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

February 10, 2009

New Catalog for Digital Library for International Research

The Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) and its Digital Library for International Research (DLIR) program are pleased to announce a new, improved Web site for the catalog representing the libraries of CAORC member centers and their local overseas partners. The new catalog operates in conjunction with the catalog of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL). This improved version of the DLIR catalog (http://catalog.crl.edu/search~S6) offers more specific online searching of library collections at individual overseas research centers in the CAORC consortium and at many of their local partners' libraries. These collections include books, e-books, journals, maps, images, and archival collections. Through the DLIR, CAORC provides leadership and technical expertise to its member centers and their local 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 overseas centers' and their partners' resources for teaching, research, and public information through the DLIR union catalog and its digital library (http://www.dlir.org).

Through a grant from the Getty Foundation, in 2008 the DLIR program migrated the union catalog from the University of Utah's Marriott Library to the CRL. By working with CRL's technical staff, DLIR staff developed public access pages for each participating library in the consortium. In addition, DLIR staff developed public access pages for the overseas research centers' partner libraries, including the American Board Center (Istanbul, Turkey), the Beit Al-Banani private library (Tunis, Tunisia), and the Hasna Daoud private library (Tetouan, Morocco). The Getty Foundation grant also funded training in online searching and cataloging procedures for overseas centers' library staff. In 2008, library staff from 14 CAORC member centers convened in Chicago to gain expertise in using OCLC's and the Library of Congress's online cataloging tools, JSTOR, standards for bibliographic classification and description, and specialized instruction in describing archives and using international scripts and diacritical marks in catalog records.