Volume 36, Issue 2

Introduction During the summer of 2004, the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries commenced a two-year project to create a resource-based research and educational web site titled Green ‘N’ Growing: The History of Home Demonstration and 4-H Youth Development in North Carolina . This was undertaken in three stages. The first was to digitize more than 21,000 unique images and pages of text held by the NCSU Libraries' Special Collections Research Center and the North Carolina State Archives and to make these available via the Internet. The second was to provide “added value” by enhancing intellectual access to the digital objects through subject lists, geographic headings, and brief narrative essays. The third was to design a web site to guide research and classroom use of the digitized resources.

In August of 2004 the History & Special Collections of the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, UCLA purchased a collection of 625 AIDS posters from 44 countries including Australia, Austria, Canada, China (and Hong Kong), Costa Rica, France, Germany, India, Japan, Luxembourg, Martinique, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Tahiti, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The posters were issued by a variety of institutions and organizations to educate and warn people about AIDS and to offer advice and information in visual form. Some are more blunt and graphic than others, and they come in many styles.

Digital projects are not a new undertaking by university archives, and those related to university sports are often some of the earliest created. This is the case, not only because of the evocative imagery, but also because in the United States college sport is a subject that cuts across economic, social, geographic, and educational strata. To put it plainly, the audience is huge. Thus the opportunity to connect the college sports audience with university archives, which does not normally have a large audience, is irresistible. Increasingly, repositories are taking to the web with their sports collections, while at the same time trying to balance the needs of their mission to preserve knowledge and to serve the educational, research, fiscal, legal, and service missions of their parent institution. In analyzing the successes and challenges posed by the development and implementation of the University of Oregon (UO) sports history digital exhibition and collection, lessons were learned that will improve this on-going project and that can be applied to other projects.

The article traces recent developments in microfilming training within Australasia and adjacent regions leading to a re-accreditation of the formal course Certificate IV in Preservation Microfilming .

Creating a representative database of the British Empire is a difficult problem. How can one create a database that accurately reflects the issues of nearly one quarter of the world's land mass and over four hundred years of human history? Adam Matthew Publications has admirably taken on this task. Empire Online, an electronic collection of over eight hundred editorial essays, manuscripts, printed works, ephemera, and other materials provides an excellent starting point for undergraduates into the multifaceted world of British imperial studies.

This database represents in excess of 17,000 records from the British Public Records Office (PRO), or more than 137,000 pages, dealing with the British historical connection to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The original documentation represents official perspectives from the Foreign Office (FO), the Colonial Office (CO), the War Office (WO), and Cabinet Papers, with a time period dating from the issuance of the so-called Balfour Declaration (1917) through the activities of the Palestinian group Black September during a period of internal conflict in Jordan in 1970. The actual database is augmented with three essays that serve as guides to the subject matter as well as providing research prompts serving as references with appropriate hot links to relevant documents. The essays are an Introduction by Dr. Eugene Rogan, “Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1948–1970,” by Dr. Charles D. Smith, and “The PLO and the Palestinian Armed Struggle,” by Professor Yezid Sayigh.