THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A periodic report from

THE NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995 • NO. 4

A National Digital Library:

a shared goal

Creating a National Digital Library will require

the cooperation of libraries, institutions and

business nationwide. Thus the Library of

Congress’s National Digital Library (NDL)

Program is not working alone. It is collaborating with

the public and private sector on a wide variety of

projects.

On May 1, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington,

the Commission on Preservation and Access and officials from 14 other research libraries and archives signed

the National Digital Library Federation Agreement.

Members hope to digitize materials for students, scholars and citizens everywhere.

With funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the

NDL Program is working with end users and conferring with teachers and students to determine the materials they would find most useful in electronic format

(see story page 3). The Library is working with National

Science Foundation recipient institutions as they conduct research on digital libraries. Collaborations with

the University of Michigan for user interface and the

University of California at Santa Barbara for Geographic

Information Systems are two examples of such efforts.

the National Archives and the National Library of Medicine are digitizing materials documenting the expansion

of the American West.

The Library of Congress is participating in ventures to

test licensing for digitized works in the research and education communities. One of these is the two-year museum

educational site licensing project sponsored by the Getty

Art History Information Program. Seven institutions are

providing digital collections electronically to seven universities for use on campuses. The goal of the project is to

test the legal and technical procedures required to allow

educational use of museum collections while developing

model licensing agreements.

In cooperation with the Association of American Publishers, the Library hopes to select and make available

electronically copyrighted multimedia American history

materials under collective licensing agreements to schools

and libraries.

The Library of Congress is reaching out to the Global

Information Society. Representing libraries in the United

States, the Library of Congress participated in the G-7

working group on Electronic Libraries at the Bibliothèque

Nationale de France on May 29, 1995. One of the 11 pilot

projects endorsed by the seven nations—United States,

Japan, Germany, Italy, France, Great Britain, Canada—is

the creation of a global network of electronic libraries.

 —Suzanne Thorin,

Chief of Staff and

Coordinator of

the National Digital Library Program,

and Laura Campbell,

Director of the NDL Program

Cornell University and the University of Michigan are

cooperating on a project to digitize Civil War documents,

INSIDE

See box on page 2 for descriptions of some of the tasks involved in the Library of Congress NDL Program and who

is doing them.

ENHANCEMENTS TO

THOMAS

EDUCATORS FORUM—

TEACHERS & EDUCATORS

MEET

AMERICAN MEMORY PILOT

PROGRAM EVALUATED

2

3

5

and the National

Agricultural Library, the Smithsonian Institution,
THE NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM

2 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995

oversee collection development and production,

serving as team leaders and as brokers among the

division and automation staff and contractors.

Infrastructure Staff. Infrastructure staff are primarily information systems experts who build and

maintain the automated systems that store and

provide access to the digital collections. These are

the staff who must unscramble and make useful

the world of the Internet.

Educational Services Staff. The educational

services staff focus on educational outreach for the

use of the historical collections by the K–12 community. They research user needs, talk to the education communities, evaluate technologies for delivery of digitized materials, coordinate collection

selection and develop and supervise contracts.

HOW DO

YOU STAFF

THE HUGE

TASK OF

DIGITIZING A

CULTURE

BY THE YEAR

2000?

The National Digital Library (NDL) Program is

hiring new staff to support digitizing and making available a substantial body of material from

the Library’s incomparable collections.

Curatorial Staff. Staff assigned to the curatorial divisions prepare and process materials to be

digitized. Curatorial staff also perform on-site digitization—materials that include rare and fragile

items such as early drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address.

Core Staff. NDL Program core staff work with

the Library’s divisions to prepare and describe the

collections, verify the status of copyright and seek

permission for use of the materials when appropriate, digitize the materials and verify that they

adhere to the Library of Congress’s standards of

quality. Digital conversion specialists in the central office provide project coordination and technical oversight. The more experienced specialists

UNIFORM

RESOURCE

LOCATOR:

http://thomas.loc.gov

Continued enhancement

Begun as an initiative of the leadership

of the 104th Congress, THOMAS, the

Library’s legislative information service,

has been an unqualified success since its introduction on Jan. 5, 1995. Since then, more than

10 million transactions have been logged,

Encouraged by users’ strong interest to read

both the Congressional Record and the full text

of bills introduced by the 103rd and 104th Congresses, the Library has continued to enhance

THOMAS by adding new files and features.

In September 1995, for example, the Bill Digest was added to THOMAS to facilitate

searches pertaining to legislation introduced in

the 104th Congress. The Library has produced

this guide to legislation since 1936, in printed

form. Approximately 20 years ago the Library

made it available on-line. The THOMAS version of the Bill Digest goes a step further by providing electronic links to the full text of the bill.

Similarly, the Congressional Record Index was

added to THOMAS to ease searches of the Congressional Record. Like the Bill Digest file, it also

provides links to the full text of the document.

 —Laura Campbell,

 Director of the National Digital Library Program

 202/707-3300, lcam@loc.gov

Users may click on specific page numbers to

be connected to the corresponding pages within

the Record.

“Hot Legislation” files were also recently

added to THOMAS. As the name implies, these

files track major bills receiving floor action in

the 104th Congress, as selected by legislative

analysts in the Library’s Congressional Research Service. These “hot bills” may be

searched by topic, popular or short title, or bill

number/type. Major legislation that has been

enacted into law or is under consideration during the current week is also listed accordingly.

