THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A periodic report from

THE NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM

Library of Congress host to

worldwide law partners

The Library of Congress played host to a “miniUnited Nations” when representatives from 13

countries and five continents convened Sept.

25-27 to discuss their participation and cooperation in the Global Legal Information Network (GLIN).

GLIN is a network of legal databases housed at the

Library that offers users access to the laws of foreign

countries over the Internet.

“It is very gratifying to have so many enthusiastic and

active partners in GLIN,”

said Rubens Medina, the

Law Librarian and GLIN

Project Director in the United

States. “Much was accomplished during the three

days of meetings with current and prospective GLIN partners.”

The Library of Congress’s Law Library provides answers to questions from members of Congress and others who need to know how other nations have handled

legal issues. “There are tremendous similarities in the

way nations legislate,” said Dr. Medina. Congress looks

to other nations for inspiration in writing laws just as

other nations look to the United States as an example, he

added.

continued on page 2

Rather than having to rely on paper copies of legal

gazettes, which sometime arrive at the Law Library as

COUNTRIES WITH CURRENT

OR PENDING GLIN MEMBERSHIP

CURRENT MEMBERS ADMISSION PENDING

Argentina

Brazil

Hungary

Kuwait

Lithuania

Mauritania

Mexico

Poland

Ukraine

Bolivia

Czech Republic

Egypt

Nicaragua

Paraguay

Peru

Romania

Russia

Slovakia

South Korea

Uruguay

long as six months

after they have

been published,

when Congress

asks a question

LIBRARY RECEIVES GIFT

FROM BELL ATLANTIC

FRENCH CULTURE ON

VIEW IN WASHINGTON

AND ON-LINE

COPYRIGHT IN THE

DIGITAL AGE

2

4

6

OCTOBER 1995 • NO. 3

GLOBAL LEGAL

INFORMATION

NETWORK

about a foreign law, the Law Library’s legal specialists

can now provide a response within minutes from the

GLIN database.

To fulfill its congressional mission, the Law Library has

for many years collected official gazettes from throughout the world as a primary source of legal information

for its staff of more than 20 foreign legal specialists. Many

official gazettes are unindexed, making it difficult to retrieve the information published in them. Thus in the

1950s the Law Library began a card file that included summaries of the laws and regulations in the official gazettes.

Subject terms were assigned to the laws to enable retrieval

of the full text.

In 1976 the card file became an on-line file known as

LAWL in the Library’s mainframe databases and included

the Spanish-speaking nations of Latin America, plus Brazil and Haiti, Portugal and the former Portuguese and

INSIDE
THE NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM

2 OCTOBER 1995

Within minutes,

Members of

Congress can get

answers to

questions of

foreign law.

Worldwide law, from page 1 Public-private partnership flourishes

Bell Atlantic gives $1.5

million to NDL Program

According to Librarian of Congress

James H. Billington, contributions

from corporations, such as Bell Atlantic, are bringing the National Digital Library

(NDL) Program to life.

The $1.5 million gift to the Library presented

on Sept. 22 by Bell Atlantic President and CEO

Ray Smith “shows how something talked

about can be made real, namely the public-private partnerships” that so far have contributed

nearly $18 million for the NDL Project since it

began in October 1994.

“The Library wishes to thank Ray Smith and

Bell Atlantic for their generous support of the

Library and its education programs. Bell

Atlantic’s contribution will enable the Library

to continue to share its unique historical collections with the American people,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington.

During the news conference, held in the

Digital Library Visitors’ Center, Mr. Smith announced the beginning of the Bell Atlantic

Project CANDLE (Creating a National Digital

Library for Everyone), established to improve

American education through high technology.

“Project CANDLE reflects our determination

to add a dramatic dimension to learning, to

light a new pathway to knowledge and information,” said Mr. Smith.

Also participating in the news conference

were students and teachers from Washington,

D.C., and Bridgeville, Del. The teachers and

students, who are in the fifth, seventh and

eighth grades, demonstrated how they could

use the Library’s on-line primary source materials in their studies to help develop critical

thinking skills.

Spanish colonies in Africa. Several jurisdictions

were added later, including the Philippines and

Spain.

