n 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
Naude, whose 'Advis pour dresser une bibliotheque' (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