World Digital Library

The mission of the World Digital Library is to "promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research."

John Van Oudenaren, Senior Advisor for the World Digital Library, was a keynote speaker at the Computers in Libraries conference this past April in Arlington, Virginia. Some key goals of the initiative are to:

- promote an international understanding,

- acquire rare and unique materials,

- become an education resource for a globalized and wireless world,

- bring to light “hidden treasures”, and to

- repurpose already scanned materials worldwide.

Watch the video and “experience the vision.”

Read more at: http://www.worlddigitallibrary.org

OCLC's Top 1,000 Titles Accessible via del.icio.us

The "Top 1,000" titles owned by OCLC member libraries was released in 2005 and is now available via del.icio.us at http://del.icio.us/oclc2005top1000. Visit the site and see how easy it is to locate any of these titles via OCLC's "Find in a Library" service. The del.icio.us tags are broken down by genre, language, and time period.

New Modern and Contemporary Art to Enter ARTstor Digital Library

ARTstor announcement:

The Visual Artists and Galleries Association (VAGA) and ARTstor are pleased to announce that they have reached a collaborative agreement through which a significant number of images – depicting works by VAGA member artists – will be made available in the ARTstor Digital Library. Under this collaborative agreement, ARTstor will initially make available approximately 3,000 such images for educational and scholarly use, and will make more available over time as additional collections of modern and contemporary art are added to the Charter Collection.

VAGA is an organization for visual artists in the United States. Founded in 1976, VAGA represents many visual artists and their estates, including Kenneth Noland, the Romare Bearden Foundation, Louise Bourgeois, the Stuart Davis Estate, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation, Jasper Johns, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, the Robert Motherwell Estate, the Donald Judd Foundation, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Robert Panzer, Executive Director of VAGA, expressed his enthusiasm for this collaboration. "We are very pleased to collaborate with ARTstor. We believe this collaboration will significantly further education and scholarship in the arts and other fields, and are pleased to further such important aims." James Shulman, Executive Director of ARTstor, similarly expressed his pleasure for the relationship with VAGA. "The collaboration with VAGA is an important opportunity for many artists and artists' estates to have a voice in the development of ARTstor and, through VAGA, to show their support for the education of future artists and scholars."

ARTstor, a digital image library, was created in 2001 as a non-profit initiative of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is now an independent non-profit organization dedicated to serving education and scholarship in the arts and humanities. The more than 750 non-profit institutions currently participating in ARTstor are located in North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

To access ARTStor, visit Library Online and select "Articles and Databases." Contact a librarian for current username and password and for information on how to setup an ARTStor account.

Encyclopedia of Life

Following in the footsteps of giant genome and 3D protein databases comes the Encyclopedia of Life, an online resource that wishes to construct and make available a web page for each species living on earth. Wow!

From the Encyclopedia of Life website: "Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth available everywhere by single access on command." E.O. Wilson.

Well, we don't need to imagine anymore. :) For more information visit the EOL website at: http://eol.org/.

Also, listen to/read an NPR story at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10136879

Best Book Review!

The results are in, and Jesse Finkel's book review on Cesar's Way: the Natural Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems has been chosen by Professor Vassel as the best review from Mrs. Vassel's Comp II classes this session. Jesse earned a $15 gift certificate to Follett's bookstore and has been given the opportunity to have the book review published on the SPC Library Blog. Click on the link to read the full review. Great job, Jesse! Book Review