GATEWAYS One of the greatest features of the Internet is that people, regardless of their location, can have instant access to digitized information anywhere in the world. A single organization can load information into a computer and keep it current. That organization can then make its computer files available to other users. DIGITAL LIBRARIES Numerous libraries have created digital files of some of their holdings. Until recently a person could only do serious research at the Library of Congress by going there in person. The same was true for the University of Georgia Library. Now both have stored much of their historical material on computers—accessible to researchers from anywhere in the world. Although access to some of the material is restricted to faculty, employees, students, etc., much is available to the general public at no charge! The Digital Library of Georgia is described as "a gateway to Georgia's history and culture found in digitized books, manuscripts, photographs, newspapers, audio, video, and other materials." http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/ Other selected online library collections that should interest Murray residents include The Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/ and the National Archives and Records Center http://www.archives.gov. Other major libraries with digital collections are listed at the following website: http://vlmp.museophile.com/libraries VIRTUAL TOURS OF ART MUSEUMS Some art museums offer virtual tours through which you can read about individual works of art and see excellent pictures of them. This means that from Murray County, Georgia, computer users can visit our National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, (http://www.nga.gov) or the J. Paul Getty Museum (http://www.getty.edu/museum/) in Los Angeles. Heck, why not tour the Louvre in Paris (http://www.luvre.fr/) or the Hermitage (http://www.hermitagemuseum.org) in St. Petersburg ?!? The National Gallery of Art usually provides digitized images of special exhibits. Click here to see what is currently available on their website: http://www.nga.gov Major art museums world-wide offer some degree of digital viewing by computer. With museums holding hundreds of thousands, even millions, of works of art, digitizing will be a work-in-progress for many many years! Click here for a listing of several hundred major art museums you can instantly click to around the world: http://vlmp.museophile.com/galleries.html Click on any museum, then, when its welcome page comes up, select English (for language choice), then select Virtual Tour or Virtual Exhibits. One of the most impressive virtual exhibits is at the Netherlands' Rijksmuseum http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/ After selecting the category "masterpieces"some 300 tiny pictures appear on a single screen. When you rest the computer mouse on one of the small pictures, it is enlarged to show the detail. A terrific Italian research site (select English language option upper right corner) called Artbank-Old Master, permits visitors to browse through biographies of more than 35,000 painters, engravers, and drawers who worked from the 10th to the 18th century. The site contains images of more than 1,000,000 works with auction prices their works drew. Users must register (free) to search the database. http://www.artbank-oldmaster ONLINE NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES Newspapers and magazines around the world now use computers to write and edit their stories, then to format and print the publications. Many publish online versions that can be read from anywhere. Their archives can be searched by computer query for any story on any subject for any date—with search results available in mere seconds. Want to read an English-language newspaper or magazine printed in India? Or Hong Kong? How about New Zealand? Until very recently any of these would have been impossible to do from Murray County, Georgia. Now, simply by clicking on any of the links below, someone in Murray County will immediately see a listing of thousands of publications for the entire world. By clicking on the name of a publication, the current issue appears on the computer screen FREE. Those searching archives for a particular story usually must pay a modest fee, most are around $2 per story, which can be paid by entering a credit card number. Once the fee is paid the story immediately appears on the computer screen to be read and printed out. http://www.ipl.org http://newslink.orghttp://www.nettizen.com http://www.world-newspapers.com