For additional information,

contact Rubens Medina ,

GLIN Project Director,

202/707-5065, rmed@loc.gov

continued on the next page

The GLIN Project is a natural outgrowth of

the earlier projects. Its goal is to encourage government agencies and other partners worldwide to exchange the full text of their primary

legal sources over the Internet. Members of the

GLIN network contribute to the GLIN database, then have electronic access not only to

the data they have input but to the entire GLIN

file. Currently the file includes data from 29

nations (the former LAWL file) as well as the

new data being contributed by GLIN partners.

GLIN Project Teams from nine countries received training in 1994 and 1995 and began the

GLIN project at their own workstations. Additional teams will be trained this November and

next February. It is expected that there will be

20 member countries by spring 1996.

The Law Library is negotiating a cooperative agreement with the National Aeronautics

and Space Administration to upgrade GLIN’s

technological capabilities using satellite technology. The Inter-American Development Bank

and the World Bank are sponsoring various

countries in their areas of interest, and the

Library’s Congressional Research Service

(CRS) Special Task Force has also supported

the project in various countries where CRS is

assisting the development of the parliamentary

libraries.

The Law Library hopes eventually to set up

“regional servers” to store data and train other

GLIN members. Dr. Medina sees the Law Library as becoming more of a “facilitator” in

GLIN on an equal basis with other nations that

provide training and assistance.

 Guy Lamolinara

 Public Affairs Office
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

OCTOBER 1995 3

Bell gift, from previous page Dr. Billington then explained how the NDL

Program has enabled the Library to reach a new

constituency: K-12 students, who are not served

in the reading rooms. A survey conducted during the Library’s American Memory pilot

project determined that K-12 students were the

heaviest users of the Library’s digitized materials.

American Memory was a five-year pilot, begun in fiscal 1990, in which the Library provided

digitized materials to 44 schools, colleges and

libraries across the country. The survey showed

that K-12 teachers used American Memory collections to teach the research process—how to

begin research, analyze results and communicate results to others. The students learned how

to integrate digitized resource materials with

those they obtained from traditional sources.

concludes on page 8

By the year 2000

the Library

hopes to have

raised

 $60 million

through

congressional

and private

funds.

Led by Martha Dexter, from the NDL

Program’s educational services team, the students and teachers took a “virtual” tour of

turn-of-the-century Washington using images

from the Detroit Publishing Co. Collection,

whose 25,000 images are now available on the

Library’s World Wide Web homepage (http://

www.loc.gov).

The students were shown, for example, a

view of the Capitol from East Capitol Street

with a streetcar riding down the middle. Ms.

Dexter invited them to take a copy of that

photo and go to East Capitol Street to see how

the neighborhood and everyday lives have

been changed by commercial and technological development.

Photo by Yusef El-Amin

Ray Smith,

president and

CEO of Bell

Atlantic, presents

a check to Dr.

Billington for the

National Digital

Library Program.
THE NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM

4 OCTOBER 1995

Vive la France

Beginning Sept. 8, visitors to the Library

could view treasures from the best of

French culture, courtesy of a collaboration between the Library and the Bibliothèque

nationale de France.

So too could people as far away as Hawaii

or even Hong Kong, thanks to the digitized

images and text from the exhibition that are

available on-line from the Library’s World Wide

Web homepage (Uniform Resource Locator:

http://www.loc.gov).

Since 1992 the Library has offered electronic

access to its major exhibitions on the Internet.

That year, two exhibitions went on-line: “Revelations from the Russian Archives,” featuring

FRENCH CULTURE

FROM

CHARLEMAGNE

TO CHARLES

formerly secret documents, and “1492: An Ongoing Voyage,” in celebration of the Columbus

quincentenary.

“Creating French Culture” documents 12

centuries in the development of the French nation. It is the second in a series of exhibitions

featuring the great libraries of the world. The

first brought treasures from the Vatican Library

to Washington, and in 1996, the Library of Congress will host the Dresden Library.

