H-ASIA
September 2, 1996
Query: Soliciting reports on use (successful or otherwise) of Internet
sources for Asian studies
*************************************************************************
From: Frank F. Conlon <conlon@u.washington.edu>
This is an open solicitation to H-ASIA members to report on their
experiences in using Internet sources, (lists, webs, course-related
lists,
etc.) for teaching about Asia, or its component parts.
Types of materials, exercises used?
Context of use--courses taught within institutions? distance-learning?
Types of audiences: enrolled students, general education?
Types of projects or resources utilized? Examples?
Evaluations: your own? your students?
Suggestions for others?
Please do not hesitate to reply on the basis of not having answers or
comments to all of the above questions--they are offered merely as
suggestions.
For some time it has been troubling me that while we have developed
H-ASIA
as a means for sharing ideas among professionals with respect to
scholarship, we have, apart from a few bibliographies and syllabi, not
addressed the question of how the new Internet medium has (or has not)
worked in support of our teaching.
I look forward to your observations and reports of experience in this
area.
Thanks
Frank F. Conlon
Professor of History
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
Co-editor of H-ASIA
<conlon@u.washington.edu>
========================================================================
Response to query: Using the Internet to Teach about Asia, No. 1
*************************************************************************
From: Jana Everett <jeverett@carbon.cudenver.edu>
For a spring 1996 course on the politics of China, India, and
Japan I got lots of help from H-ASIA folks on how students could access
newspaper from those three countries, got further assistance from the
Australian national university Asian studies web site, compiled a
handout
and had the students responsible for sharing with the class material
they
gleaned from these sources relevant to the topics we were covering
(e.g. economic policy, political parties and elections, gender and
politics).
This was an upper-division course that met twice a week; CU
Denver is a commuter campus; many of the students did not have modems
at
home and so had to use campus computer labs. About half had no
experience
with the Internet--the availability of a grad assistant I had for
another
program was crucial to providing hands-on help for some to take the
first
step. This was a small class--18 students--so there was room for
students
to talk about what they read in the newspapers and connect it to the
topics discussed.
Two-thirds of the way into the class the resources on India
improved with several Indian newspapers developing home pages on the
web
in connection with the elections.
About half of the students seemed to find this worthwhile,
In my other courses I use the Internet more extensively, and I
think I will do so when I teach Asian politics again--e.g. circulating
material to the students through Email ( I did circulate the citation
guide H-ASIA put out), but I'm still cautious because of inequalities
in
access among our students. The availability of Asian newspapers is a
real
plus.
--Jana Everett =========================================================================
Response to query: using the Internet to teach about Asia, No. 2
**************************************************************************
From: sangle@wesleyan.edu (Stephen C. Angle)
For several semesters now I have been incorporating Email and web based
materials into my courses on Chinese philosophy. The things I've done
break
into three categories:
1. Class mailing list. The local computer staff sets up an alias at the
system level so that mail sent to "phil222" is forwarded to all people
in
the class (including myself). This has proved to be a great resource in
several ways. [A] Students who have questions about what a passage
means
can ask as they're reading; often they'll get an answer (from me or
another
--student) before the class meets. [B] Discussion goes on outside of
class--either continuation of themes raised in class, or new ideas that
students didn't have time (or courage) to raise in class. [C] I have
one
student per class post a summary (around 400 words) of what went on in
class. Sometimes this sparks further discussion; at the very least, I
get a
sense of what students got out of the day's discussion/lecture.
materials--syllabus, hand-outs, assignments--on the class web site.
(E.g.,
<http://www.wesleyan.edu/phil/courses/205/phil205.html>) Since
not everyone
is equally keen on using the web, I still hand out paper copies, too.
But
now they always have access to things, even if they've lost it. In some
classes (e.g., a seminar I taught on human rights and Chinese
philosophy),
there's a fair amount of sentences. I think there's a lot that can be
done with this kind of
idea...if only I had more time....
Another thing I'd like to do is put etexts of the course texts on the
web,
probably on a password-protected page so that only enrolled students
who
have bought the books can use them. Chinese philosophical texts are
notoriously unorganized; if you're told to write a paper on
"benevolence"
in the _Analects_, it'd be nice to be able to readily track down all
the
occurrences in the text. Doesn't guarantee a good paper, by a long
shot, but
it might be a start. And it seems to me that if students have purchased
the
text, they should have free access to the electronic version for such a
purpose as well (kind of like a single-user license for software). I've
tried to get the presses that publish these books to tell me what they
think; so far, no responses. Sigh.
