Volume 34, Issue 1

You don't need to know much about microfilms in order to use them wisely, but to many people still, a film is a film is a film – and the cheapest one often wins by virtue of its cost. I have used an analogy many times–but not enough times, I guess. To repeat myself yet again, everyone knows what a fabric is, but everyone also knows that fabrics appear in many manifestations. We have cotton, or silk, or linen, or wool, for example. We also have a host of manmade fibres from which to choose. We can make sails out of cotton canvas and evening gowns out of silk taffeta. We can use whatever fibre and fabric made from that fibre (or combination of fibres – cotton and lycra, for example) we choose, but we also know that each fabric has its own characteristics and its use will be dictated by those characteristics.

Background The project to provide access to 19 th century New Zealand newspapers and periodicals began in mid-2000 and was kicked-off with an objective of delivering 250,000 pages of early newspapers online within a year. The Papers Past web site went live in August 2001 with just over 300,000 digitized pages of newspapers online at: http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/.

In their continued support of the micrographic marketplace, Kodak offers a free seminar on the best practices and production of microfilm and microforms for librarians, micropublishers, and others who use Kodak microfilm. This seminar is provided at the end-user's request and is typically held on-site at the user's microfilm production facility. The seminar is usually six hours in length. The focus of the seminar is to aid in the understanding of the history of microfilm and micrographic technology, with the goal of implementing procedures and practices that result in consistent “Reliable Images” on microfilm. See Figure 1 at the end of the article for a complete Seminar outline.

In December 2004, Google Inc. announced its plans to digitize millions of books from prestigious libraries such as Harvard, Stanford, and the New York Public Library. Most of the books are in the public domain and will be available for free on the Internet. The Google initiative is one among many, including the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress, the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, and Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. All of these programs offer free access to good-quality digital materials. Another common feature is that they are heavily funded.

Introduction German libraries and subject information providers as well as academic researchers provide a number of subject portals with a variety of high-quality information. Users, however, sometimes do not know where to find the right portal for their specific needs; other users do research in an interdisciplinary field and would like to do searches in several portals simultaneously. Thus, there is a need for orientation, harmonization, and the possibility of simultaneous searches. The search for information should also lead directly to the desired document. Many countries are trying to offer their academic researchers and students portals or subjects hubs which provide easy access to quality information.

Executive Summary The RLG initiative Automatic Exposure – Capturing Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images seeks to minimize the cost of technical metadata acquisition and maximize the cultural heritage community's capability of ensuring long-term access to digital assets. The goal of the initiative is to lower the barrier for institutions to capture the data elements proposed by NISO Z39.87: Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images [Draft Standard for Trial Use]. NISO Z39.87 defines a standard, comprehensive set of data elements key to an institution's ability to manage and preserve its digital images.

If Julia Child had been a government documents librarian instead of a chef, one can just imagine Dan Aykroyd as Julia in his classic “Saturday Night Live” sketch imploring us to “save the Serial Set” instead of the liver. We can all be pleased that Readex, a division of Newsbank, Inc., has not only made the Serial Set accessible but easily searchable with the release of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set – Digital Edition .

The works on the Dominican religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola did not vanish from sight with his execution in 1498. The preacher's works began appearing in print during the last decade of his life, and they continued appearing after his death. Most were published in Florence, but some appeared in other cities. A few even were printed in Germany. The printers most associated with dissemination of the friar's works are Bartolomeo de' Libri and Lorenzo Morgiani. This selection of early editions of Savonarola's works illustrates the rapid passage or his words into print and the long afterlife of the friar as a religious figure. The collection also contains writings of both supporters and opponents of Savonarola, most of them published in his lifetime. Thus the microfiche collection (212 titles on 263 microfiche) illustrate every aspect of the friar's impact on both the book trade and the reading public of his day. (MARC21 Bibliographic Records are also available but were not reviewed.)