The World Digital Library is a project that is quite vast in scope, but is looking ready to take on the challenge of combining primary historical resources from many of the worlds great libraries.

This project was started by UNESCO and the U.S. Library of Congress just last year, and was the subject of a presentation at the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) 2007 conference last month.

Using PostGIS and MapServer, open-source programs that together join a database with mapping information, the library will allow users to search for and retrieve information via a well-thought-out, multi-lingual, world map interface, with a variety of tools for narrowing the search parameters.

I say “will allow users to search” because the library is not yet live. They do, however, have a demonstration video available, in two sizes:

• 500×365 pixels, 8MB
• 1010×720 pixels, 35MB

There is also a good article about the project in the Washington Post.

found on One Big Library

Advice to a slightly less experienced geek librarian is written by Daniel Chudnov at One Big Library, and is an excellent essay with good advice for anyone exploring new ways to do things in libraries.  I can vouch for a few points that he makes, and will try to be prepared to follow the rest!

from One Big Library

It seems odd that it hasn’t happened before now, but the Library of Congress has just started a blog.

from One Big Library

Wow… library blog land is abuzz tonight with the release of LibraryFind… and it does look fantastic!

It is an open source federated search engine that is fully customizable, and the price is right.

Check out the Oregon State University Demo to see what it does.

from (in time stamp order): Web4Lib post (5:52 p.m.); One Big Library (6:15 p.m.); OSS4Lib (6:31 p.m.); ResourceShelf (6:35 p.m.) — makes my later-than-9-p.m. post seem kind of late, eh?

Zotero, the software project I am waiting for, won’t keep us waiting much longer:  the Public Release Date has been set for Thursday, October 5th.

One slight hitch:  it requires Firefox 2.0 (I have been staying on 1.5.0.7 for the extension functionality).  No problem… I will test it on Firefox Portable 2.0

from One Big Library