexed on an issue-by-issue basis. Asia-related articles appearing in a selected number of "non-area" periodicals such as Accounting, Business and Financial History, Daedalus, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Radical History Review, and Urban Affairs Review are also identified and indexed.

USABILITY No flashy frills—but with everything a researcher needs—BAS offers various methods for seeking citations. From the opening screen researchers can use the search function for simple or advanced queries or browse by country-subject or by journal title. Interestingly enough, a quick glance at our annual statistics demonstrates that the majority of users prefer simple or advanced search, with absolutely no takers for country or subject browse. All citations are accessible by author, title, year of publication, subject, country, journal title, keyword, and ISSN.

With a Journal Title browse, users can easily scan the alphabetical listing to view the number of entries indexed for each publication, selecting an individual year or "All Years" if desired. We chose Acta Orientalia (Budapest), which includes 453 total entries from 1970 to the present, and retrieved 14 records from 2006. A "search within the publication" option would be helpful for users exploring citations from a particular journal, which is a frequent assignment, but researchers can achieve that same result with advanced search coverage, combining the specific publication with key terms or phrases.

As with all results listings, records can be sorted, saved, and emailed or downloaded as text files. A handy "Add to bookbag" link follows each record, and once saved, citations can easily be emailed or imported into RefWorks or another citation management tool.

Once a search has been executed, a top navigation banner offers options to revise a search, choose a browse mode, view your bookbag, check out help, or consult search history. Users can select any search query link in the history list to resubmit that search.

Advanced mode offers more flexibility with Boolean operators and field limiting (entire record, author, title, journal).

The Country-Subject browse option organizes citations within 16 broad subject categories such as Economics, Literature, Politics & Government, and Science & Technology, for each of the 38 countries included—from Afghanistan to Vietnam.

Listed with each record is a "Find it @ your library" URL linker that connects to WorldCat.org. Our linking profile is configured through the WorldCat gateway, offering our patrons easy and seamless access either through WorldCat or Serials Solution, to full text or document delivery/interlibrary loan services.

PRICING Determined by institution size, the basic annual fee includes very small ($500) to large ($1200) libraries. Individual subscriptions are available and discounts allotted to consortia agreements.

END USERS A core index for decades, BAS in the online format has become a new standard for institutions supporting Asian studies curriculum. In addition to the scholarly content, we were impressed with the functionality that resides within an unassuming package—powerful searching options, linkable search results, easy export/import into RefWorks, and seamless access to our institutional link resolver.

University of Michigan China Data Center & All China Market Research Co.

chinadataonline.org

CONTENT China Data Online (CDO) is made available thanks to a partnership between the University of Michigan China Data Center (CDC) and the All China Market Research (ACMR), which is authorized by the National Bureau of Statistics of China as the country's primary statistical data provider. The resource—offering monthly and yearly macroeconomic statistics as well as historical statistics back to 1949—was developed and licensed by ACMR with support provided by the CDC.

The resource is designed to facilitate easy browsing, and much of its content is readily accessible via the All China Data Center homepage. In the left-hand frame under the "China Statistics" heading are links to Monthly, National, Provincial, City, and County Statistics, as well as Monthly and Yearly Industrial Data back to 1999. There are also two options for viewing statistics via interactive maps.

Under the "Statistical Yearbook" heading are Provincial Yearbooks from 1981 to 2009, and City and National Yearbooks from the same period. There is a heading for "Census Data" with files going back to 1982 as well as a Census Data Search capability, although access is restricted to China Census Database subscribers. The "Census Map & Report" heading links to product descriptions demographic databases in CD-ROM format.

Clicking the "Survey Data" link takes the user to a page describing a joint CDC/China Center for Economic Research site set up to help researchers share data sets. "China Maps" links to a number of atlases, including the 3rd Industrial Census and the 2000 population census as well as China Atlas of Population and Environment for 1990 to 1999 and for 2000.

"Sample Data" lets the user access major economic indicators, industrial surveys, the Monthly Report (on China's macroeconomic development), Custom Data (on imports and export), and Census Data.

The main frame of the homepage is geared for the committed China watcher, with a long list of the latest China statistical news reports such as "National Economy: Recovery and Posing in the Good Direction in 2009" and "China's Foreign Trade Got Rapid Growth in December." Also residing in the frame is a somewhat dated selection of links to CDC news items like "Learn more about the 5.12 earthquake of China." Both groupings ultimately lead to the corresponding news story in full text.

USABILITY Given the emphasis on browsing, most users will likely locate the material they want via the links on the homepage and subsequent look-ups when they reach their areas of interest. In fact, there's no sign of a Search capability anywhere on the homepage. Various sections of the resource—China National Statistical Yearbooks, for example—do have their own internal search capability with a box for the search term and pull-down menus for Source (Book Title or Table), Region, and date range, but the absence of a comprehensive search capability means the user has to know the resource fairly well in order to extract the information needed.

