Open Access: CRL Alliance with East View Yields First Global Press Archive Collection
From the Center for Research Libraries:
Late Qing and Republican-Era Chinese Newspapers has been released as the first Open Access collection coming out of the Global Press Archive (GPA) CRL Charter Alliance, a multi-year, flagship collaboration between CRL and East View Information Services. The collection, ultimately comprising 500,000 pages from hundreds of titles published in China between 1912 and 1949, is hosted on East View’s GPA platform with robust search functionality for multi-language content.
For the initial collection, a CRL Advisory Committee consulted closely with subject experts from member libraries to select key newspapers published in China during the transition from imperial rule to the establishment of the People’s Republic. Republican China (1912–1949) was an era of contrasts, seeing industrialization and modernization, but also civil unrest and outright war between Nationalists and Communists. At the same time, China faced invasion from imperialist Japanese forces in the run-up to World War II. At the conclusion of the war internal fighting continued, ultimately resulting in victory of the Communist forces and ejection of the Nationalists to Taiwan.
CRL sponsored the Global Press Archive through a Charter Alliance, with 74 CRL and NERL libraries committing $4.25 million to help launch the first three years of the project. Plans call for the collaborative undertaking ultimately to deliver up to 4.5 million pages of content, including 3 million pages of public domain or “orphaned” material available through Open Access and a remaining 1.5 million pages of in-copyright content accessible to all CRL member institutions. In addition to hosting on the GPA platform, East View will provide all of the files and metadata to CRL for local hosting, with eventual support for computational analysis available on request.
Direct to Late Qing and Republican-Era Chinese Newspapers Open Access Collection
See Also: East View Information Services Release on New Collection
Filed under: Academic Libraries, Libraries, News, Open Access
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.