Promoting Asian Collections on the World Wide Web
In a continuing move to promote the National Library’s Asian Collections outside the four physical walls of the Library, we are making use of Web 2.0 services to strengthen our presence on the Web.
Late last year two enthusiastic staff put their great expertise to good use by shooting a video in-house to promote the Asian language collections. The heads of each of the five language units took part in showcasing their collection materials and explaining services available for researchers. The video was shown to different postgraduate groups earlier this year with great success. It has now been uploaded to the video sharing site, YouTube (www.youtube.com) to reach a worldwide audience. Search under ‘Discover Asian Collections’ to take a peek.
By now there is enough research to show that Internet search engines are often the first starting point for information seekers, and the collaborative service Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) ranks particularly highly for the most popular search engines.
The National Library already has a page on Wikipedia and Asian Collections will be adding information about its vast collections. This will give Internet users a better understanding of the Asia-related resources that the National Library offers. In particular, information on the formed or ‘scholarly’ collections will be featured on existing Wikipedia pages or newly created pages.
To reach a specific audience, the Thai librarian has been engaging with the academic community via the New Mandala blog (http://rspas.anu.edu.au/rmap/newmandala) since 2007. A blog created and read extensively by the academic community researching mainland South-East Asia, with an average of 1000 visits a day, this is a logical place for Asian Collections to feature its important collections. The dedicated space we have on the blog is called the Book Zone, and it features new acquisitions in Thai, Lao or Khmer. Some of the featured publications have even stimulated significant discussion threads on the blog.
Wan Wong
Director (Acting), Asian Collections



