dec11b.indd December 2011 701 C&RL News Joni R. Roberts is associate university librarian for public services and collection development at Willamette University, e-mail: jroberts@willamette.edu, and Carol A. Drost is associate university librarian for technical services at Willamette University, e-mail: cdrost@ willamette.edu I n t e r n e t R e v i e w sJoni R. Roberts and Carol A. Drost Business and Human R ights Resource Centre. Access: http://www.business -humanrights.org/. Business and Human Rights Resource Cen- tre is a source of news and reports about the positive and negative impacts that companies have on human rights worldwide. The site, which is updated hourly, provides thousands of links to published and unpublished materi- als from governmental and nongovernmental organizations, corporations, legal organiza- tions, the media, and other entities. Resource Centre, an independent non- profit group runs the site. One of their stated purposes is “to encourage companies to respect human rights, avoid harm to people, and maximize their positive contribution.” To this end, the site tracks 5,000 companies across the globe and provides information on their human rights conduct. From the homepage, site visitors can search by company, country, and issues, which are topics grouped around broad subject areas such as discrimination, environment, health, and abuses. Within these broad areas, it is possible to find information on specific topics like migrant workers, human trafficking, access to water, and child labor. A key feature of the site is the inclusion of the text of international human rights standards and comments. An advanced search option permits searching by topic, date, and language. The search results page is a list of resources with lengthy abstracts. Each resource listed has a green or red dot indicating a good link (green) or a broken link (red). Although there are few broken links, one wishes they could be removed altogether. Articles and reports are primarily in Eng- lish, Spanish, and French, but a few articles are available in Portuguese and German. The Web site producers indicate that they are currently expanding coverage to other languages. Business and Human Rights Resource Centre fulfills one of the Resource Centre’s purposes “to provide easy one stop access to information for companies, non-governmen- tal organizations, and others.” The site tries to be fair and objective by giving corporations accused of having a negative human rights impact a chance to respond to allegations. The site will be useful to anyone inter- ested in the influence of corporate activities on humans and the environment. Students writing term papers and interested laypersons will find the site beneficial. The site may also serve as a tool to motivate companies to be accountable in their dealings with humans and with the environment.—Maureen James, University of Arkansas-Little Rock, mejames@ ualr.edu Mountain West Digital Library. Access: www. mwdl.org. The Utah Academic Library Consortium has created a comprehensive portal for users interested in the history of the mountain- western region of the United States. The Mountain West Digital Library (MWDL) was created by the consortium to be a portal to a wide range of digital resources from various universities, public libraries, museums, and historical societies located throughout the American West. Specifically, the resources within the digi- tal library represent rare and unique items from Utah, Idaho, Nevada, and Hawaii. These items come in various formats including text, image, video, audio, and EAD files. This digital library is a central search portal that provides access to 300,000 resources in more than 330 collections from institutions as far west as Brigham Young University-Hawaii. The site’s homepage design is easy to navigate and offers a variety of features for C&RL News December 2011 702 the user. For example, the site has a naviga- tion bar with links to several useful pages including “Search,” “DCC Portal,” “About,” “News Blog,” and “Contact.” The search box provides an expedient access point to all the harvested text, image, video, and audio files located within the CONTENTdm-based digital collections of the site’s various partners. For example, when “railroads” was typed in the search box, there were 3,138 items listed at the time of this review. They include not only digitized maps from the University of Nevada-Reno, but also the EAD files for the manuscript collections from the University of Utah. Another useful feature on the MWDL site is the “Featured Collections” section, which is located within the third column of the homepage. This area highlights some of the digital collections created by the various institutions located throughout the mountain- west region of the United States. Currently, there are several featured collections that include “Nevada in Maps” from the Univer- sity of Nevada-Reno; “Western Soundscape Archive” from the University of Utah; and the “Intermountain Indian School” from Utah State University. The “Featured Collections” section is a wonderful way for the user to sample some of the diverse digital collections within the MWDL site. The MWDL portal will grow over time as its partners continue to digitize more of their collections. Therefore, this portal will continue to be an essential resource for any student of the American West.—Tom Som- mer, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, thomas. sommer@unlv.edu The European Library. Access: http://www. theeuropeanlibrary.org/. The European Library is a collabora- tive project of the Conference of European National Libraries, which provides free in- ternational online access to holdings, maps, photographs, music, and digitized materials from 48 national libraries in Europe. The Web site estimates that it can search between 100 to 150 million items in 35 languages. Searching the European Library is simple, and starts with the basic search box promi- nently displayed on the Web site’s homepage. The default search is “catalogues from na- tional libraries,” which conducts a federated search across all catalogs, with the option to search in any of the 35 languages found in the European Library’s holdings. A sample search for the “Spanish inquisition” in English brings a results page that lists all the national libraries (as well as a number of additional collections) on the left, with the number of items returned. An icon with the universal “?” sign beside the search box opens up a guide to using the search feature. In addition to the default search, you can also select various other options. A search for “Van Gogh” across “digital collections,” “images,” and “manuscripts” brings many results, including 1,209 results from the Van Gogh Museum’s excellent online “Vincent Van Gogh: letters, art, and context” collec- tion, which features scanned letters, books, and other primary materials. This type of federated searching is where the European Library excels—digging into a wide range for cultural collections to provide access to such treasures as the Van Gogh museum. As might be expected, a federated search across collections in 35 languages can have some limitations. Like many federated search- es, it can be a bit slow at times. Language differences can also limit results - searching for “Spanish Inquisition” brings far fewer re- sults from the National Library of Spain than a search for “Inquisición española.” Users should keep this in mind when exploring the resources in the European Library’s col- lections. The Web site also includes several fine on- line exhibitions, including “Reading Europe,” an online collection of 1,000 scanned books. There are links to each of the libraries in the European Library, and you can limit your search to libraries in one country. In short, this site provides plenty of ways to explore the national libraries of Europe, and is well worth your time.—Gene Hyde, Radford Uni- versity, wehyde@radford.edu