Reference Reviews
Péter's Digital Reference Shelf
October 2006
Title: Aardvark
Publisher: i-Group, Ltd.
URL: http://www.aardvarknet.info
Cost: free
Tested: continuously
The Context
A year ago, Aardvark was one of the picks in the Peter’s Picks and Pans column. I discovered it while preparing for my two business trips to Asia in 2005, and found it to be an excellent guide. Little did I know at that time that in 2006 I would travel four times to several countries, spend more than two months in the region, and Aardvark would become an even more important ready-reference source than before.
I don’t know of any other open access or fee-based directory that would come close to Aardvark in its scope, competence and currency. True, there is an Asian chapter of the Special Libraries Association, but its newsletter sparsely provides news. Luckily, it has a link to Aardvark. The Asia and Oceania section of IFLA has a much more informative web site and an active presence in the region through a series of activities, projects, and meetings. Its presence at the yearly IFLA World Information and Libraries Conferences is also substantial.
The name of this portal is somewhat odd, as aardvark is a native mammal of Africa, not Asia. One might think that the motivation for the name was to get a top position in directories which list sites alphabetically, but the publisher keeps a low profile, and you don’t see the logo or name of i-Group splashed around the pages as a sponsor. Actually the name of the editor does not seem to appear anywhere, so it is highly appropriate to mention here that he is Clive Wing of i-Group. He apparently keeps a close watch on what is happening in the information field in the region (and around the world which is relevant for Asian librarianship and information technology).
It also helps that i-Group has offices in many countries in Asia, and it represents many of the largest U.S. companies in the information industry, including publishers of databases, books, and journals. This still would not guarantee the richness of the portal in and by itself, but the founder and owner of i-Group Pote N. Lee (a.k.a Lee Pit Teong), the archetype of “old Asia hand” in the information field, who is as “high octane” in disseminating information systems and services as he is low-key in demeanor, apparently keeps supporting this portal which opened more than three years ago, and this yields a very useful resource.
The Content
The portal has two classified sections, called Literature and Recommended (sites). There is direct access from the homepage to additional directories of Library Science e-journals, Asian Databases, a calendar of conferences and exhibits, the ACCESS magazine, the headlines from the very current news section and the i-Group’s version of the ERIC database. All these resources are open access.
Literature
This section is a collection of about 500 open-access journal articles, reports, blogs and other Web-born publications with issues directly or indirectly related to information technology, such as metadata and copyright, respectively. There are 18 subsections. The subsection on Archiving & Document Preservation is the largest with 78 entries followed by a cluster of subsections with near-50 sources, such as Open Access (57), Journal Crisis (56), Copyright (47), Digital Libraries (49), Metadata (46). The rest of the sections are in the twenty-something or teens region, such as Digital Collection Development (22), Digitization (22), Information Literacy (25), Open Archives Initiative (17) Linking Technologies (15), OpenURL (15) , RFID (11), Weblogs (10). Two sections have 6 items: Courseware and Digital Object Identifier, and CrossRef has 4 documents. These latter two could perfectly fit in the Linking Technologies section. There are a few items which appear under two subsections, and one caught my eyes because of appearing twice within the same subsection. It is a practical and very well illustrated article published in two digital journals, but one entry would have sufficed.
This section is meant for background reading and, with the possible exceptions of two sections, could be excellent foundational references for a course on Digital Libraries, complemented by articles describing current developments without providing the background so well covered in the Literature section. For example, the Open Access Movement is a huge issue in a course on Digital Libraries, which probably focus on current issues, and may refer to the BOAI (Budapest Open Access Initiative) without elaborating on it. Aardvark’s section on the topic has 57 source documents, and three of them specifically address the BOAI – including the controversies surrounding the issue.
I found only a very few outdated links, far fewer than in the typical portals. For example, the Wellcome Trust Report about the cost of scholarly publishing moved from the location which appears in the Open Access section to this location. It also appears in the Journal Crisis subsection which may have been a temporary address. The upside of this is that (at least in case of the former link) the user may have the chance to explore the Wellcome Fund site and find a closely related other report about the business models of open access publishing.
ERIC Database
This is a showcase for the eBRIDGE software which is used with other databases as well, including the native version of CABI database of the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau. The software offers Boolean and natural language search mode, thesaurus look-up, cross-database searching, full text linking, cited and citing reference linking (I did not test this feature but pine to do so).
Recommended sites
This section is a collection of more than 2,640 links to sites about Asian Digital Libraries (26 links), Asian Library Associations (64), Asian Library Consortia (24), Asian Library Schools (88), Asian National Libraries (24), and to far the largest subset of Asian University Libraries (1,793). This section also includes links to worldwide Free Preprint and Full Text Science Archives (120), Professional Organizations (56) and Publishing Houses (275). The links to Asian Digital Libraries are annotated, the rest are not (and they don’t need to be).
Directories
This section has three directories and the current and back issues of ACCESS magazine, which has 57 issues full of news about developments in the information industry in the region and interesting interviews, primarily with the movers and shakers of the (digital) publishing world who work or set up information business in Asia.
