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Building Global Collections

Collaborative international projects are an exciting avenue to building contemporary academic library collections. At UCI the Libraries are playing an active role in preserving the global scholarly record by contributing to such projects and through our own digitization programs.

For example, under the aegis of the Center for Research Libraries, we participate in the Latin American Microfilm Project and the German-North American Research Partnership. We also lend our support to CRL’s Global Resources Network, a consortium of libraries dedicated to building international collections. GRN projects include the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project and the Digital South Asia Library. All of these CRL projects seek to preserve vital scholarly and cultural materials in regions where saving the cultural record has been a challenge.

We recently have become a member of the Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance (www.prdla.org), which seeks to improve user access to scholarly research materials through resource sharing, cooperative purchasing, and coordinated collection development. Projects include the PRDLA Archive, a union catalog of digital resources, and the Pacific Explorations Archive, a growing digital archive of materials on exploration of the Pacific Ocean and Pacific Rim countries.

The libraries also are tapping local resources to create digital collections. We are excited by the success of the online Quest for Peace interviews (www.lib.uci.edu/quest), which were conducted by John M. Whiteley of the School of Social Ecology. During the 1980s he interviewed numerous internationally prominent political figures such as Robert McNamara, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Condoleezza Rice. A video and a written transcript of each interview are available online.

We look forward to similar success with SEAAdoc (seaadoc.lib.uci.edu), an archive of materials from the Southeast Asian Archive that document the Southeast Asian refugee and immigrant experience. SEAAdoc’s collection of primary source materials contains over 1,500 images and 4,000 pages of text. The site is intended for use by K-14 students, teachers and the general public.

Even as our digital collections grow, our print collections also are expanding. For example, we recently began purchasing books from Vietnam to support research and teaching, and Special Collections and Archives actively collects artists’ books from Latin America. Our East Asian collection remains an important focus as well.

For more information contact Jim Galbraith, Head of Collection Development (jgalbrai@uci.edu
or x41249).

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Inside this issue

Message from the University Librarian: Globalism and the Libraries

Multimedia without Boundaries

Fall Exhibit: California Universities Building Amistad

Digital Images from the National Palace Museum
of Taipei

Building Global Collections

Library Recruitments Continue

Where Is Anteater Island?