New! Take a Tour of the Berg Fashion Library!
New! Encyclopedia selected as a Library Journal Reference Supplement 'Editor’s Pick' for New & Forthcoming Reference!
Berg Fashion Library - a fashion portal
Available from May 2010 on a subscription basis, the Berg Fashion Library is a cross-searchable online portal that incorporates a full range of resources essential for anyone working on dress or fashion from a broad range of disciplinary bases – anthropology and material culture, art history, theatre studies, history, sociology, cultural studies, human geography, folklore, and fashion studies.
Key content available at launch is outlined below.
- The Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion online – updated twice a year
- E-Book collection: full text of c.60 Berg fashion e-books with regular updates
- E-Journals: the Berg Fashion Library will also be fully cross-searchable with Berg fashion journals (Fashion Theory, Fashion Practice, and Textile) if your institution subscribes to them
- An extensive, colour, image bank with thumbnails that link through to enhanced content. This will include 1,600 images from the internationally renowned V&A collection and 2,000 images from the print encyclopedia
- Extra reference resources, such as an A-Z of Fashion and a Dictionary of Key Terms
Other added-value resources for future stages may include the following:
- A regularly updated abstracting and indexing (A&I) database – covering journal articles, industry literature, books and images – this will enable users to locate relevant content with ease, and to gain access to the full text via Open URLs wherever possible
- 200 ‘position papers’ (1.7 million words) covering the state of the art in fashion research across all fields – from curation to business
- Specially-created materials through which key museums can be visited ‘virtually' – for example, videos of curators introducing major exhibitions and collections with links to exhibits
Key Features
Powerful searching
The Berg Fashion Library will incorporate both quick and advanced search functionality. Users will be able to rapidly access the content via a single-term quick search, or fine-tune their search for more targeted results using the BFL’s sophisticated advanced searching.
Specially-created taxonomy
Central to the Berg Fashion Library will be its taxonomy, a purpose-built classification system for the study of dress that will – through search and browse tools – guide users to the information they need, and help focus and refine search results.
Cross-referencing and linking through OpenURL and DOIs
The Berg Fashion Library will make full use of cross-referencing both within the resource, and externally (via OpenURLs). Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) will be available at book, chapter, article, and entry level, ensuring content can be reliably located. Interfaces with citation management tools will mean the Berg Fashion Library content can be referenced accurately and with ease.
Social networking tools
The Berg Fashion Library will make it easy to interface with social networking tools so that items within the portal can be shared by means of users’ tags and links.
COUNTER compliant usage statistics and library branding
The Berg Fashion Library will offer usage statistics conforming to the latest version of the COUNTER specification. Libraries will be able to incorporate their own branding for users within the institution.