American Memory @ Library of Congress

American Memory @ Library of Congress
(http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html)

If primary source material on the United States is sought, look no further than to the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world and it is making a concerted effort to bring that same presence to the virtual world. The National Digital Library Program (NDLP) began in 1995 to digitize books, pamphlets, motion pictures, photographs, sheet music, manuscripts, maps and sound recordings, and out of it was born “American Memory”, a massive digital archive containing around 11,000,000 files. The collection can be browsed by subject, time period, format type or geographic region and, like a good book, will hold you captive for many hours on end.

Regarding primary sources from other parts of the world, there are two websites of note – Internet History Sourcebooks Project, located at the Fordham University History Department and Center for Medieval Studies, and Eurodocs: Primary Historical Documents from Western Europe, begun at Brigham Young University in 1995 and broken into 46 separate web indexes representing the countries and city-states of Europe.

>>> Megasites <<<

As with anything, there is good and bad, and the same goes for the internet; for every great website there are a thousand others that we could do without. The ones we like the most we tend to bookmark for easy retrieval. Compiling an index of useful websites arranged according to subject or discipline is what we librarians do! There are a few of these so-called megasites that try to bring order to this chaotic world of information in cyberspace and they are excellent tools for any library to exploit when searching for quality information online.

Librarians’ Internet Index (http://www.lii.org/)

Based in California and publicly funded, there are over 20,000 entries of websites which have been carefully selected, evaluated and organized by a team of librarians and arranged into 14 main topics and roughly 300 related topics. A free weekly newsletter is also distributed highlighting new editions.

Infomine (http://infomine.ucr.edu/)

Hosted at the University of California, Riverside, this portal is aimed at faculty, students and research staff at the university level. There are over 50,000 entries, about half of which are selected by professional librarians, the other half by robot crawlers.

Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/)

Over 40,000 librarian-approved weblinks at this site founded by the University of Michigan School of Information but currently hosted by Drexel University’s College of Information Science & Technology. Not nearly as detailed as the Librarians’ Internet Index, which employs Library of Congress subject headings and more in-depth annotations, but extremely useful nevertheless.


BUBL Link (http://bubl.ac.uk/)

Begun in 1990 as the Bulletin Board for Libraries, hence the name, this site based at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland, is one of the oldest yet least known of the major megasites. What will make this particularly attractive to public librarians is the arrangement of weblinks according to Dewey decimal numbers!