• Latin American Newspapers Collection
• Music from Many Lands
• Billy James Hargis Collection
• World Digital Library is Opened

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) has recently opened the first component of their World Newspaper Archive, the Latin American Collection.

The World Newspaper Archive is a collaborative effort of Center for Research Libraries institutions to preserve and provide persistent access to historical newspapers from around the globe. Initially the World Newspaper Archive will focus on news from Latin America and the Caribbean, but will eventually encompass the news output of other major regions, including Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Eastern and Central Europe.

Currently, the archive contains papers from Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Latin American Newspapers now contains more than 150,000 pages of content. New titles and issues will be released periodically on a rolling basis at a rate of nearly 100,000 pages per month, with an initial goal of one million pages by fall 2009. The collection will contain potentially more than 1.5 million pages by the end of the project. The project status report is available through the CRL web site.

UofA researchers should try out the Latin American Collection before July 1, 2009. Currently, access is free to all CRL members but after that date a subscription fee will be assessed. Please send your comments on this exciting new venture to Phil Jones, librarian for Latin American Studies.

The Center for Research Libraries is a centralized collection of scholarly research materials in all disciplines. CRL is an international not-for-profit consortium of colleges, universities and libraries that makes available scholarly research resources to users everywhere. CRL offers large collections of foreign dissertations, newspapers, and microfilm sets. Because the University Libraries have membership in CRL, University of Arkansas students, faculty, and staff may borrow these collections through Interlibrary Loan. Read more about CRL...

Alexander Street Press has made a number of streaming music collections freely available for 2009. Jump on over to these web sites and just try to keep your toes from tapping:

	During the week of May 12 -15, Alexander Street is offering open access to its new Jazz Music Library database. Jazz Music Library features more than 3,800 jazz artists and more than 18,000 jazz audio tracks in streaming audio, complete with quizzes and learning tools, and individual playlists. Enter the juried playlist competition—create a playlist that lots of other users would like, and you could win one of several prizes, including: a Flip video camera, jazz cds from Concord and Jazzology, discount coupons to Concord Jazz and Jazzology, and a one-year subscription to Jazz Music Library for the library of your choice (hint, hint)
	African American Song covers jazz, blues, gospel, and more. When complete, African American Music will offer 50,000 tracks of music, including recordings by premier artists such as Ma Rainey, Lead Belly, Mahalia Jackson, Alberta Hunter, Tampa Red, and William “Bunk” Johnson. At least 5,000 of the tracks are rare or never-before-published, and the other 45,000 are in-copyright and included through arrangement with distinguished labels. This release features some 16,000 tracks of great historical recordings from Document Records.
	American Song Online is a history database that will contain 50,000 tracks that allows people to hear and feel the music from America's past. The database will include songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. Included in the database are the songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests, and more. This release includes 1,064 albums, equaling 18,198 tracks.
	Contemporary World Music will contain 50,000 tracks that deliver the sounds of all regions from every continent. The database will contain important genres such as reggae, worldbeat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz, and other genres such as traditional music - Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku, and more. This release includes 1,082 albums, equaling 14,235 tracks.
	Smithsonian Global Sound is a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions. It includes more than 40,000 individual tracks of music, spoken word, and natural and human-made sounds drawn from published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of the legendary Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels.
	Music Library Online provides a cross-searchable platform for most of these Alexander Street Music databases, allowing one to search across more than 5,000 albums and 87,000 songs for particular artists, genres, geographical regions, time periods, and more.
	The Libraries have offered access to Classical Music Library for several years and it has proven a popular resource for research as well as leisure listening. Classical Music Library offers access to more than 5,000 tracks, with the ability to browse or search by composer, time period, type of composition, instrument, ensemble, conductor, or music label. Includes reference materials, such as program notes, biographies, portraits, glossaries, and historical essays.

Please send your comments on these Music resources to Lora Lennertz Jetton, librarian for Performing Arts.

Researchers studying the history of political and religious ideologies will get a fresh look at the origins of the American conservative movement and the Religious Right through studying the papers of conservative Tulsa minister Billy James Hargis (MC1412).

Hargis’s papers were recently opened for research at the special collections department of the University of Arkansas Libraries.  Hargis established his ministry, the Christian Crusade Against Communism, in 1950.  He waged his crusade through writings, public appearances, and television and radio programs.  Under girding his fight against communism were countless meticulously compiled files on pertinent subjects.  Over the course of a career lasting more than 50 years, he accumulated materials comprising more than 180 boxes.  These materials document both the mid-twentieth century climate in which the modern conservative movement formed and Hargis’s role in defining communism as a threat to America and Christianity, a tenet central to the conservative Christian movement that emerged as the Religious Right in the 1970s and 1980s.

An ultraconservative minister, Hargis’s career was full of controversy. In addition to his anti-communist views, he was a supporter of racial segregation and reputedly held anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic views. The earliest materials in his collection detail Hargis’s activities as a minister in Oklahoma and his affiliation with the International Council of Christian Churches.  In 1961 he made an important acquisition – the research and correspondence files of Allen Zoll and the National Council for American Education (NCAE).  The New York-based Zoll had a well-deserved reputation as an anti-Semite and formed the NCAE as an anti-communist watchdog organization.  Sympathetic to the anti-communist efforts of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy, the NCAE compiled files on alleged “reds” in educational institutions, agitating for their dismissal from academic positions.  The Zoll materials provided Hargis with a well-organized core upon which to build the Christian Crusade’s research files.

Hargis remained an active collector of materials during the period of 1960 to1980.  In addition to materials related to the McCarthy era, the papers include materials related to the battle between fundamentalist and liberal churches, especially Carl McIntire’s campaign against ecumenicalism as represented by the National Council of Churches.  Hargis’s opposition to desegregation on the basis that it was a “communist conspiracy” is well documented in the papers. The papers also include materials pertaining to the upheavals of the 1960s, radical student groups and the black nationalist movement. 

Hargis also fought against communism outside of the United States.  He advocated support for the white regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa, viewing the anti-apartheid movement as a subterfuge for spreading communist rule to Africa.  His interest in this conflict is reflected in the large quantity of related materials in the collection.

Hargis relied upon diverse materials from both sides of the political spectrum for his information. His papers include approximately 300 unique newspaper titles.  Right wing newspapers represent divergent groups featuring fundamentalist Christian, anti-labor, patriotic, neo-Nazi, and white supremacist viewpoints.  Similarly, left wing newspapers include titles with ecumenical, anti-war, pro-labor, socialist, communist, radical student and black nationalist viewpoints.  Of particular note is an almost complete run for the period from November 1958 to May 1973 of the New York-based communist newspaper The Worker, and its successor title The Daily World.

The World Digital Library (WDL) was recently launched. Sponsored by the UNESCO, the Library of Congress, and partner research and national libraries around the globe, the WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures from around the world on one site, in a variety of ways. These cultural treasures include, but are not limited to, manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings.

Items on the WDL may easily be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution, or can be located by an open-ended search, in several languages. Special features include interactive geographic clusters, a timeline, advanced image-viewing and interpretive capabilities. Item-level descriptions and interviews with curators about featured items provide additional information.

Navigation tools and content descriptions are provided in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Many more languages are represented in the actual books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and other primary materials, which are provided in their original languages.