Beonline +

BEOnline began in 1996 as an experimental project designed to explore means of access and bibliographic control for remote Internet resources of interest to the practice or study of entrepreneurship and small business. Beginning in January, 2000, the BEOnline Project was renamed BEOnline Plus (BEOnline+) to reflect its expansion to include all disciplines and began to make use of OCLC' s Connexion program to catalog these resources. BEOnline is the first BEAT initiative that has been promoted from project status to be incorporated into the Library's general workflow.

At the Beonline+ site a researcher at LC user can learn that this project provides access to a wealth of resources such as:

• American Memory sites: which is a gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more than 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical collections.
• Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control:

  The aim of this conference was to bring together experts in the cataloging and metadata communities to discuss critical issues in the improvement of the discovery and access to Web resources within the framework of international standards. The focus of the conference was to promote an open discussion of the issues with primary attention on proposed solutions and action items.

  An ever-increasing amount of the world's cultural and intellectual output is now created in digital formats and does not exist in any physical form. Such materials are colloquially described as "born digital." This born digital realm includes open access materials on the World Wide Web.

• MINERVA (Mapping the Internet: Electronic Resources Virtual Archive), the Web Preservation Project, initiated a broad program to collect and preserve primary source materials. A multi-disciplinary team of LC staff representing the areas of cataloging, law, public services, and technology is studying methods to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to, and preserve these materials for future generations of researchers MINERVA's web site is http://lcweb.loc.gov/minerva/