While I was growing up in Colombia libraries were very scarce, the only library one ever heard mentioned was the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango (BLAA), which I finally got to visit.
While the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango is owned by the Banco de la República de Colombia, it is very much a public library, and open [...]

Yesterday while I was riding the bus to work a new billboard caught my eye, one for Read.gov. Read.gov is part of the Library of Congress, and it aims to encourage reading of all kinds of material, by every age group. On the website you’ll find recommendations by age group, and for educators, and under [...]

My friend Alberto Martinez, who works at El Colegio de México, is always collaborating on great projects, the most recent one has resulted in free access to all the journals that the university edits!
The journals, which cover a wide range of topics, many of them relating to Mexican history can be accessed here. You can [...]

The Latin American Briefing Series is part of the University of Chicago’s Center for Latin American Studies; they regularly invites guest to discuss a wide range of topics and issues, and kindly makes them available through their website for free!
Look through their online archive to find videos of previous events. Some of these include discussions [...]

Today I spent the day at the Library of Congress and loved it. I was there with my mother and brother and we took one of the guided tours of the building. This tour starts off with a short movie including a number of brief interviews with some of the librarians who highlight many of [...]

On Thursday I attended the webinar titled “Opening up Library Systems through Web Services and SOA” which was co-hosted by WebJunction and ALA Tech Source, and moderated by Marshall Breeding. The session was very interested and presented three different cases of how Integrated Library Systems can be made more accessible, regardless of whether they run [...]

I just received an email with a call for simultaneous interpreters – English/Arabic to translate at IFLA’s annual conference, which will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden, August 10 – 15, 2010. The title for the upcoming conference is “Open access to knowledge – promoting sustainable progress.”
Here is the description for the position.
As the IFLA Center [...]

This Thursday Marshall Breeding will be moderating a webinar discussing whether a integrated library system be open without being open source. He will explore the ways that an Application Programming Interface (API) can help libraries wring data and functionality out of their ILS, extend its functionality, and interact with other applications.
The webinar is hosted through [...]

The British Library is constantly coming up with new great projects to make their collections accessible to all; In the latest, Archival Sound Recordings, they have digitized all of their audio collections and made them available to the world. The full collection gathers about 28,000 items which include recordings of singing, yelling, speaking, banging, and [...]

This beautiful database set up by the Van Gogh Museum, gathers all of Vicent van Gogh’s letters, including facsimiles of the originals, transcriptions, translations, and the art work connected to each. The site allows you to browse by period, correspondent, and by place. You can also conduct basic and advance searches. The collection includes 902 [...]