Contact: Diane Ryan, Council of American Overseas Research Centers’
Digital Library for International Research, dlir@caorc.org, (773) 955-4545 x 266

May 16, 2007

The Digital Library for International Research Receives Support from the Getty Foundation

The Council of American Overseas Research Centers has recently been awarded a grant of $150,000 from the Getty Foundation to develop its Digital Library for International Research (DLIR). Through the DLIR, the Council provides leadership and technical expertise to member centers and their partners in managing their library and information resources. By centralizing project coordination and facilitation through the DLIR, and by collaborating with organizations sharing similar goals, the program maximizes public access to the centers’ resources for teaching, research, and public information through the DLIR union catalog and digital library (http://www.dlir.org).

The Getty project supports the development and migration of the member centers' union catalog to the Center for Research Libraries and training in cataloging procedures. The project will provide overseas library staff with expertise in OCLC's and the Library of Congress' online cataloging tools, standards for bibliographic classification and description, and specialized instruction in describing archives and using international scripts and diacritical marks in catalog records. In addition, the staff will receive training in electronic reference services to complement the recently implemented JSTOR project that provided access to the full JSTOR collection for local scholars and students and for American scholars working overseas at participating centers.