Yesterday was the official launch of “StoryCorps Historias“, the Latino version of StoryCorps, the project that gathers personal stories in audio format. Since 2003 the independent and nonprofit project has gathered thousands of interviews, often in conversation format between two people. These interviews are then available though public radio stations and online. These oral histories [...]

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 [...]

The Library of Congress (LOC) just set up a YouTube account where they will be sharing a number of the treasured they hold. They currently have over 70 videos uploaded, but they promise to regularly continue adding more material. Right now they have their videos organized in a number of playlists; author presentations, industrial films, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Turning the Pages is a great collection digitized books, at the British Library, that allow you to turn the pages and almost experience the real thing. The works included in this project include some very old books, such as the first atlas of Europe, Blake’s notebooks, sketches by Leonardo DaVinci, and the original Alice in [...]

Based on the belief that American popular culture is shaping a new global environment which each day looks more hegemonic, the National Library of Venezuela has decided to fight back. Under the direction of Fernando Báez, the National Library of Venezuela will now try to fight what they believe is a global commercialization of world [...]

In a gesture of good faith, the Chilean government has returned close to 4,000 books that were plundered from the Peruvian National library back in 1881 during the War of the Pacific. Some of these books were written in French, Spanish, Greek and Latin, and date as far back as the 16th century. Some of [...]

A World Digital Library is coming together after an agreement signed yesterday between Abdul Waheed Khan, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communications and Information, and James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress in the USA’s Library of Congress. The project was started in 2005 by a $3 million grant from Google. The project aims is to create [...]