About Epasia

English Portal Asia is a web project to mediate the English Studies in Korea to the Global community by means of advances in information technology becoming more widely available to humanities scholars.
To create the Epasia database, the very best web resources for English studies are selected by students majoring in English studies in Korea. The Epasia database helps teachers, students and researchers to find the most relevant resources with ease among millions of Internet resources in a complex environment.

What we do and why we do it

When people need to find specific information, the first and easiest method they use is to go to portal sites or search engines on the web and type the word they want to find. However, to select what is appropriate and useful for their research is another question. Even with specific knowledge in the field, it is very difficult for people to discover reliable information.

Through the process of evaluating and selecting the best on the Web, we provide people quality resources for advanced education and research.

Who we are

Epasia was created as a part of the Brain Korea Project Team "A New Model for English Studies in Korea: Scholarship, Cultural Translation and Professional English for the Global Context" by the department of English Language and Literature at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea.

English Portal Asia is designed and maintained by Professor Chan Kil Park (EPA supervisor, BK project manager), 9 student editors (Ph D candidates of the BK Project team), a programmer, and a technical advisor.

Chan Kil Park: Professor of English Poetry at Ewha Womans University. Wordsworth scholar by training, but also a devoted computing humanist who has performed a series of successful and unsuccessful projects in digital humanities. He has also designed several academic websites with technical support from his partner-programmer Mr. Sung il Yoo.

Policy

The framework of the site sits in the following details:

• The scope of Epasia’s subject coverage
  
• The audience for whom resource descriptions are intended
  
• The types of resources collected
  
• The process by which resources are selected and described for inclusion within Epasia
  
• Policies regarding the management and development of the Epasia collections

1. Scope

1.1 Subjects covered
Epasia comprises four subject groups which serve users in the following major subject areas:

• General Resources
  
• English Literature
  
• English Linguistics
  
• English Writing

1.2 Intended audience and access
The Epasia primary audience comprises students, researchers, teachers, lecturers, librarians and others studying or supporting the subjects outlined in section 1.1.

Epasia provides its records free of charge to anyone who can access to Web.

1.3 Language coverage
Only English language material (and Korean) is the principal selection. Significant resources in Korean may be included since the mother tongue of all members is Korean. Translation of the site content is not available, but the annotation of the site will be provided in English.

All of the materials in the Epasia must be proofread by a native English speaker.

2. Webliography Selection Policy

2.1 Resource discovery

Epasia webliographies are constructed with findings from a variety of sources, including online discovery tools, search engines, references, etc.

2.2 Selection and evaluation criteria

Epasia pursues to create well-organized and well-maintained webliography archive on the Internet. Therefore, only online resources can be included in the Epasia collection and rated according to the agreed selection criteria.

2.2.1 Rating

Each annotated website is rated by cataloguers for Epasia with stars, five stars indicating the very best sites in the subject. Dependent upon their subject knowledge, cataloguers, all experts on the divided subjects, select and evaluate resources for Epasia.

2.2.2 Selection criteria

Cataloguers are required to select sites that satisfy the core criteria first, and then list all available sites on the Internet. They first consider the usefulness of each site and its relevance to English studies. With the five criteria below, cataloguers evaluate the content and the form of the website.

The five primary criteria are as follows:

1. Originality and Uniqueness
2. Coverage and depth of information
3. Accuracy
4. Navigability
5. Site maintenance

2.2.3 Webliography form

Cataloguers are asked to take all five criteria into account at the same time and write about the details in no more than three paragraph. A three-paragraph structure is recommanded: the first paragraph will summarize the (content of the) site being evaluated, the second describes its content coverage and its navigability, and the last paragraph might contain a general impression of the site.

2.2.4 Maintenance

Epasia aims to make all of the annotated websites accessible. In order to achieve this goal, it runs a url checker irregularly and cataloguers are asked to evaluate the accessibility and longevity of sites on a regular basis of three months. Trivial error findings by the url checker are updated immediately. However, a site's contents update or major changes that cannot be investigated by the machine checker will be regulated by cataloguers themselves, who check all of the annotated websites taking into account the stability of the content, longevity of the resource, design and layout durability, and other significant changes.

3. Cataloguing Policies

The Epasia catalogues are based on Dublin Core, the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2), Library of Congress Online Catalog (LCOC).

4. Search Policies

The Epasia Site Search offers direct search options for every annotated webliography in Epasia. Once users enter any word they want to search, the engine will retrieve all webliographies collected in Epasia. It will search the title, the contents, and the keyword at the same time. If users want to use the search engine more effectively, they should be aware of each search type the site serves.

4.1 Boolean Search

Boolean operators will help users to search for word combinations. Enter Boolean operators (i.e., AND, OR, NOT) in uppercase.

Concept	Search Examples	Retrieval Formula
AND	rodgers AND hammerstein children AND poverty "civil war" AND virginia Note: If you put space between words, the engine automatically regards it as AND.	Retrieves only records containing both terms.
OR	sixties OR 60s OR 1960s labor OR labour email OR e-mail OR "electronic mail"	Retrieves records containing either one or more terms.
NOT	caribbean NOT cuba jockey NOT disc "civil war" NOT american	Excludes records containing the second term.

<Source: Library of Congress Online Catalog http://catalog.loc.gov/help/boolean.htm>

4.2 Keyword Search

Users can click on a keyword from the site annotation detail page to retrieve all webliographies that contain the selected keyword.