Although the searcher can switch the interface from English to Chinese and back with the click of a button, it is not always the case that the information on any given page is available in English. Dates and numbers, for example, are sometimes represented in Arabic numerals, while text and column labels are displayed in Chinese.

Display options vary across the database. Much of the statistical information is presented in table format, but some areas also permit a researcher to view data as histograms or line figures. Some of the maps are cluttered and poorly labeled, but others—combining data, geography, and time—are quite striking visually.

Export options include Copy to Clipboard, which enables the user to view and manipulate the data in Excel, and Print Datasheet, which brings up the browser's print menu.

PRICING CDC offers subscriptions to China Data Online at a range of price points depending on member status and institutional FTE.

Individual, single-account membership subscriptions are $1300, while college and university faculty and student membership subscriptions are priced at $880. Full institutional membership is $4600.

Discounted memberships for university libraries start at $1200 for institutions with fewer than 4000 FTE, climb to $1800 for schools in the 4000–6000 range, increase to $2400 at the 6000–8000 level, and top out at $2800 for institutions with an FTE beyond 8000. University library subscribers may also add the China Census Database component for $3200.

There is a one-time setup fee of $100 for individual users and of $600 for institutions.

END USERS As the vehicle authorized by the Chinese government to serve as its primary statistical provider, it's pretty hard to bypass CDO and still have access to quality statistical information. The design is fundamentally utilitarian, with few of the extras most searchers have come to expect, but for the novice it will open up a whole new world of information, and for the motivated China watcher, this is essential.

CHINA ACADEMIC JOURNALS (CAJ)

CHINA CORE NEWSPAPER DATABASE (CCND)

EastView, online.eastview.com

CAJ and CCND are just two of the numerous databases available though the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKInet). Touted as "the most comprehensive, full-text database of Chinese journals in the world," CAJ contains 7500-plus scholarly journals on mainland China with coverage from 1994 to the present (full text from 2004). It is produced by Qinghua University and has both English and Chinese search interfaces. Organized within ten Series Databases, further division includes 168 Subject Databases. Institutions can access online (updated daily) or via DVD-ROM (updated monthly). For back-file content, institutions can subscribe to an archive of CAJ from 1915 to 1993 through the Century Journal Project, one of the largest retrospective digital collections of 20th-century Chinese journals, with 3900-plus full-text titles.

CCND provides access to full-text news from over 350 publicly issued core newspapers from 23 provinces, five regions, and four major cities of mainland China. With an archive beginning in 2000 to present, the database includes more than two million articles.

CHINESE CULTURAL REVOLUTION DATABASE (CCRD)

The Editorial Board of the Cultural Revolution CD-ROM Database in the United States; Chinese University Press, www.chineseupress.com

Based on the 2006 second edition, CCRD—the largest database for the study of the Cultural Revolution—is now available online as well as in CD-ROM format. It comprises 10,000 documents, including historical materials related to the Revolution, with Chinese Communist Party original documents, memos, speeches, and writings by major party leaders and media commentaries. Users can browse by subject categories and date, or search by author, keyword, and organization. Subscriptions include a hardcopy index in Chinese and English.

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MODERN ASIA

Scribner/Gale Cengage

www.gale.cengage.com/gvrl

Available online via Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL), Encyclopedia of Modern Asia is a six-volume scholarly work containing 2600 entries on modern Asia from a global perspective, covering topics such as economics, religion, technology, politics, education, the family, the arts, environmental issues, international relations, and scientific advances. With 800 contributors worldwide, including from 25 Asian countries, the resource focuses on Asia in the modern world, including Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Far East. Historical articles emphasize people, places, events, and developments that have had a continuing influence on Asia. The title is cross-searchable with other GVRL titles.

MIDDLE EASTERN & CENTRAL ASIAN STUDIES (MECAS)

EBSCO, www.ebscohost.com

MECAS is a bibliographic index of research, policy, and scholarly discourse on the countries and peoples of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa. It contains more than 588,000 records, with coverage spanning 1900 and earlier to the present. Over 15,000 records of recently published and grey literature are added annually. Subject coverage includes ethnic diversity, cultural heritage, economic affairs, international relations, arts and humanities, significant religious events, and recent history (1900-present), with titles such as Asian & African Studies, Japanese Institute of Middle Eastern Economies Review, and Journal of Asian Earth Sciences. The file is cross-searchable with other EBSCOhost databases.

PROQUEST ASIAN BUSINESS AND REFERENCE (PABR)

ProQuest, www.proquest.com

PABR covers a wide range of Asian business and financial information from key international publications including Asiaweek, Far Eastern Economic Review, Pacific Affairs, and Southeast Asian Affairs. The 285-plus titles include newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, reference reports, newswires, and trade publications, with A&I, full-text, full-image, and Text+Graphics formats available. Users can access country information and statistics; financial and demographic series and analysis; and directory and biographical information for national government, civil service, and business and cultural organizations. Often used as a complement to other business resources such as ABI/INFORM, PABR can be searched simultaneously with other ProQuest databases.