Coming soon: The Berg Fashion Library

This promises to be a wonderful resource for all costumers: opening in May, the Berg Fashion Library will give us access documents, books, research papers and an impressive database of pictures!

This is an excerpt from the website, specifically from the About the Berg Fashion Library section:

Berg Fashion Library - a fashion portal

Available from May 2010 on a subscription basis, the Berg Fashion Library is a cross-searchable online portal that incorporates a full range of resources essential for anyone working on dress or fashion from a broad range of disciplinary bases – anthropology and material culture, art history, theatre studies, history, sociology, cultural studies, human geography, folklore, and fashion studies.

Key content available at launch is outlined below.

• The Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion online – updated twice a year
• E-Book collection: full text of c.60 Berg fashion e-books with regular updates
• E-Journals: the Berg Fashion Library will also be fully cross-searchable with Berg fashion journals (Fashion Theory, Fashion Practice, and Textile) if your institution subscribes to them
• An extensive, colour, image bank with thumbnails that link through to enhanced content. This will include 1,600 images from the internationally renowned V&A collection and 2,000 images from the print encyclopedia
• Extra reference resources, such as an A-Z of Fashion and a Dictionary of Key Terms

Example from the Virtual Tour presentation

Other added-value resources for future stages may include the following:

• A regularly updated abstracting and indexing (A&I) database – covering journal articles, industry literature, books and images – this will enable users to locate relevant content with ease, and to gain access to the full text via Open URLs wherever possible
• 200 ‘position papers’ (1.7 million words) covering the state of the art in fashion research across all fields – from curation to business
• Specially-created materials through which key museums can be visited ‘virtually' – for example, videos of curators introducing major exhibitions and collections with links to exhibits

Another example from the Virtual Tour presentation

I can't wait to start using this resource. Just imagine the possibilities! I wonder how much the subscription will be? I hope it is affordable enough for private users. In the mean time, you can always take the Virtual Tour to get a taste of what it will be like.