For the most part I have had very positive feedback from students. The
Email list is the most visible of these three categories, and in some
classes it has been greatly successful, clearly enhancing the degree to
which a portion of the students were engaged with the class's themes
and
ideas. Not everyone was happy about having to master Email (much less
the
web [though the web stuff wasn't required]), but it seems to me to be
an
essential skill for the future, so I didn't feel very guilty about
making
them do it.
Best of luck with your own experimentation; I look forward to hear what
others have done!
Stephen C. Angle Assistant Professor of Chinese Philosophy <sangle@wesleyan.edu> =======================================================================
Response to query on using the Internet as a teaching resource, No. 3
************************************************************************
From: Mark Lincicome <mlincicome@holycross.edu>
Each student will be required to "surf the Net," identify one or two
potential candidates for the list, and to introduce her/his
selection(s)
to other students in the course using a local e-mail address that I'm
also
setting up for them to communicate outside of class. They will be
asked
to briefly defend or justify their choice by describing what kind of
information the website provides and what value they think it would
have
to other students like themselves. Before the end of the term, I plan
to
publish their list on the Internet, probably as a link from my home
page
and survey course syllabus (neither of which, I confess, is up and
running
yet!).
I look forward to reading about what others are doing.
Mark Lincicome
College of the Holy Cross
========================================================================
Response to query: using the Internet to teach Asia, No. 4
*************************************************************************
From: Ming-te Pan <pan@calvin.gonzaga.edu>
In addition to mailing list, on campus discussion forum which I find
very useful, I have encouraged students in my East Asian to 1600,
modern China and modern Japan to find material that may enhance their
understanding of the subject matter. Before I can put a html text on
the computer, I give them a list of web sites that they may be
interested in. Students will spend their time to explore the sites
and come back with a 2 pages report on what are useful, what are not.
Asian newspapers are very helpful for students to approach the issues
from a different perspective. Asahi, Yomiuri, Mainichi, The Peking
Review, Taiwan Headline News, Strait Times all have English
versions on the Internet. For more advance students with language
training in Japanese and Chinese, there are much more out their.
Mankajin, China Times, People's Daily, and many specialized magazines
are all on the net.
Chinese classics: such as Laozi, Lunyu, Sunzi bingfa and many Buddhist
text are all available on Internet.
Library is another important source to the students who are working
on papers or essays related to Asia. Library of Congress and many
university libraries are now allowing guest users to access their
data base.
In this summer I contacted the Japan Times inquiring the possibility
for it to put some of the Times back issues on the net. I got no luck.
No
one from the institution has responded to my 3 inquiries. My original
idea was to ask students using the information to compare US and
Japanese perspectives on the same event, such as the Pearl Harbor
Attack,
Security Treaty, Rape of school girl in Okinawa...
I am also seeking the possibility to coordinate with colleagues on
other campuses designing courses with a common theme. In this way we
can organize a small discussion group across campuses on very specific
issues. I believe this will encourage students to participate in
discussion.
Ming-te Pan
AD Box 35 ======================================================================
Response to query on using the Internet to teach about Asia, No. 5
************************************************************************
From: TSTANLEY@HKUCC.hku.hk (Thomas A. Stanley)
While I have not successfully used WWW or Internet to _support_
teaching, I
did try assigning my students last autumn to write their term papers in
WWW
format. My experience may be of passing interest to someone hoping to
encourage students to think about presenting information and ideas in a
different manner -- and perhaps coming to think a little differently
about
their studies.
The result was partially successful: all the students reported that
they
were far more involved in writing this assignment than their other
assignments. The complained to some extent about having to learn new
and
confusing skills like scanning pictures and text as well as the
moderate
complexities of HTML composition; they also came to the point of
expressing
interest in these new skills/devices (and I gave myself the benefit of
the
doubt by assuming that in the end their interest outweighed their
complaints and frustrations). I also think that they learned far more
about their topics than they would have otherwise, probably because
they
spent more time on the "papers" but also because the subject I assigned
them (Hong Kong's reaction to Japanese invasion of China/Hong Kong) was
closer to their hearts than my normal assignments on Japanese history.
Of the small group (11), two who have now graduated have applications
pending to do graduate degrees with my department: one is even
continuing
with the general topic of Hong Kong Chinese during the occupation.
