Pacific Rim's multilingual gateway receives new funding

Citation

(1999), "Pacific Rim's multilingual gateway receives new funding", Asian Libraries, Vol. 8 No. 10. https://doi.org/10.1108/al.1999.17308jab.002

Pacific Rim's multilingual gateway receives new funding

Pacific Rim's multilingual gateway receives new funding

The Pacific Rim Digital Alliance received a US$300,000 award from the Henry Luce Foundation in late 1998 to fund three projects:

1. 1.

   building a multilingual gateway to library resources giving scholars access to databases in many languages;

2. 2.

   creating a Pacific explorations archive of documents chronicling the history of Pacific exploration;

3. 3.

   extending its Chinese serials database.

The alliance was launched in October 1997 in San Diego with support from the National Education Security Programme, to link major libraries across the political linguistic, and technical boundaries of the Pacific Rim. Its 14 members span the shores of the Pacific Ocean from Mexico to Australia, by way of the USA, Canada, China, Taipei, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.

The multilingual gateway is one of the alliance's more ambitious projects. Using this gateway, catalogue information in different character codes and bibliographic formats will be collected from many libraries and converted into a single code and format, eliminating the cumbersome procedure of changing codes and the need to learn different formats. The resulting software will greatly improve the efficiency of bibliographic searching across national boundaries.

At its membership meeting in La Jolla, California in April 1999 the alliance also began creating a Pacific Rim electronic interlibrary loan infrastructure that will allow a user to request and receive digitised items via the Internet. Within the framework of international copyright laws, books and journal articles may be received by the user within as little as a few hours after placing the request.

Charter members of the Alliance are: Academia Sinica, Taipei; Australian National University Library, Canberra; El Colegio de Mexico Library, Mexico City; Kelo University Library, Tokyo; National University of Singapore Library; Peking University Library Beijing; Seoul National University Library; University of British Columbia, Vancouver; University of California, Berkeley Library; University of California, San Diego Library; University of Hong Kong Library; University of Washington Libraries, Seattle; and Zhongshan University Library, Guangzhou. The National Institute of Japanese Literature in Tokyo is an associate member.

More information about the alliance is available at http://www.prdla.org, or from Alliance Co-ordinator, Phyllis Mirsky, and Executive Director Kari Lo. Their e-mail addresses are: prnirsky@ucsd.edu and klo@ucsd.edu They may be reached by telephone: 619-534-1234; fax: 619-534- 6193; and mail: University of California, San Diego, Libraries, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0175, USA.