There are more than 700 electronic serials listed in the directory of Library Science e-journals. It is not perfect, but neither are the expensive serials directories. On the other hand, Aardvark has a pretty comprehensive directory, listing serials published in the four corners of the world that not even the most well-informed librarians may be aware of. For example, I did not know Academia, and neither did I know that it hosts Walt Crawford’s substantial and enlightening column Cites & Insights since 2005 (the back issues are now at http://citesandinsights.info).
There are actually 741 entries in the directory but some – correctly – reflect title changes (such as the Journal of the Medical Library Association, earlier known as Bulletin of the Medical Library Association), some appear twice, such as the Journal of Digital Information – once with the acronym, once without, or appear in two different formats, such as MLA Bulletin and Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. Some entries have no description or short annotation (not a big problem as the name often alludes to the topical coverage of the journal, such as Serials Review, a click takes you there to check it out). Rrarely, there are outdated information or errors in the annotation. For example, the entire run of the Bulletin of MLA and its successor title are freely available from Volume 1 No. 1 and should be stated so under all entries.
The directory/calendar of conferences and exhibits is both current and historical. The entries link to the Web site of the conference. As the list of past conferences and exhibits is retained, it is possible to look up the venues and dates of a conference series. It is possible to search the calendar by year, month and country.
The directory of Asian Databases is a particularly useful, unique and reasonably comprehensive resource. It has information about 659 subscription-based and open access databases. Not necessarily all of them are hosted in one of the countries in the Asia-Oceania region, but all of them has an Asian focus or at least a significant subset related to Asia, such as the Anthropological Index Online and the Anthropological Collection, hosted by the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the California Academy of Sciences, respectively. There are a few databases that should be added to this directory, such as the wonderful, bilingual multimedia Encyclopedia of New Zealand (a real pathway to the history, people, flora and fauna of the country which is not only in the Asia and Oceania region but also the home for hundreds of thousands of Asian immigrants), the multimedia Biographical Dictionary of New Zealand, and the New Zealand History Online site – all from a government agency, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. I did not mention Mapihi, the equally impressive multimedia collection (with Dublin Core metadata) of the New Zealand National Library because it is included in Aardvark.
I also would like to see an entry for the very important and recently much enhanced J-STAGE and Journal@rchive site developed and hosted by JST, the Japan Science and Technology Agency. These two sites have not only bibliographic records and abstracts for the papers published in the most important Science, Technology and Medicine journals by Japanese authors in English and Japanese, but also the full text of tens of thousands of those papers.
Even with these limitations just scrolling through the well-annotated entries in Aardvark is a joyful and eye-opening experience.
The Software
Aardvark has smart software, which puts browsing on the front burner, but offers some good search options, too. Whatever subcategories you click on the software automatically displays a result list alphabetically listing the entries in the appropriate section or subsections, in the subsections of the Literature section and in the directories and the link collections. It also offers a jumpers bar to the letters of the alphabet. On top of the pages there is a search cell, and for most of the directories there are small query templates with multiple cells.
These query templates reflect the content of the section/directory. For example, the template for the directory/calendar of Conferences & Exhibits has a cell for keyword search, another for year and month, and a third for country. The Asian Databases directory has query cells for keyword, country and subject. The country and subject list has a pull down menu for picking the term (one subject and one country can be searched at a time).
The country list is much longer in the Asian Databases section than in the conferences as Bhutan (and many other countries) are unlikely to host a conference on Library and Information Science & Technology, but may have a digital library. The country list is mostly adapted to the topic, so the one about library schools would have only a few countries to choose from. Actually, from the pull-down menu of this query template New Zealand is missing (Australia is there), even though Victoria University of Wellington has undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. programs in library and information studies. In the Asian Database directory the country list is excessively long, probably listing all the member countries of the U.N. even though 90% of them are very unlikely to have an Asian database or any database with Asian coverage, such as Cameron, Burkina Faso, Mali, Sao Tome & Principe, or from the European continent Andorra, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and Belarus.
The search software appears to apply stemming, which is a good idea to retrieve all variants of the stem libr, such as library, libraries, librarian, librarianship, or libri. That may be the only reason that my search term libres did retrieve a staggering 137 hits even though I hoped for a single hit when spot checking the availability of some specific titles in Aardvark, including LIBRES, the Library and Information Science Research electronic journal published by Curtin University of Perth. (Libres is not the plural form of book in any of the romance languages which could justify such high number of hits). When I put my search term between quotes it did retrieve the single matching record. This stemming would be fine, but the help file does not mention this, neither the use of quotation marks for exact word or phrase searching.
The result list is always presented in increments of 10, and there is no option for changing it to, say, 50 items per page, nor is there a sort option beyond the default alphabetic order.
In spite of some of the deficiencies, which can be understood and forgiven considering that it is a labor of love on the side of a few highly competent information professionals, this outstanding open access resource is indispensable for anyone interested in the library and information science and technology field in Asia and the Pacific, and developments in the information industry in the region.
— Péter Jacsó