Today I got a “behind the scenes” tour of the National Library of Ireland! On my visit I found out that the library is quite a welcoming place to people from all around the world. Any local resident, or any person with a passport in hand can receive a library card, and use the library’s [...]

This afternoon I had an appointment for a tour of The British Library. The library itself is huge, taking up the better part of a city block, and having so much storage it has 5 underground levels full of books, plus additional storage at a remote location. Being the national library, it is in charge [...]

Today the World Digital Library goes live! The project has been in the works for about 4 years now, and was initially conceived by James Billington of the USA Library of Congress (LOC), and developed by UNESCO and LOC. The site will function in seven languages and will showcase digital treasures from around the globe [...]

Financial advice at the public library? Apparently so. As unstable and scary as the financial landscape appears these days all of us seem to be looking for advice where we can find it. Smart investing@your library® initiative, a partnership between FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) Investor Education Foundation and ALA (American Library Association) has established [...]

March is Women’s History Month in the USA and a number of universities, libraries, and other educational institutions are preparing events to celebrate. This month long celebration started with events for International Women’s Day, which falls every year on March 8th. Many of the celebrations around this date wish to write women back into history [...]

The Perdita Project is a collaboration between the AHRB Center for Byzantine Cultural History, Nottingham Trent University, and The University of Warwick which gathers over 400 manuscripts collections from round the world on early modern (mostly British) women’s history. Some of the topics covered in this collection include poetry, religion, recipes, and autobiographies. The catalog [...]

If Darwin were still alive he’d be turning 200 today; and today just as during his lifetime his name still creates a buzz. All these years later there are still plenty of people who doubt his findings and who refuse to consider that our ancestors were apes. Newspapers all over have been aflutter this week [...]

I grew up listening to Rubén Blades, -by far one of my favorite musicians-, and I just found out that he has agreed to donate his personal papers to the Eda Kuhn Loed Music Library at Harvard! It will take a few years for the complete transition and cataloging of the material, but in the [...]

Spain’s National Library has recently set the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica to highlight some of its most valuable items, including paintings, photographs, maps, and written texts spanning several centuries. The collection can be browsed through its main categories, or can be searched by keywords. The site also connects you to a number of other digital collections [...]

Israel’s Antiquities Authority has begun digitizing the Dead Sea Scrolls to make them available to everyone on the web. The project is an effort to preserve the remains of this 2,000 year old document that is currently a series of parchment and papyrus fragments. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain the earliest know version of the [...]