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East View Provides an Extraordinary Digital Resource from China

Recently the Beijing-based Tsinghua Tongfang Optical Disc Company, affiliated with Tsinghua University and the main executive behind the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, announced that East View Information Services would offer access in the US and other countries to their massive databases. These databases include the CAJ (China Academic Journal) and CCND (China Core Newspaper) full-text/full image databases, which collectively form an unprecedented digital library of the most important publications from the People's Republic of China.

For those who are just hearing about East View's new and exciting role with the CAJ and other databases, we would like to offer a brief list of FAQs regarding key issues raised since TTOD's announcement from Beijing.

WHY EAST VIEW?

East View, founded in 1989, is a natural partner for TTOD. Founded in 1989, we have a long history of working with academic and other libraries, including consortia, to bring them foreign-language publications and databases. We ourselves are publishers of the most popular among Western academics aggregated journal and newspaper databases in the Russian language, our line of Universal Databases (http://online.eastview.com). As such, we have the essential technical and customer service experience required to bring massive foreign-language databases to Western customers. For example, many of our customers have had to make small but important modifications to their patrons' computers and network systems to accommodate Russian-language databases, and in principle some of the same issues will be encountered with Chinese-language databases.

In addition, with its own databases East View has pioneered the creation of a simple yet powerful interface which is designed to allow non-native speakers as well as those fluent to work with a database whose content is mostly in a foreign language. With our new partners in Beijing we have already manufactured an English-language interface that will allow virtually any university faculty or student to immediately-and meaningfully--begin using the enormous Chinese databases. With the new English-language interface users will quickly discover, for example, that while there are almost 7000 Chinese full-text/full image journals, there are also hundreds of these journals in the English language. Users will also discover that thousands of titles contain English-language metadata, such as fully-translated article titles, author names, and even abstracts.

WHAT WILL BE AVAILABLE?

The largest of CNKI databases, the CAJ database, offers full-text and full-image access to over 5,000,000 articles from almost 7000 serials published in China since 1994 in the physical sciences and engineering, humanities and social sciences, medicine, and agriculture. The archive is growing, due to retrospective conversion of most titles back to their first issue.

The newspaper database, know as CCND, covers more than 360 titles from every province and region of China. While its archive only dates from 2000, it already has nearly 2,000,000 articles, with thousands added every day. With the dynamic changes affecting all aspects of life in modern China, this database is destined to become a unique and essential resource for almost anyone interested in this part of the world.

Other databases include a massive collection of Chinese doctoral and master's theses, as well as databases of laws and legislation and other areas.

One of the key elements of EVP's role with these databases is a mirror web site in its Minneapolis headquarters identical to that in Beijing. Thus, all of the content currently offered in the China Academic Journal and the Core Newspaper Databases is reliably available in North America via web access for the first time. Access is both IP-based and/or username/password, depending on the needs of the institution. By the end of 2001, East View's mirror server in Minneapolis assures faster, more reliable Internet access with an English language interface.

EVP is also the North American source for all technical and customer service assistance to institutions wishing to set up local server hosts of the Chinese databases, as well as for those preferring to access the data via optical disk (CD-ROM and DVD-ROM) storage. East View technical personnel will travel on-site as necessary, and be available 24/7 for any issues relating to the operation of such access options.

HOW CAN I OBTAIN MORE INFORMATION OR A COMPLIMENTARY TRIAL ACCESS?

Please direct your browser to http://www.eastview.com/chinese_databases.asp and follow the Chinese database links. Alternatively, please feel free to contact us: e-mail at info@eastview.com