The Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the most comprehensive museum library in the world, constantly is finding ways to improve our access to information in subjects related to the Smithsonian's interests. Smithsonian Institution Libraries has been part of the founding phase of the OCLC's Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) project and continues to use the product to assist in providing for patrons information that is needed.
CORC, a Web-based service, is being used by librarians around the world to create a database of high quality, library-selected Web sites. It assists librarians in leveraging their organizing, selecting, describing and cataloging efforts for electronic resources through cooperative pooling.
Ongoing projects included the cross-institutional archival digitization project "Sewing Machines: Historical Trade Literature in Smithsonian Institution Collections." SIL has also been able to use the metadata harvesting features, the pathfinder tool set, and the cataloging interface to support our researchers' requirements for an information portal to ongoing research needs.