Project funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG)
A Virtual Research Environment for Research on East Asia
Project Overview
| Institution | Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz |
| Project coordinator | Matthias Kaun East Asia Department |
| Cooperation partner of the project | Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin Institute of Chinese and Korean Studies of the University Tübingen, DFG-Research group 596 Institute for Chinese Studies of the University Heidelberg (Cluster of excellence), projects „Chinese Media History“ and „Early Chinese Law“ |
| Technical realisation | Lars Holtrup |
| Funding | Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Project page in the DFG project database GEPRIS |
| Term of project | 1.3.2010 – 31.8.2011 |
| Contact | Matthias Kaun |
Project Description
Access to CrossAsia Campus
The Virtual Research Environment CrossAsia Campus and the CrossAsia Forum is open to all users worldwide. A registration with CrossAsia is necessary. In case your institution has the right to use the licensed content, no additional registration with CrossAsia Campus is necessary. After your successful registration with CrossAsia you have access to the Virtual Research Environment.
Persons who are not eligible to get access to the licensed CrossAsia content, can still register for CrossAsia Campus and the Forum. On the registration form please select “-keine-” (i.e. none).
In case you would like to maintain and administer a virtual working group, please send a message to x-asia@sbb.spk-berlin.de. You will then a login for the CrossAsia Campus administration tool, so you can organize your group individually.
Background
CrossAsia Campus uses new technological features to simplify access to licensed databases and is committed to further develop CrossAsia into an East Asia research alliance. CrossAsia, in its role as information technology platform of the SSG 6.25, had successfully assisted research and education by providing access to relevant electronic information and resources. Within East Asian studies in Germany CrossAsia currently counts as the main portal for individual researchers, teachers and students to various information pools and databases. With the help of a number of new technological features this portal developed into a research environment which enables individuals and groups of researchers to use CrossAsia as a platform for their own and group projects and allows an easy exchange of information and data. After a testing phase in cooperation with our partners in Tübingen, Heidelberg and Berlin (see above), we achieved within this project to open the virtual research environment CrossAsia Campus to all CrossAsia users as a platform that on one side provides access to the CrossAsia databases and information pools and on the other side is connected via WebDAV with their home workstation.
The CrossAsia Campus WebDAV provides access for registered users to a personal online storage space, to one they may share within a defined group and to storage space accessible worldwide (logged in CrossAsia users have access to their CrossAsia Campus environment).
To channel and secure these different access levels to the online storage space CrossAsia Campus works with an advanced right-management system.
Aside from an individualised access to the CrossAsia Campus virtual research environment, the right-management system provides an infrastructure that facilitates communication and the cooperative work of research communities and international research groups. Especially in international research groups care must be taken in respect of access to databases that are subject to license. While members of institutions that take part in the interlibrary loan agreement “Blauer Leihverkehr” will have access to all CrossAsia resources, research group members that come from outside this circle cannot automatically partake in the access (to licensed databases). But these users have unrestricted access to all other features of the virtual research environment, only the access to CrossAsia licensed databases has to be excluded.
Via the virtual research environment documents can be freely exchanged using the online storage space and are accessible to all members registered for that group. After a special registration, external users can be added to existent research groups and get full access to the virtual research environment and the online storage space. Additionally every user will keep having access to resources licensed by their local institution or university. Thus the platform serves the interchange of information and documents among an international community of researchers.
CrossAsia Campus users have within the systems environment parallel access to resources and usage rights of their home workstation and to those provided by the research environment. They can access documents on their workstation’s storage space and those their research groups want to share with them. A connection to their local printer is also established.
All author and other property rights connected with the documents created on or uploaded to the platform stay of course unaffected.