 “Creating French Culture” traces the relationship of culture and power in France from

the time of Charlemagne (742?-814) to Charles

de Gaulle (1890-1970). It is divided into four

sections, beginning with “Monarchs and Monasteries: Knowledge and Power in Medieval

France.” A psalter-hymnal of Saint-Germaindes-Prés (about mid-11th century) is included

in this section. According to the exhibition catalog, “Throughout the Middle Ages, the Parisian

abbey of Saint-Germain-des Prés was a wellknown and influential intellectual center from

its royal beginnings to the 18th century. Its distinction, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, stemmed from the brilliant work of its

monks.”

Section II, “The Path to Royal Absolutism:

The Renaissance and Early 17th Century,” relates to the political and cultural history of

France from 1498 to 1661, from Louis XII’s

ascendance to the throne through Louis XIV. It

was during this time that France looked to Italy

as an inspiration for its own flowering of the

arts.

One of the most beautiful pieces in this section of the exhibition, indeed in the entire exhibition, is “Julie’s Garland.” This 1641 painting

by Nicolas Robert for a book of verses inspired

by the loveliness of Lucine-Julie d’Angennes

was given to her by her future husband.

In Part III, “The Rise and Fall of the Absolute Monarchy: Grand Siècle and Enlightenment,” the exhibition takes a look at the second

half of the 17th century through the end of the

continued on the next page

From the French

collection: a

costume

drawing for the

Royal Ballet of

the Night, first

performed on

Feb. 23, 1653
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

OCTOBER 1995 5

following century. The plan of Louis XIV (1643-

1715) to dominate European culture showed

promise with the international recognition of

French creativity, which was largely fueled by

state patronage. The so-called Sun King oversaw the creation of academies in the arts and

sciences dedicated to reinforcing the “royal religion.”

A 1641 Selenographia, or description of the

moon, by astronomer Johannes Hevelius is the

first lunar atlas, and is included in Part III. The

author himself engraved the illustrations for

his text.

The final section, “From Empire to Democracy: The Independence of Culture,” covers the

period 1799 to the present. In it is a vividly colored excerpt from Panthéon égyptien (1815-

1825), by Jean-Francois Champollion, who is

credited with being the first to decipher hieroglyphics.

French culture from previous page This section also offers a humorous

illustration of the transmogrification of

King Louis-Philippe into a pear. The

pen-and-ink drawing by Charles

Philipon was made in 1831, while he was

on trial for publishing an antiroyal caricature.

According to Librarian of Congress James H.

Billington, the marriage of culture and power as

it exists in France “is difficult for Americans to

understand, born as we are under written documents that set ... bounds upon central authority

[and] that are skeptical and separatist with respect to power.”

Taking a tour of “Creating French Culture,”

either on-line or in person, should go a long way

toward lessening that difficulty.

“Creating French Culture” is on view in the Jefferson

Building of the Library Monday - Saturday 10 a.m. -

5 p.m. and Sunday 1 - 5 p.m. It will be “on view”

indefinitely on the Internet.

 Guy Lamolinara

 Public Affairs Office

Revelations from the Russian

Archives

Rome Reborn: The Vatican

Library and Renaissance Culture

1492: An Ongoing Voyage

Selections from the AfricanAmerican Mosaic

The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Ancient

Library of Qumran and Modern

Scholarship

❦

❦

❦

❦

❦ ❦

❦

In the Beginning Was the Word:

The Russian Church and Native

Alaskan Cultures

The Gettysburg Address: Words

That Shaped America

Temple of Liberty: Building the

Capitol for a New Nation

Declaring Independence: Drafting

the Documents

Creating French Culture: Treasures

from the Bibliothèque nationale de

France

❦

❦

❦

Exhibitions on-Line

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Go to: http//www.loc.gov

what’s

ON-LINE

KING LOUISPHILIPPE

AS A PEAR

(DETAIL)
THE NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM

6 OCTOBER 1995

The Library and copyright in the digital age

“Digitization and the Internet now make it possible to transmit electronic materials anytime, anywhere. Both hard and electronic copies can be made

at the press of a button. But intellectual property

rights of creators can be compromised by the technology that makes near-instantaneous transmission

of data possible. Those using this information may

not even know they are violating intellectual property rights.” (Library of Congress Information

Bulletin, June 12, 1995, p. 267).

