Second Installment Puts Important British Literary Manuscripts into the Hands of Students and Educators

Farmington Hills, Mich., Jan. 19, 2011 — Gale, part of Cengage Learning, today announced the release of British Literary Manuscripts Online, Medieval and Renaissance, the second installment of the British Literary Manuscripts Online series. Following the release of the first installment in May 2009, this new digital archive brings approximately 565,000 pages of unique author manuscripts into the hands of students, educators and researchers.

“This fascinating series, selected from a multitude of leading world libraries, delivers insights into the culture and context surrounding centuries of British literary achievement,” said Jim Draper, vice president and publisher, Gale. “Gale is proud to be the first publisher to conceptualize and publish a collection of this vast range and depth.”

Cross-searchable with British Literary Manuscripts, c. 1660-1900, the first installment in the series, Medieval and Renaissance presents an extraordinary view into the culture and history of renowned and lesser-known writers of the period. The collection features works from more than 1,000 authors and more than 500 years of manuscripts dating from roughly 1100 to 1660 – preceding and broadening the scope of the first series. It offers hundreds of thousands of pages of letters, poems, stories, plays, chronicles, religious writings and other materials.

The Medieval documents include notable works of early English literature – Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Vision of Piers the Plowman, and The Canterbury Tales, in addition to religious works such as The Prick of Conscience, the York and Coventry Mystery Plays and the writings of John Wycliffe, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Scholars will also find important cultural and historical sources like the letters of Alcuin and Lanfranc and the 1488 manuscripts of Barbour’s Life and Acts of Robert the Bruce. Well-known Renaissance authors include John Donne, Thomas Campion, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Thomas Wyatt. Also included are transcriptions of works by Shakespeare.

The manuscripts in British Literary Manuscripts Online, Medieval and Renaissance were selected from a number of institutions, including The British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Forster and Dyce Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Library customers can select British Literary Manuscripts Online, Medieval and Renaissance as a stand-alone product or, for a more comprehensive resource, it can be combined and cross-searched with British Literary Manuscripts Online, c. 1660-1900, which includes thousands of pages of poems, plays, essays, novels, diaries, journals, correspondence and other manuscripts from the Restoration through the Victorian era.

For more information or to set up a trial of the British Literary Manuscripts Online series, please contact Kristina Massari at kristina.massari@cengage.com.

About Cengage Learning and Gale
Cengage Learning is a leading provider of innovative teaching, learning and research solutions for the academic, professional and library markets worldwide. Gale, part of Cengage Learning, serves the world's information and education needs through its vast and dynamic content pools, which are used by students and consumers in their libraries, schools and on the Internet. It is best known for the accuracy, breadth and convenience of its data, addressing all types of information needs – from homework help to health questions to business profiles – in a variety of formats. For more information, visit www.cengage.com or www.gale.cengage.com.

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January 19th, 2011
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla
(888) 900-8944
sales@bywatersolutions.com

Erikson Institute of Chicago, IL. Goes Live on Koha with ByWater Solutions

ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, announced today that Erikson Institute of Chicago, IL. is now live on the official Koha integrated library system.

The Edward Neisser Library's Koha installation went live early this week, and Erikson has partnered with ByWater Solutions for ongoing support and hosting services.

Karen Janke, Director of Erikson Institute's Edward Neisser Library, commented on their decision to switch to Koha and ByWater Solutions by saying "The big factors that led us to choose Koha with support from ByWater were the customizability of Koha, the quick implementation timeframe we were working under, and ByWater’s experience working with libraries like ours."

Brendan Gallagher, CEO of ByWater stated: "We are thrilled to have the chance to partner with Karen and the staff of Erikson. Their dedication to the education of child care professionals is an extremely important one and we are glad to be a part of that process. We look forward to a long and productive relationship with them."

About Erikson Institute:
Erikson Institute is an independent institution of higher education that prepares child development professionals for leadership. Through its academic programs, applied research, and community service and engagement, Erikson advances the ability of practitioners, researchers, and decision makers to improve life for children and their families. The Institute is a catalyst for discovery and change, continually bringing the newest scientific knowledge and theories of children’s development and learning into its classrooms and out to the community so that professionals serving children and families are informed, inspired, and responsive.

