Library Ireland Week 2010

"Libraries are not made; they grow."

Augustine Birrell (1850-1933)

Digital library project... access millions of resources for free!
Europeana: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/

Europeana is a multilingual project sponsored by the European Commission and the European Members States that allows you to access more than 6 million digital items: from images, to texts, to sounds and recordings from European and worldwide museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections.
… a great way of getting lost in virtual space and discover resources that make your mind wonder and travel!

Libraries of the world (by A. Finegan)
Monday 8th March 2010:

The National Library of India (Kolkata)
http://www.nationallibrary.gov.in/
The National Library of India in Kolkata has collections in all the Indian languages as well as foreign language books published on India. The Library also collects, processes and preserves Chinese and other East Asian languages; at present the collection has 15,000 Chinese and one thousands each in Japanese, Korean, Tibetan, Nepali and Thai languages. There also a large number of Arabic, Persian and African books and manuscripts.

The National Library of China
http://www.nlc.gov.cn/old/old/english.htm
The National Library of China in Beijing has a rich collection of over 24,1100,000 volumes/items, and ranks 5th among the libraries of the world. In the collection there are 270,000 volumes of rare books, 1,600,000 volumes of general ancient books, 35,000 pieces of the scripted turtle shells and animal bones.
The Library not only has the largest collection of Chinese books in the world, but also the biggest collection of materials in foreign languages in the country. In the main collections of the Rare Book Department, there are 270,000 volumes of ancient rare books, including 1,600 volumes of the Song and Yuan dynasties, most of which are the only existing copies or rare copies. Besides, there are 12,000 volumes of new rare books, manuscripts of notable authors, and 25,000 volumes of rare books in foreign languages, 268,000 items of rubbings, which are worldwide famous for its number, quality and variety.

The National Library of Sweden
http://www.kb.se/english/

The National Library of Sweden in Stockholm has been collecting everything printed in Sweden or in Swedish since 1661. The Department of Audiovisual Material (previously the Swedish National Archive of Recorded Sound and Moving Images) collects TV and radio programs, movies and videos distributed in Sweden, Swedish music and multimedia recordings.
The National Library is also a humanities research library that purchases scholarly literature in several languages.
The National Library coordinates services and programs for all research libraries in Sweden and administers and develops LIBRIS, the national library catalogue system.