In difficult financial times, libraries are always looking for less expensive ways to connect their communities to the array of resources available in the world, and the U.S. Virgin Islands will find it a little easier to do that wth a $30,000 grant announced Wednesday by the Division of Libraries, Archives and Museums.
The grant is from the 2011 Library Services Grant for the Pacific Territories, Freely Associated States, and the Virgin Islands.
“This grant will assist us providing great access to a vast array of literary resources for scholarly and educational research, provide learning tools for the youth and encourage literacy in our children through story time centers in each public library,” said Ingrid Bough, territorial director of Libraries, Archives and Museums.
The grant includes a two-year subscription to EBSCO’s "Master File," a database designed for public libraries with almost 2,000 full-text publications such as Sports Illustrated, Ebony, Jet, Hispanic, Time, Antiques, and Horticulture, with more than 107,000 primary source, and 1,000 reference books. Business Source Elite is a popular business research database, and it includes the full text for more than 1,000 journals. Newspaper Source provides cover-to-cover full text for 35 national and international newspapers including USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Times of London and The Toronto Star.
The database also contains selective full text for 375 regional newspapers and full text television and radio news transcripts from CBS News, CNN, CNN International, FOX News and National Public Radio, among others.
A special feature of the subscription includes Caribbean Search, which the library’s news release called the most comprehensive research database covering the Caribbean region. This database features more than 200,000 records with full text for more than 80 journals and magazines, more than 500 full-text books, and additional content ranging from economic and country reports to conference papers to Caribbean newspapers.
Also included in the grant is an extension of access to the online collection of eBooks by Tumble eBooks. TumbleBookLibrary is an online collection of TumbleBooks – animated, talking picture books from K-5 and 6-12, which teach kids the joy of reading.
Further information can be obtained by contactng Bough at 773-5715 or visiting the Virgin Islands Public Libraries website at www.virginislandspubliclibraries.org.
