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The Seven Golden Rules of the
Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library

Edited by Dr T.Matthew Ciolek

Est.: 25th Oct 1996. Last updated: 10 May 1999. This document is a part of Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library.

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Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library is a large-scale, distributed, collaborative project providing an up-to-date, subject-oriented guide to networked scholarly documents, resources and information systems concerned with social sciences research on Asia.

This voluntary coalition of self-governing web sites subscribes to a handful (= at least seven) of "golden", common sense rules:

  1. Asian Studies virtual librarians are colleagues and partners, with no-one among them playing a central or a subordinate role.

  2. They strive to be unique and worthwhile. They do not replicate work already done elsewhere, and, especially, do not replicate work done by other virtual libraries. At the same time, however, they try not leave gaps in activities that need to be undertaken.

  3. They concentrate on factual, attributable information of relevance to social sciences research.

  4. Whenever possible, virtual librarians construct and develop online documents with data. In other words, they provide not only guides to the online information, but the repositories of the scholarly information as well.

  5. They do not fail to check the accuracy of URLs and soundness of the content of resources they link to.

  6. They make sure to give ample annotations (covering both the publisher- and content details) to their links.

  7. They do not work alone. Virtual librarians always take advantage of and integrate (cross-reference) cataloguing efforts, initiative and expertise of the other Asian Studies sites.

  8. They try, in addition to maintaining a specialist (eg. country-specific) resource, to establish and maintain a facility of value to all Asian Studies virtual libraries.

  9. Whenever appropriate, they try to encourage other dependable and trustworthy sites to develop and maintain specialist sections and sub-sections of your own WWW VL. In other words, virtual librarians do not put all eggs in one electronic basket.

  10. They aim at a well educated, critically minded, independently thinking audience.

  11. They make sure that a WWW VL logo, appropriate hypertext links and the words "The World-Wide Web Virtual Library" are displayed in the left hand upper corner of their top-level pages.

  12. They are mindful of the research usefulness of meta-data tags.

  13. They also make sure to provide a link back to the Asian Studies WWW VL home page (i.e. http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVL-AsianStudies.html).

  14. They avoid in their documents exotic HTML dialects or complicated/unusual presentation formats (world-wide readability of your pages, especially in countries with unreliable - costly - painfully slow connection to the Internet, is very important).

  15. Virtual librarians try to share any useful information with other Asian Studies virtual librarians, especially with those working on materials from the similar geopolitical region.

  16. They remember to announce new resources (their own, or those discovered on the Net) in the Asian Studies' Asian Studies WWW Monitor e-journal.

  17. They always acknowledge readers' corrections, additions and improvements to their site.
New (must be cheerful, imaginative, hardworking and almost selfless) "virtual librarians" are warmly invited to join this ongoing, collaborative project.

Return to Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library page
This WWW server is provided by the Coombs Computing Unit, Research Schools of Social Sciences & Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra.

Maintainer: Dr T.Matthew Ciolek (tmciolek@coombs.anu.edu.au), ANU, Canberra

Copyright © 1996-1999 by T.Matthew Ciolek. This Web page may be linked to any other Web pages. Contents may not be altered. Note that the information contained within the Virtual Library pages is copyright. Unauthorised use or electronic dissemination is prohibited by applicable laws. Please contact the appropriate section maintainer for permission to re-use any material.

This page has been tested for full accessibility

URL http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVLAsian/VLRules.html

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