Some amazing image collections went online, for example American Memory, as "an effort to digitize and deliver electronically the distinctive, historical Americana holdings at Library of Congress, including photographs, manuscripts, rare books, maps, recorded sound, and moving pictures".
SPIRO (Slide and Photograph Image Retrieval Online) was the Visual Online Public Access Catalog (VOPAC) for UC (University of California) Berkeley's Architecture Slide Library (ASL) collection of 200,000 35mm slides.
IMAGES 1 was the database of the Pictorial Collection at the National Library of Australia, with 15,000 historical and contemporary images relating to Australia and its influence in the world, including paintings, drawings, rare prints, objects and photographs.
Librarians also helped patrons to surf on the web without being drowned, and to find the information they needed at a time search engines were less accurate. Library catalogs went online. Some patrons were already hoping that online catalogs would no longer only be a list of bibliographic records, and a prelude to a lengthy process to find the document itself if it didn't belong to their library - forms to fill out for interlibrary loan, fees to pay in some cases, and a long waiting period to finally get the book. They were hoping that, some day, bibliographic catalogs would give instant online access to the full text of books and journals.
= Gabriel in Europe
Gabriel - an acronym for "Gateway and Bridge to Europe's
National Libraries" - was launched as a trilingual (English,
French, German) website by the Conference of European National
Librarians (CENL).
As stated on the website in 1998: "Gabriel also recalls Gabriel Naudé, whose 'Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque' (Paris, 1627) is one of the earliest theoretical works about libraries in any European language and provides a blueprint for the great modern research library. The name Gabriel is common to many European languages and is derived from the Old Testament, where Gabriel appears as one of the archangels or heavenly messengers. He also appears in a similar role in the New Testament and the Qu'ran."
In 1998, 38 national libraries participated in Gabriel: the
ones of Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech
Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,
Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein,
Lithuania, Luxembourg, (Former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia,
Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia,
San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,
Turkey, United Kingdom, and Vatican City.
How did Gabriel begin? During the 1994 CENL meeting in Oslo, Norway, it was suggested that national libraries should set up a common electronic board with updates about their ongoing projects. Representatives from the national libraries of Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek), United Kingdom (British Library) and Finland (Helsinki University Library) met in March 1995 in The Hague, Netherlands, to launch the pilot Gabriel project. Three other national libraries joined the project, the ones of Germany (Deutsche Bibliothek), France (Bibliothèque nationale de France) and Poland (Biblioteka Narodowa). Gabriel would describe their services and collections, while seeking to attract other national libraries into the project. The original Gabriel website was launched in September 1995. It was maintained by the British Library Network Services and mirrored by the national libraries of Netherlands and Finland.
In November 1995, other national libraries were invited to submit entries describing their services and collections. At the same time, more and more national libraries were launching their own websites and online catalogs. Gabriel also became a common portal for those.