The Edward Neisser Library provides multifaceted information services that support the education, information, research, and service programs of Erikson. Its specialized collection is a valuable resource. Information about journals, assessment kits, and other materials can be found at http://library.erikson.edu.

About Koha:
Koha is the first open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). In use worldwide, its development is steered by a growing community of libraries collaborating to achieve their technology goals. Koha's impressive feature set continues to evolve and expand to meet the needs of its user base. It includes modules for circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, serials, reserves, patron management, branch relationships, and more.

Koha’s OPAC, circulation, management and self-checkout interfaces are all based on standards-compliant World Wide Web technologies--XHTML, CSS and Javascript--making Koha a truly platform-independent solution. Koha is distributed under the open-source General Public License (GPL). For more information about Koha, please visit: http://www.koha-community.org

About ByWater Solutions:
With over 10 years of experience, ByWater Solutions offers customized hosting, data migration, configuration, installation, training, support options and development of enterprise class open-source library systems. Offering a 24/7 technical helpline, ByWater Solutions’ clients have the support system they need to make their software work for them. ByWater Solutions pledges to share 100% of all developed code to the Koha community for the strengthening and advancement of the Koha ILS. For more information about ByWater Solutions, please visit: http://www.bywatersolutions.com

DUBLIN, Ohio, January 18, 2011—OCLC and the HathiTrust have developed a unique WorldCat Local user interface for discovery of items accessible through the HathiTrust Digital Library. The WorldCat Local prototype (http://hathitrust.worldcat.org) for the HathiTrust Digital Library was designed and implemented by both organizations in close cooperation as a means to further develop a shared digital library infrastructure. The WorldCat Local interface for the HathiTrust Digital Library is based on the WorldCat database, and will run along with the current HathiTrust catalog during the prototype testing period.

As a digital repository for the nation’s great research libraries, the HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the massive digitized collections of partner institutions. HathiTrust offers libraries a means to archive and provide access to their digital content, whether scanned volumes, special collections, or born-digital materials. The representation of these resources in digital form offers expanded opportunities for innovative use in research, teaching and learning.

OCLC and HathiTrust have been working together to increase online visibility and accessibility of the digital collections by creating WorldCat records describing the content and linking to the collections via WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local. The creation of the unique public interface through WorldCat Local is the next step to offer enhanced access to this vital collection.

“HathiTrust benefits greatly from this partnership in that the collaborative development has enabled the creation of a new means of discovering HathiTrust holdings while simultaneously integrating these holdings into the larger world of library holdings made discoverable by OCLC,” said John Wilkin, Executive Director of the HathiTrust.

HathiTrust Digital Library records are discoverable through the separate WorldCat Local interface, as well as through WorldCat.org.

“OCLC and the HathiTrust have been working together closely in this shared development project to facilitate access to these valuable digital materials,” said Chip Nilges, OCLC Vice President, Business Development. “This collaboration leverages OCLC’s extensive work in the area of resource discovery with the HathiTrust’s considerable expertise and infrastructure with respect to the preservation of scholarly resources.”

OCLC and HathiTrust are seeking feedback from users of the new HathiTrust public interface through WorldCat Local. Feedback from the user community and usability assessments will inform future development of the HathiTrust Digital Library catalog.

Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has a growing membership currently comprising 52 partners. Over the last two years, the partners have contributed more than 8 million volumes to the digital library, digitized from their library collections through various means, including Google and Internet Archive digitization and in-house initiatives. More than 2 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available on the Web.

More about HathiTrust is at www.hathitrust.org/.

About OCLC
Founded in 1967, OCLC is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing library costs. More than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries have used OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend, preserve and manage library materials. Researchers, students, faculty, scholars, professional librarians and other information seekers use OCLC services to obtain bibliographic, abstract and full-text information when and where they need it. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the world’s largest online database for discovery of library resources. Search WorldCat on the Web at www.worldcat.org. For more information, visit www.oclc.org.