Library News and Events
The Croft Institue for Intenational Studies Provides Library Materials
The Croft Institute’s and the Croft Foundation’s support for the library over the years has provided the library with the means to acquire over 10,000 books for the library covering the natural history, politics, and the arts of the countries that students will visit, 300 videos and DVD’s, and major collections in Russian, Portuguese, Italian, and German literature to augment the library’s foreign language holdings. These include: the Robert E. Calvin Collection of Portuguese Literature, Liberia Italiana (St. Louis, Missouri) Collection of Italian poetry, David Wilson’s Russian Literature collection, and the Prof. Dr. Gert von Gontard Library.
The exhibit on display on the second floor of the J.D. Williams Library shows the depth of these collections by highlighting some of the titles available in the library’s collection to support the curricular and research needs of the university community.
UNdata: A World of Information
The DESA Statistics Division has just launched a new internet-based data service for the global user community. It brings UN statistical databases within easy reach of users through a single entry point. Users can search and down load a variety of statistical resources of the UN system.“The UN-system has accumulated over the past 60 years an impressive amount of information. UNdata, developed by the Statistics Division of DESA, is a new powerful tool, which will bring this unique and authoritative set of data not only to the desks of decision makers and analysts, but also to journalists, to students and to all citizens of the world, ” says Sha Zukang, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs.
Since its foundation, the United Nations system has been collecting statistical information from member states on a variety of topics. The information thus collected constitutes a considerable information asset of the organization. However, these statistical data are often stored in proprietary databases, each with unique dissemination and access policies. As a result, users are often unaware of the full array of statistical information that the UN system has in its data libraries. The current arrangement also means that users are required to move from one database to another to access different types of information.
UNdata addresses this problem by pooling major UN databases and those of several international into one single internet environment. The innovative design allows a user to access a large number of UN databases either by browsing the data series or through a keyword search.
The project has been developed in partnership with Statistics Sweden, the Gapminder Foundation and with partial financial support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.
For more information: http://data.un.org
(source: United Nations DESA News, http://www.un.org/esa/desa/desaNews/v12n03/pubs.html#UNdata)