Many of the works that could potentially be included in the Library’sNational Digital Library Program are

protected by the U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17,

U.S.C.) and/or by the copyright or neighboring-rights laws of other nations. Additionally,

the reproduction of some materials in the

Library’s collections may be restricted for other

reasons, including rights of privacy or publicity, or special terms in the Library’s gift or purchase agreements.

 Thus the Library’s initial digitization efforts

are focusing on works

in the public domain

or works for which

authorization has

been obtained from

rights holders. However, the Library also

recognizes that policies and procedures need

to be established for handling copyright issues

associated with its digital collections, such as

allowing use in accordance with the terms and

conditions of the rights holders.

Copyright Pilot Projects: The Library is

planning a small number of copyright pilots to

gain experience with possible solutions to these

problems. The goal is to help the Library and

other participants in the National Digital Library effort develop approaches for the inclusion of copyrighted content on their Internet

servers. The pilots will also address the problems associated with providing electronic access to older materials for which copyright status cannot be determined. In later phases, these

pilot projects will also experiment with permissions procedures and test automated systems

that protect the work while providing authorized access.

MESL Project: The Library is currently participating in a pilot called the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL), sponsored

by the Getty Art History Information Program

and MUSE Educational Media. In this project

seven museums and cultural institutions, including the Library (see box above), are permitting seven universities to have access to selected

digitized museum images and related documentary materials for a two-year test period

without royalty payments. (It should be noted

that the Library makes all its digitized materials available for free over the Internet.)

The purpose of the MESL project is to experiment with offering limited, protected access

to high-quality digital images provided by the

participating institutions for bona fide purposes, including classroom teaching, research,

analysis and other educational uses. One key

continued on the next page

MESL PARTICIPANTS

MUSEUMS UNIVERSITIES

American

University,

Washington, D.C.

Columbia

University, N.Y.

Cornell University,

Ithaca, N.Y.

University of Illinois

at Urbana–

Champaign

University of

Maryland

at College Park

University of

Michigan

University of

Virginia

Fowler Museum of

Cultural History

University of California,

Los Angeles, Calif.

George Eastman House,

Rochester, N.Y.

Harvard University Art

Museums,

Cambridge, Mass.

Library of Congress,

Washington, D.C.

Museum of Fine Arts,

Houston, Tex.

National Gallery of Art,

Washington, D.C.

National Museum of

American Art,

Washington, D.C.

COPYRIGHT

OFFICE

The Copyright

Office is working

to secure

intellectual

property rights

on the Information Superhighway.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

OCTOBER 1995 7

goal is to develop a model site license as a prototype that can be used across a broad spectrum by museums offering digitized images

and universities using those images for educational purposes with permission and, where

necessary, payment of royalties.

Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: In addition to other

initiatives related to copyright protection in the

digital age, Marybeth Peters, Register of Copyrights of the U.S. Copyright Office (Library of

Congress) actively contributed to a two-year

analysis and study by participating federal

agency experts, chaired by Bruce Lehman,

Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks, that

resulted in the recently issued federal “white

paper” report on Intellectual Property and the

National Information Infrastructure: The Report of

the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights.

Print copies of the report, which was issued on

Sept. 5, are available by calling the U.S. Patent

and Trademark Office at 703/305-8341. It is also

on the Internet at http://www.uspto.gov/web/

ipnii, or point a Gopher client to iitf.doc.gov,

or telnet to iitf.doc.gov (log in as gopher).

Fair Use: While “fair use” under the U.S.

Copyright Law (Section 107) permits users to

reproduce a copy of selected items for certain

limited purposes such as criticism, comment,

news reporting, teaching (including multiple

copies for classroom use), scholarship and research, further reproduction or transmission of

protected works requires permission of the

copyright owners and may require payment of

royalties to the rights holders even for some library and educational uses.

The Library of Congress has been participating in a yearlong series of meetings of rights

holders and representatives of education and

library organizations who are negotiating to

determine whether guidelines can be developed for the “fair use” of electronic works by

libraries and educational institutions. Such voluntary guidelines, if they can be agreed on,

Copyright from previous page would be similar to four sets of guidelines developed under the current Copyright Law,

which went into effect in 1978.

