No. 3 January 2004

A Very Happy New Year to all users of and contributors to the Caribbean Digital Library from the staff at the Caribbean Documentation Centre. To those of you who contributed so regularly to CDL during 2003 we say a special Thank You.

The Caribbean Digital Library faced a fairly challenging year but for all that, it continued to expand, albeit slowly. Several inactive links were removed. By the end of 2003 there was a net addition of some two hundred and thirty-five (235) documents.

During 2003 the CDL was plagued with recurrent system failures, but most of these have now been corrected thanks to a lot of hard work by our Systems Unit. You will notice the changes that were introduced. These have resulted in a faster and more efficient access to the information.

During December 2003, librarians from around the region who attended a CDS ISIS workshop sponsored by ECLAC and organized in collaboration with the National Library and Information System Authority of Trinidad and Tobago (NALIS). Participants came from Anguilla, Nevis, Dominica, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Suriname, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago. They used the opportunity to visit the Caribbean Documentation Centre at ECLAC and become familiar with the Caribbean Digital Library. There was a lot of enthusiasm for the CDL and there has since been some follow up and some very positive feedback.

The annual ACURIL conference takes place in Port of Spain, Trinidad during the last week of May 2004. The Caribbean Digital Library will be the subject of one of the concurrent workshops. This workshop will be held on the Thursday morning of the conference at the ECLAC offices, five minutes away from the Trinidad Hilton, the conference hotel. We look forward to seeing you there.

So as we look ahead to another exciting year we ask for your continuing support and participation.

As December 31 2003, the CDL provided links to 694 web-based documents distributed among the 27 broad subject headings as follows.

The table below gives an indication of the geographic distribution of documents in the CDL.

Persons and institutions interested in being a part of the CDL Consortium should indicate their interest by writing Sandra John, Chief, Caribbean Documentation Centre, United Nations ECLAC at the following address: sjohn@eclacpos.org .

Caribbean Documentation Centre

January 2004