This
also leads me to assume, again with some self-congratulations, that the
task of writing for the WWW affected the students more positively and
profoundly than would have been the case if they had written the
tradition
paper on paper.
One of the reasons I demanded WWW documents was to force the students
to
depart from traditional linear presentations of research
by using the less
linear and multimedia capabilities of WWW/HTML. This part of the
experiment was only partially successful: the initial papers were
little
more than a normal paper, digitized and with pictorial illustrations.
Since these papers were, however, too large to be viewed on machines
with
only 4Meg memories, the students soon found themselves exploring the
opportunities (and limitations) of alternative methods of presentation.
In
the end, the documents were more satisfying than when the students
first
presented them, but they still did not take very much advantage of the
medium. This was largely because until they began the course, they had
not
spent time surfing and during the course they also did not surf.
Accordingly, they were not familiar with the possibilities confronting
them.
Now, they know that they could have done far more; hopefully, they will
become WWW/Internet users.
Thomas A. Stanley ========================================================================
Response to query on using the Internet to teach about Asia, No. 6
*************************************************************************
From: Shahid Refai (refais@rosnet.strose.edu)
Prof. Conlon could not have suggested a better topic for this group
than
this. There are several points that I would like to raise in this
respect
which all of us as well as our students must have come across.
(2) My graduate students also complained that neither they (nor I) knew
last year how the citation of textual references or endnotes could be
done if they had it from the Internet or website or gopher or whatever.
Is there a standardized guide to citations of Internet, gopher, CDROM,
websites, H-Net, e-mail, etc. that can be ordered from a publisher for
the campus store?
(3) The material that was cited by my graduate students was so
"cyber-oriented" that I could not check it on my computer as it could
have taken enormous time to get it online once again. The only
solutions
they had was to xerox plethora of this material and attach it to their
research paper!
(4) Finally, how do you ascertain the reliability of the cyberspace
material that was not reviewed by (a) scholarly publications (b) choice
cards © published bibliographies.
I hope these issues could be discussed and clarified by cyberspace
gurus.
Shahid Refai ======================================================================
Response to query: Using the Internet to teach about Asia, No. 7
************************************************************************
From: Judith Henchy <judithh@u.washington.edu>
I would like to add to this discussion the view of a librarian. We
believe that we have a responsibility to select information resources
based on their value to our users; for this reason I would suggest
that you start your student's searches on a site that has been created
by a library. At least in this way they will start off in the realm of
verifiable resources. Such sites also tend to be better
organized and
easier to use. Many libraries, such as ours, are posting lists of
scholarly refereed e-journals, so their quality is again verifiable.
I believe that by starting in these kinds of sites the students
have a standard of comparison which would help them critically
analyze some of the less worthy sources they will encounter.
Southeast Asia Library Guide:
URL:http://weber.u.washington.edu/~judithh/wwwsea.htm
Regards,
Judith Henchy
Head, Southeast Asia Section
University of Washington Libraries, FM-25 ======================================================================
Response to query: Using the Internet to teach about Asia, No. 8
*************************************************************************
From: David Magier <magier@columbia.edu>
Shahid Refai (refais@rosnet.strose.edu) raised some very good points
and issues about the use of Internet information in Asian studies. As
a librarian and library administrator, I've been intimately involved
in trying to formulate some solutions to the problems he outlines.
> (1) Too much material is available and is pouring everyday like
monsoon
> rain on the websites and on Internet. I wish there was some
structure, as
> many of my graduate students complained. There were no shortage
of
> Internet sources but rather too many of them...
> Is there a way that
> would give them (and us too) a kind of "select bibliography" that
is not
> only comprehensive but also critical with informed comments from
scholars
> who have used that material?
