Project ATHENA debuts

Friday morning, Project Athena, the virtual catalog of selected Nashville Area Library Alliance (NALA) members, was unveiled to the Nashville community. Donna Nicely, Nashville Public Library, Chancellor Wyatt and Mayor Bredesen spoke; two library users demonstrated searches using Athena at a special press conference associated with a Library POWER Conference being held at the Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel.

Project Athena is now available for all Vanderbilt library users. A new link to NALA has been added on the Library's home page; on the NALA page, following a list of NALA members (with links to their libraries' home pages) is the START button for Project Athena. Athena uses the SiteSearch software from OCLC to search all of the Athena participants' catalogs simultaneously. Library users may request that their home library borrow books identified through Athena via interlibrary loan.

We invite all library staff to try it out.