Tag Archives: Library of Congress

United States has 5 National Libraries: Library of Congress, & National Libraries of Medicine, Agriculture, Education and Transportation

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five books of different colors representing the five national libraries in the United States: agriculture, transportation, education, medicine, and the Library of Congress“Today, we’re asking “How many national libraries are there in the United States?”

For most countries, the answer is usually one.

But the United States actually has five.

In addition to the National Library of Medicine, the other national libraries are the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National Library of Education, and the National Transportation Library.

National libraries or libraries established by the government of a country serve as preeminent repositories of information. Often, they include numerous rare, valuable, or significant works and play an important role in the preservation of their countries’ cultures and intellectual traditions.

National libraries are commonly open to the public for research, and while members of the public may not directly check out items, they may be able to obtain them through interlibrary loan. National libraries are also increasingly making their collections available online, as copyright and digitization projects allow.”

Source:  NLM Announcements from the NLM Office of Communications, July 25, 2018.

NBII To Be Taken Offline Permanently January 15, 2012

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“In recent years, however, the NBII–like so many other important federal programs–was plagued with budget cuts. The FY 2012 budget mandated its termination. The main Web site, www.nbii.gov, will be taken offline on January 15, 2012, along with all of its associated node sites.

The NBII provided three main benefits to the biological resource community. First, its design as a federation of partners allowed it to assist data owners in maintaining critical assets that might not otherwise be made broadly available; second, scientists, managers, and others searching for data on a particular subject could do so from a single, Web-based source rather than having to go to the sites of numerous organizations to compile the results they sought; and third, the NBII provided users with direct access to many data resources that are deeply embedded in structured databases on the Web and that are relevant to biology–resources that would not be revealed to them using a standard search engine such as Google.

USGS staff now are working with partners to identify ways that–to the extent possible–will help to fill the gap in data access that will be created when the NBII goes offline.”

To read more about the National Biological Information Infrastructure, here’s a link from which the above quote was taken:

http://www.usgs.gov/core_science_systems/Access/p1111-1.html

A Postscript:

“The Library of Congress is a part of a collaborative web archive project to archive U.S. Federal Government Websites, and this site has been crawled by the Internet Archive as a part of that project. It is not publicly accessible yet but it has been preserved.

 

Since we’re a part of the collaborative project, we’ll eventually get a copy of that capture for the Library of Congress archives.”

 

/mrc (Margaret Clifton, mcli@loc.gov)