The Association for Asian Studies is now involved in a fledgling
effort to coordinate evaluation, selection, classification and
annotation of small select sets of "peer reviewed" Internet resources,
for inclusion in the kind of structure you describe, to be called the
Asian Studies Online Library. This effort will only succeed with
active input from the community of Asian studies scholars, since no
one library or organization will have the necessary human resources to
do a good comprehensive job unilaterally of collecting and classifying
the massive quantities of new information appearing daily on the
Internet. I have been asked to chair the small subcommittee (which
operates under the aegis of the AAS Committee on Publications), which
will develop the structure to coordinate (and maintain on the web)
such an information resource for Asianists. In the meantime, I myself
have been working very hard to update the "virtual collection" for
South Asia, which, till now, has been represented online by The South
Asia Gopher. In order to include a classified, annotated, selected set
of web-based resources among the many others already
available in the
SAG, I have been preparing to bring up the web version of the SAG,
which will be called SARAI (South Asian Resource Access on the
Internet). So far I have concentrated almost exclusively on the
"collection development" work, developing very large raw lists of
particular useful Internet resources for South Asianists. Now I am
shifting to the "classification" and "annotation" stages of the work,
and hope to have SARAI up an running soon. To get a preliminary peek
at the (very) raw lists of S.Asia materials I've been collecting for
SARAI, have a look at
http://www.columbia.edu/~magier/SAsia.html
(These raw lists do not reflect the very hierarchical detailed
*subject* structure which the classification effort will yield for
this collection. Meanwhile, any advice, suggestions, or any other
input from South Asia scholars and educators will be greatly
appreciated).
> (2) My graduate students also complained that neither they (nor I)
knew
> last year how the citation of textual references or endnotes could
be
> done if they had it from the Internet or website or gopher or
whatever.
> Is there a standardized guide to citations of
Internet...?
Yes, a number of standards have been published on the net:
a) Li & Crane, "Bibliographic Formats for Citing Electronic
Information", which can be read at:
http://www.uvm.edu/~xli/reference/estyles.html
b) Janice Walker, "MLA-Style Citations of Electronic Sources"
which can be read at:
http://www.cas.usf.edu/english/walker/mla.html
c) There was also a work on "Citing Sources in History and Humanities"
which was published on the H-Net gopher earlier. I have not been able
to find its new address on the H-Net web page, but it was a good
resource.
> (4) Finally, how do you ascertain the reliability of the
cyberspace
> material...
All information, whether disseminated via ink on paper or electrons on
the Internet, is essentially "buyer beware". It is certainly true that
the ubiquity, ease of use, and inexpensive access of the Internet has
made it very easy for anyone to 'self-publish' whatever they like,
including all sorts of garbage masquerading as "fact" or scholarly
work. But one shouldn't expect the Internet to be any different than,
say, the output of all the worlds typewriters, photocopiers, printing
presses and pens and pencils! In particular, the Internet is not a
library. Libraries have the feature of being selective (they spend
their money only on books they have evaluated as being "good books"),
and they also ease intellectual access by organizing the books into
coherent classification schemes (e.g. call number ranges) so that one
can browse all the books on a given topic. The Internet itself,
because of its lack of any centralized control or authority structure,
is incapable of generating either of these added-value services.
Therefore, for information consumers like us, the only way the
Internet will approach the functionality of library is if large stable
organizations or structures (e.g. AAS?), with the support of wide
ranges of specialist volunteers from the scholarly community, attempt
to leverage collaborative input into the creation of recognized,
'authoritative' online libraries. Till that happens, we're all just
surfing, cruising, jumping and hopping: lots of fun but not very
information-dense.
David Magier =========================================================================
Re: Using the Internet for teaching about Asia, No. 9: Citation Guide
***********************************************************************
Response to query: Using the Internet to teach about Asia, No.9
**************************************************************************
From: Patricia Ebrey <p-ebrey@uiuc.edu>
I would like to respond to the question of using the Internet in
teaching, since I spent much of the summer thinking about it and trying
to develop some materials suited to it.
First, some background. Last spring I tried a very low tech approach
to
getting students to interact outside of class via e-mail. My
experiences
were rather different in the two classes I tried it in. One was an
honors general education course which had 17 students, 16 freshman and
sophomore non-majors, and one senior major. This was designed as a
discussion class, and I looked on e-mail as a way to improve the
quality
of the discussion. I assigned one or two students the responsibility
of
generating questions for each reading we had and passing them to me and
the other students by 9 PM the night before. The freshmen and
sophomores,
who mostly live in dorms wired to the campus backbone, had no trouble
with
this. Moreover, they wrote some excellent questions, often bringing up
apparent contradictions with previous readings and asking for
explanations
of them. It was clear to me that the students had begun to compete
with
each other to come up with probing questions, which was great for the
quality of the discussion. Having the questions in advance helped me,
too,
because I could get a good sense of what students had made of the
readings, and could plan ways to make sure that we also got to some
topics
I would have raised.