These include the guidelines for classroom

reproduction of books and periodicals; classroom use of music; the guidelines on photocopying and interlibrary loan arrangements of

the Commission on New Technological Uses of

Copyright; and guidelines for off-air recording

of broadcast programming for educational purposes.

CORDS—Electronic Copyright Registration and Deposit: Looking to the digital future,

the Library and the U.S. Copyright Office are

collaborating on development of the Copyright

Office Electronic Registration, Recordation and

Deposit System (CORDS). The new system will

allow applicants to submit copyright applications and deposit their works electronically.

Applicants will be able to prepare their applications and deposit materials in machine-readable formats, to “sign” their submissions using

public key/private key encryption technology

and to send applications, deposits and documents for recordation to the Copyright Office

over the Internet, using Privacy Enhanced Mail.

The Copyright Office will receive the digital

submissions through the Internet, verify that

each one is authentic and complete, debit fees

from the applicant’s Copyright Office deposit

account and send an electronic acknowledgment to the applicant. The Office’s digital repository will hold these digital copyright deposit works in a secure and verifiable manner.

Testing will begin in November 1995.

CORDS is also being designed to help rights

holders manage their copyrighted works more

effectively in the new digital environment by

permitting electronic registration and deposit

and by making ownership and licensing information more readily available to users seeking

to clear rights to copyrighted works.

 Mary Levering

 U.S. Copyright Office,

202/707-8350,

Levering@mail.loc.gov
THE NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM

8 OCTOBER 1995

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Printed on recycled paper.

60 percent reclaimed products.

FIRST CLASS MAIL

POSTAGE & FEES PAID

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

WASHINGTON, D.C.

PERMIT No. G-103

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

THE NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM

WASHINGTON, D.C. 20540-5250

OFFICIAL BUSINESS

PENALTY FOR PRIVATE USE $300

A PERIODIC REPORT FROM

THE NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM

Reports will be published about 12 times a

year, using gift funds. Comments and

suggestions are welcome.

Editorial Direction

Suzanne Thorin, Chief of Staff

Office of the Librarian

202/707-5220; SUTH@LOC.GOV

Laura Campbell, Director

National Digital Library Program

202/707-3300; LCAM@LOC.GOV

Managing Editor

Caroline Krewson

202/707-5220; CKRE@LOC.GOV

World Wide Web Access

URL: http://lcweb.loc.gov/ndl/per.html

■ Produced by Nancy Brooks Publishing Services ■

ISSN 1083-3978

THIS REPORT

IS ON

THE WEB

conclusion of Bell gift, from page 3

Rather than replace books, “electronic collections are bringing people back to books,” said

Dr. Billington. “And these digitized primary

source materials let students draw their own

conclusions about what they mean and their

importance.”

He then introduced Mr. Smith, who praised

the Library and Dr. Billington for sharing with

the “people of this country the finest collection

of knowledge ever known on this planet.”

The NDL Program is important to Bell Atlantic, said Mr. Smith, “because we are in the

business of communicating with people.”

“There are two steps to the process,” he said.

“Step 1, digitizing the collections and step 2,

making them available to absolutely everyone.

The gift today is for step 1, but we also want to

help with step 2. Our Project CANDLE will

work to provide more access to schools

throughout our territory.”

The gifts from Bell Atlantic and others have

enabled the Library to digitize more than

300,000 items. These include selected Civil War

photographs of Mathew Brady, notebooks of

Walt Whitman and early motion pictures, 1897-

1916. Ten of the Library’s major exhibitions are

also available (see box on page 5), as is the

Library’s on-line catalog and THOMAS, a database of congressional information.

The $1.5 million gift brings the Library of

Congress closer to achieving its goal of raising

$45 million in private funds for the NDL Program. The Library has asked Congress to appropriate $3 million over the next five fiscal

years, or $15 million total, for the NDL Program. By 2000 the Library hopes to have raised

$60 million through congressional and private

funds.

Guy Lamolinara

Public Affairs Office

Homepage URL:

http://lcweb.loc.gov

See report URL

in box below

E-mail feedback:

lcweb@loc.gov

NOTE:

THE NEXT ISSUE

WILL COMBINE

NOVEMBER AND

DECEMBER NEWS.