One Europe? One European Library (online)!

It's not easy to get 45 countries to agree on something, but libraries have a long history of collaboration and sharing, and in Europe this has led to the creation of "The European Library,"

"a portal which offers access to the combined resources (books, magazines, journals.... - both digital and non-digital) of the 45 national libraries of Europe. It offers free searching and delivers digital objects - some free, some priced."

Why use it? Consider the reasons proffered by the developers:

• It brings together disparate collections on your desktop and will allow for cross-collection searching
• It presents integrated results and will deliver digital objects
• It enables types of collection-level searching which would otherwise be impossible
• It is a major contribution to research both in making resources widely available and by making possible new connections through exploitation of a huge virtual library collection.
• The European Library encourages new research!

Along with the catalog search interface, the EL's site includes personal account registration, handy for saving favorite items and search strategies for later use. 16 languages currently supported for searching. Bravo!

E-Treasures from the Center for Research Libraries

The most recent collection added to the CRL's e-collection repositories is titled "Slavery and Manumission Manuscripts of Timbuktu." From the official announcement:

"The collection of 206 manuscripts are from the Bibliothèque Commémorative Mama Haidara in Timbuktu, Mali. Abdel Kader Haidara, Curator of the Bibliotheque Commemorative Mama Haidara and John O. Hunwick, Professor of History and Religion, Northwestern University, selected these manuscripts for conservation treatment and digitization in order to make them accessible via the Web. The manuscripts were returned to the Bibliotheque Commemorative Mama Haidara following their conservation and digitization.

The materials, in Arabic, include documentation on Africans in slavery and manumission in Muslim societies. "

This digital collection is fine addition to the others currently available, including:

• Chinese pamphlets: Political communication and mass education in the early period of the People's Republic of China
• Brazilian Government Documents
• Pamphlets and Periodicals of the French Revolution of 1848
• The Digital South Asia Library (DSAL)

Please note that these are digital scans of original documents in their original languages.