The other class was a team-taught senior seminar/graduate seminar with
thirteen students of a very wide range of backgrounds. For this one
class, groups of four or five students were assigned the
responsibility
of coming up with questions for an entire session, discussing them
among
themselves in advance by e-mail or in person, then sending them to the
other students. The groups were designed to mix students with
different
backgrounds. Unfortunately, this group of older students, who mostly
lived in apartments, found using e-mail much less convenient.
Moreover,
--More--(27%)they tended to write the sorts of questions that work fine
in person but
are boring to read, such as "What was the author's main point?" The
groups fell into the habit of merely dividing up the readings, so in
the
end, we had to switch our strategy and use more small-group discussion,
beginning the three-hour seminar by dividing the class into groups so
that they could caucus to come up with a short list of the key issues
that
would need to be discussed that week.
Having been impressed with the effect of using e-mail in the
lower-level
course, I began thinking more about other possible ways Internet
technology
could enhance teaching. I was particularly attracted to the
possibility of
making more effective use of visual materials. Putting them on web
pages
would seem, potentially at least, to have several advantages over other
ways
of conveying visual images, such as slide lectures or illustrated
books.
Pedagogically, my objection to slide lectures is that students tend to
treat
them as a day off. Illustrations put on a web page, however, could be
treated much like assigned readings, with students asked to come
prepared to
discuss them. The problem with illustrated books is that one can never
get
all the illustrations in them that one would like. I had just finished
the
Cambridge Illustrated History of China, for which I had spent a lot of
time
collecting ideas for illustrations and maps. In the finished book,
however,
only was only able to use a fraction of what I had collected.
Anyway, I got a grant from an office at the university that supports
projects for "asynchronous learning," which allowed a graduate student
and
me to spend our summer preparing materials to try out next spring for
the
100-level Chinese civilization course. These fell into two groups:
Maps
and what I called "visual units." I divided Chinese history into
seven
time periods, and each period into four sessions, one on general
history,
one on a "visual unit," one on documents, and one on literary sources.
Besides using e-mail to distribute questions, this time I will have a
large
set of web pages for the visual units. For these visual units the
class
will be divided into groups, and each group is supposed to discuss
among
themselves what one can infer about Chinese culture from the
illustrations
via e-mail before coming to class. Since the purpose is to spark
discussion, the "units" do not give a lot of textual explanation. The
ones
we prepared include one on early tombs (Shang-Han), one on paintings
that
show social life (Song), one on furniture and architecture (Ming-Qing),
and
one of people at work (late-nineteenth-early twentieth century).
Selecting
and scanning this material took much more time than I anticipated, but
it
was relatively straightforward.
Maps proved another story. I began with the model in my head of the
great maps that appear in the New York Times every day. Wouldn't it be
great if there was some software program that would allow me to quickly
draw maps like these to illustrate points I wanted to make in class?
Well, I now know that there isn't. I began knowing almost nothing
about
how maps are made, and have learned quite a bit since then (in part
because of the generous response I got from a query in H-ASIA), but
map-making is still not easy.
I learned two things about maps that might be of some interest to
others.
If all you want is a bright colorful maps that gives shaded topography
and the names of lots of cities, it is hard to beat Encarta World
Atlas.
For about $40, you can get a CD that lets you zoom to any place on the
globe, with more and more city names listed as you get smaller in
scale.
There appears to be well over a thousand Chinese cities, for instance.
You cannot add your own details to this map, however; nor can you
delete
modern names to make it work better for a discussion of earlier
periods.
Because I was mainly interested in making custom maps, looked at
several
more expensive map-making programs, such as MapArt and MapInfo, which
allow someone familiar with a design or drawing program to make layered
maps. There are problems with these, however, since I wanted to be
able
to show areas larger than today's PRC, and most of the maps are
designed
according to contemporary borders. Moreover, I did not find any that
used
color effectively to show topography, and it seemed a waste not to make
use of color if the map was destined for the web.
In the end, I got a cartographer to make a base map for me of Asia. It
took her over twenty hours to do this, tracing from a book for contour
lines. Because rivers, city names, province boundaries, and so on are
on
different layers, I can redesign the map as I please, changing font
size,
adding new layers for other information I want. The main problem with
this so far is that one cannot crop vector drawings of this sort.
Rather,
the image has to be converted to a bitmap image and exported to a
photo-handling program to be cropped, which results in some loss of
clarity. I am still working on this problem.
