UpDate - Vol. 13, No. 14, Page TT-1
December 9, 1993
TechTalk
A MARVELous trip to the Library of Congress 

     Imagine traveling to the Library of Congress (LC) without ever leaving
the comfort of your office or home. Or, being able to do preliminary
legwork before you visit the nation's capital.
     Sometime in the future, right?
     Wrong.
     You can do all these MARVELous things now on U-Discover!, using LC
MARVEL (the "Library of Congress Machine-Assisted Realization of the
Virtual Electronic Library").
     The Library of Congress designed LC MARVEL to serve its own staff as
well as to provide information access to the U.S. Congress and constituents
throughout the world. LC MARVEL combines the vast holdings of the Library
of Congress with resources available worldwide through Internet.
     To reach the Library of Congress, work your way through the following
U-Discover! menus:
     "Off-campus Information Services"
      "Other Gopher and Information Servers"
       "North America"
        "USA"
         "Washington, D.C."
          "Library of Congress (LC MARVEL)."

Library of Congress on-line catalog
     You can spend many hours browsing LC MARVEL or you can go directly to
the on-line catalog by selecting "Library of Congress Online Systems" from
the main menu. The Library of Congress Information System (LOCIS) lists
over 26 million items, ranging from books, to cartographic materials, to
sheet music. In LOCIS, you can also find information on materials housed in
other research libraries.
     Select "Connect to LOCIS" for an immediate connection to the Library
of Congress on-line catalog.
     You can search the catalog by subject, author, title, partial LC call
number or LC record number. After you conduct a search, you will receive a
brief description of the material you requested, including the LC call
number.
     If you get stuck at any point, type end to return to the main LC menu.

The Global Electronic Library
     In addition to the regular holdings of the Library of Congress, LC
MARVEL offers access to other resources, numbering in the millions. The
Global Electronic Library menu contains texts, searchable databases,
information services and electronic journals from throughout the world. For
example:
     * Dartmouth College now offers the full text of 33 of Shakespeare's
plays (Arthur Bullen's Stratford Town Edition).
     * The On-line Book Initiative provides 198 items-everything from the
1910 Harvard Classics' translation of Beowulf to Bill Clinton's inaugural
address.
     * CancerNet offers information for cancer patients.as a service of the
National Cancer Institute This information-written specifically for the
patients-is about current treatments for most cancers.
     A wide variety of government information is also online. For example,
you can find the following:
     * Congressional phone and fax numbers
     * Congressional committee assignments
     * Presidential documents
     * White House press releases
     * Supreme Court decisions
     * Federal Communications Commission (FCC) documents.

On-line exhibits
     If you have access to the proper equipment, you can also enjoy many LC
exhibits.
     To view U-Discover! images, you must be running a gopher client that
is capable of using a supplemental image viewer. These clients include
UGopher (DOS), HGopher (Windows), TurboGopher (Mac) or XGopher (UNIX),
along with appropriate image viewer. Suitable image viewers include CShow
(DOS) and xv (UNIX). Contact the Helpline at 831-6000 for more information.
     Current exhibit offerings include
     * "1492: An Ongoing Voyage,"
     * "Revelations from the Russian Archives,"
     * "Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library,"
     * "Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture," and
     * "Scrolls from the Dead Sea: The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern
           Scholarship."

Traveling to Washington?
     LC MARVEL provides information on just about everything you need to
know to get to the Library of Congress and to get around efficiently once
you are there. Not only can you find out hours for the main and special
reading rooms, but you can also find out where to stay near Capitol Hill
and how to get to the Library of Congress by plane, train, bus, taxi or
subway (and even how much you'll have to spend for each mode of
transportation in the city).