galaxies of knowledge: a cd-rom containing images and introductions to books held by the rare and early printed books collections from the berlin state library. take the tour - there are some lovely and curious items on it.

nlb should do something like that. i was talking with a librarian in widener who is the asian bibliographer for widener and yenching and who had just this summer been in singapore to give a lecture to nlb. it's refreshing to hear a professional's point of view (particularly someone who works at a place like widener!) on the design and architectural space of the new victoria street building, its unusual position as simultaneously a national and a public lending library, (national libraries rarely are the latter) but also on the lack of formal training of librarians in singapore, the hierarchical (i.e. east asian) structure of the workplace for career librarians, and the lack of interest in the libraries as places of resources compared to other libraries in southeast asia i.e. we still think of libraries in fairly traditional ways - as places where you go in, take out a book, and leave; we don't utilise the full resources of a modern library. guilty, myself. i've only just been discovering last year the nlb e-resource list is substantial too. but i realise that this is true even of my own set - who are young, very well-educated, and comfortable with technology - and who never go into the lee kong chien library, or have a digital library account on nlb - who have, i think, stopped thinking of the library as an intellectually stimulating place, merely a large, free bookshop, and who perhaps would rather type search terms into google than look something up .) it would also seem that we have interesting and substantial special collections holdings, which i should think could be made available in cd-roms - the good thing is that you can get moe to help - bring them to the attention of the schools - and do talks too, public education - it's a way of getting what's "in here" "out there," and to show people what they can see if they would come "in here."