I won't teach the Chinese Civilization course until the Spring, so I
cannot yet say how students will respond to this sort of course. The
course will have a couple of other Internet-type features, such as
extensive use of e-mail to distribute questions (generated sometimes by
single students, sometimes by pairs). Moreover, one of the four short
papers will be a web-paper, in which the students will research what
they
can find on a topic concerning recent China on the Internet.
Let me pose a question. As I worked creating or collecting material
for
--More--(90%)visual units, I had vaguely in the back of my mind that it
would make
sense to prepare a "visual sourcebook" CD that gathered images that
would
work will in teaching Chinese civilization, much the way the more usual
sourcebook collects texts. This would be a large and expensive venture
(one would need to pay permission fees for most of the images, not to
mention compensation for all the time that would be required). Would
there be enough of a market for such a product to repay its costs?
Students buy sourcebooks, but perhaps only the teachers or libraries
would
buy such a CD. Would those who purchased the CD quickly put the images
on
Web pages, making them so widely available that no one had the
incentive
to buy the CD anymore?
Patricia Ebrey
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
==========================================================================
Using the Internet to teach about Asia, No. 10: Guide to Citations
***************************************************************************
From: "T.Matthew Ciolek" <tmciolek@coombs.anu.edu.au>
Dear H-Asia Colleagues,
In reference to Shahid Refai's query about electronic citation formats
I highly recommend visiting the following site:
Electronic References & Scholarly Citations of Internet Sources
http://www.gu.edu.au/gint/WWWVL/OnlineRefs.html
It is established and maintained by Dr Anita Greenhill
(A.Greenhill@hum.gu.edu.au), Griffith University, Australia.
Her www page provides links to and a review of at least ten citation
schemes. That page is a part of the Information Quality WWW Virtual
Library: (http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVL-InfoQuality.html)
Some of these I found to be simple (however, not the system proposed
by
H-AFRICA's Mel Page) elegant and very effective in my work - in both
paper
and on-line contexts.
Another, recently announced and useful source of relevant materials is
URL: http://www.classroom.net/classroom/CitingNetResources.html
- best regards -
T. Matthew Ciolek
Dr T. Matthew CIOLEK tmciolek@coombs.anu.edu.au
ANU Social Sciences Information Systems Administrator,
Coombs Computing Unit, Research School of Social Sciences,
[Coombsweb Social Sciences Server http://coombs.anu.edu.au]
Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
ph +61 (0)6 249 0110 fax: +61 (0)6 257 1893
University of Colorado at Denver
jeverett@carbon.cudenver.edu
2. Course materials on the web. I try to put all course
Philosophy Department, Wesleyan University
350 High Street, Middletown, CT 06459
<http://www.wesleyan.edu/phil/sangle.html>
(860) 685-3654
I may be premature in responding to Frank's timely request for
suggestions about using the Internet as a resource to teach about Asia,
since I have no prior experiences to relate. Instead, to help fuel the
desired discussion on this issue, I thought I would mention that with
the
start of our new academic year tomorrow (September 3), I've decided to
ask students in my survey history course, "Perspectives on Asia," to
collectively compile a list of Internet resources which THEY believe
are
useful for learning about Asia.
Department of History
Gonzaga University
Spokane, WA 99258-0001
e-mail pan@calvin.gonzaga.edu
voice message 509-328-4220 ext. 3602
fax 509-324-5718
Department of History
University of Hong Kong
(1) Too much material is available and is pouring everyday like monsoon
rain on the websites and on Internet. I wish there was some structure,
as
many of my graduate students complained. There were no shortage of
Internet sources but rather too many of them which needed their time to
"sort multiple lists" and to pinpoint their narrow topics from this
--bumper bibliographic baggage that was out of control. Is there a way
that
would give them (and us too) a kind of "select bibliography" that is
not
only comprehensive but also critical with informed comments from
scholars
who have used that material. So that the user is not going into a blind
alley to find only a facade when the expensive interlibrary loan book
College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY 12203
(refais@rosnet.strose.edu)
With reference to Professor Refai's questions in the previous post
in this thread:
There is also an initiative on the part of one of the two major
national
bibliographic utilities to catalog the Internet; many libraries are
now
contributing URL cataloging to this endeavor in an attempt to guide
users to valuable scholarly sites. These resources are searchable on
the OCLC database, which is available to most research libraries.
Seattle, WA 98195
Telephone: (206) 543 3986
Fax: (206) 685 8049
Columbia Univ.