Last update: Tuesday, August 31, 2004

New and noteworthy

The new academic year brings you new ways of finding the information you need, including

• VCat, Penn's new video catalog (More info.)
• BorrowDirect+, which makes the holdings of 40 Pennsylvania libraries (in addition to the previouly available 6 Ivy libraries) quickly and easily available to Penn scholars (More info.)
• New appearance and features for the Franklin catalog. (More info.)

Look for more new information finding services in the year to come!

Locally developed digital collections

Here are some of the digital collections developed locally at the Penn Library, with information about each collection. See our full E-Resource offerings for lots more electronic resources, from Penn and beyond.

The listings here are grouped by content medium, to illustrate the different styles of interaction and technology used for each:

• Multimodal:
• SCETI (Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image [about]
• Primarily text:
• Oxford - Cambridge eBooks [about]
• Site with access to full text (Penn only)
• Public preview site
• The Online Books Page [about]
• A Celebration of Women Writers [about]
• Primarily images:
The following collections can be searched together via our Online Image Collections site:
• Fisher Fine Arts Library Image Collection Online [about]
• Penn/AIIS South Asia Archive Online [about]
• Furness Collection Images (Shakespeare and English Renaissance) [about]
• Smith Memorial Collection Images (history of chemistry) [about]
• University Archives Digital Image Collection [about]
• Primarily music:
• Robert and Molly Friedman Jewish Music Online Catalog [about]

Research and development

See this page for information on projects currently in development.

Tools and technology

Look here for information on the technology and practices underlying our digital library efforts. This section, when fully fleshed out, will include recommendations and standards for maintaining our digital library resources, and pointers to documentation on the technology that we use.

The following items are currently available for staff reference:

• Assigning persistent references in Penn's URS system
• Data farm (online data on library use)
• Summary documentation for digital library standards and software

Publications and presentations

See this page for public reports that our staff have made about our digital library activities.