Librarian Way

According to the Bibliotheca Universalis Web site, their mission is “to put major works of worldwide cultural and scientific heritage comprising text, images and sound, at the disposal of the general public using communication and information technology.”

This is the beginning of one-stop portal access to select material from 13 international digital libraries. It started as a G7 project of the Global Information Society.

English language partners include offerings from The Library of Congress in the United States, the National Library of Canada [French and English sections], and The British Library in the United Kingdom. In the search options, under the "collections" link, it appears that only the browse by institution selection works. In their Technical Section they provide links to Web sites that provide background resources on some of the issues they have encountered in this project, such as incompatibility in digitization standards and mixed interoperability and metadata standards.

They have an impressive mission, but it has so far to go. The depth and richness of resources depends on the authoritativeness, quality, and usability of the content the partners make available. A particularly rich resource is Global Gateway: World Culture & Resources (Library of Congress).

Version 52 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography Web site, published by Charles W. Bailey, Jr., was released today. It contains roughly 2050 citations relating to “selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.”

This is of interest to future librarians because it has references to issues of interest to—or should be of interest—the Information Age librarian. Citations cover intellectual property rights, cataloging identifiers and metadata, e-prints, information integrity, and much more.

If the cited article has public accessible Internet access, such as an HTML page, the citation contains a link to it. Bailey has a Table of Contents to each category of citations and has a last updated notation. This is a must bookmark Web site for anyone interested in future directions in libraries and publishing.

I received the December 12th issue of Free Pint today. As usual, it is quite lengthy. I went straight to the online photos of various conferences that their staff attended, such as the SLA Conference in June 2003 and Online Information 2003 that was this month. For more serious content, Annabel Colley, Free Pint editor, discusses some conferences she attended and includes a link to a PDF that gives an overview and history of the House of Commons library and research services.

This electronic newsletter states it “is an online network of information searchers. Members receive this free newsletter twice a month: it is packed with tips on finding quality and reliable business information on the Internet.” You can find out more information at Free Pint.