Agenda

CrossAsia – a German National Infrastructure for Asian Studies – Current Situation and European Perspective

Speaker: Matthias Kaun, Director of East Asia Department, Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin)

This event is by invitation only. Participants will receive via email the meeting passcode and link. For information please contact​ maddalena.barenghi@unive.it

Abstract
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin State Library) has been developing and running the platform CrossAsia for more than a decade. CrossAsia was launched in 2005 to provide an easy to use and central point of access to the printed and electronic resources in the library’s collection relating to East, Central and Southeast Asia. The collection is partly funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Over the years, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin has continuously adjusted the objectives for CrossAsia, incorporating and in some cases anticipating the demands of academia and research. 
This presentation focuses on two topics. First, it will introduce the CrossAsia cosmos, including collection building, inter-library loan (ILL) services, meta data and full-text data searching, digitisation and visualisation, contextualisation of collections, and support for Open Access publishing and (research) data services. It will also show what services are freely available for researchers in Germany, Europe and beyond.
Matthias Kaun’s perspective is that of a library and information infrastructure that is rethinking its mission to support Asia-related scholarship and research in an ever more globalised and digitally connected world. He will show how CrossAsia seeks to organise access to collections - regardless of their physical form and/or usage limitations due to licensing restrictions - in ways that make the materials findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable wherever possible. Secondly, he will present some ideas on how to improve the access situation for the European research community. Based on international cooperation and reliable coordination between partners and networks, and at least partial improvement of access conditions could be achieved for the European research community. In view of the diverse use cases and usage scenarios, especially in the context of electronic and digitally available texts and sources as well as in the context of digital humanities a joint and coordinated approach seems more promising.