The “Hot Legislation” files also contain links

to the Bill Digest, allowing users to narrow their

search to the legislation they wish to view in

its entirety. They may then retrieve the full text

of these documents.

The success of THOMAS will enable the Library to make further improvements. Discussions are under way with congressional oversight committees to add other features that will

make the system even more useful to the

American public.

 —Audrey Fischer,

 Information Technology Services

For additional information, contact

Judy Stork, ITS, 202/707-9739,

jsto@loc.gov
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995 3

Educators Forum feeds

Library effort to reach

K–12 scholars

As reported in our September issue, the Library

received a $3 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg

Foundation to help identify K-–12 instructional uses

of digital versions of primary source materials. With

part of the grant, the Library awarded a $615,000

contract to the Center for Children and Technology

(CCT), a division of the Education Development

Center, an education consulting firm in New York

City. Teachers and librarians from around the country came together at CCT’s Educators Forum, where

their ideas and views were aired.

T wenty-four creative teachers and school

librarians from across the country

brainstormed about how to make the

Library’s historical collections of primary

source material more accessible to K–12 educators during an Educators Forum at the Library of Congress.

Brimming with ideas, they shared their insights on the use of digitized Library collections

by a group that has historically been denied

access to the Library’s 22 reading rooms—those

under the age of 18.

But that is changing as the Library’s National

Digital Library Program, in collaboration with

other major research institutions, digitizes 5

million items and places them on the Internet

by the year 2000. Although the reading rooms

will continue to be reserved for researchers over

high school age, many of the Library’s core historical American collections will be available

on the Internet to everyone.

The majority of the instructors participating

in the forum were experienced users of technology in the classroom. The forum addressed

such issues as the types of primary source materials appropriate for classroom use, how

teachers use primary sources, their accessibility and how the Library’s archival collections

could be most effectively packaged and delivered to schools.

“The teachers’ creativity in viewing the historical materials, combined with their knowledge of curriculum and classroom dynamics,

provided stimulating discussion,” said Martha

Dexter of the National Digital Library Program.

The teachers and school library media specialists said they were eager for access to digital versions of documents such as papers of the

Founding Fathers, famous speeches, ship manifest lists, historical photographs of people and

places, maps, sound recordings, films and

drawings. The teachers stressed the need for

primary source documents, saying they receive

scant attention in textbooks. A computerized

facsimile version of a document, for example,

would allow students to look at the original lettering in order to develop critical thinking skills,

the teachers said.

“I had two fifth-graders reading [a copy of

the original] Constitution and they got very

excited about decoding the S’s,” then written

like lower-case F’s in some instances, said

Minna Novick, a Chicago-area elementary

school teacher. She plans to use the Library’s

digitized version of a draft of the Declaration

of Independence in classrooms this year.

Kim Ford, a junior high school English

teacher and media specialist from Memphis,

said that period photographs would help her

inner-city students visualize the past. Social

studies teacher Agnes Dunn from rural

Fredericksburg, Va., concurred. “The way you

teach critical thinking is to present students

with source material and then let them think,”

she said.

Dr. James

Billington,

Librarian of

Congress, asked

Forum educators

and librarians for

advice on

digitizing the

materials they

will use.

Photo by Jim Higgins

continued on the next page
THE NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM

4 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995

Educators from previous page of historical inquiry, that thought was put to rest

during the course of this forum.”

 On the second day of the forum, the teachers had a tour of the three Library buildings,

followed by a demonstration by Ms. Veccia of

several already-digitized collections.

Shown some of the 25,000 turn-of-century

photographs available, the teachers suggested

the following classroom uses: create a period

play with appropriate sets and costumes, discuss the change from a rural to an industrial

economy and pretend the photographs were

postcards and write on the back as if they had

“been there, done that,” one teacher said.

When they viewed political cartoons about

Congress drawn between 1770 and 1981, the

teachers suggested caption writing, role playing and incorporating the caricature in a comic

strip drawn by the students. High school teachers said they would use the cartoons as a jumping-off point to discuss stereotypes and regional

perspectives.

The high school teachers also expressed interest in World War II propaganda posters from

the Office of War Information. They said they

could use a poster of Rosie the Riveter to compare women’s roles of the 1940s with those of

the 1950s.

When they saw broadsides from the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they suggested

The participants also expressed frustrations

in their attempts to introduce primary sources

to their students. For example, teachers said

they did not have enough time to identify and

locate age-appropriate and subject-relevant primary sources. Others expressed concern that

prepackaged primary sources are biased and

tend to focus students’ engagement with the

material too narrowly.

Forum participants stressed that although

parts of the Library’s digital historical collections are currently available for free on the

Internet via the World Wide Web (Uniform Resource Locator: http://www.loc.gov), they

should also be made available on CD-ROM, videodisk and videotape.

During the next five months, CCT will make

recommendations to the Library about how its

historical collections can be made more accessible and useful to the K–12 educational community. These recommendations will evolve

from working with practicing teachers, who,

like those who attended the Educators Forum,

regularly use primary sources to teach history,

social studies, geography and language arts.

 “It was remarkable to watch these teachers

at work,” said Susan Veccia of the National Digital Library Program. “If there ever was any

doubt that primary sources are the foundation continued on the next page

Teachers had no

shortage of ideas

for using a

digital library.

Brainstorming in

the foreground

are Kirk

Ankeney, left, of

San Francisco,

and Gloria Sesso,

of Long Island,

both U.S. history

teachers.

Photo by Jim Higgins
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995 5

Educators from previous page But Ms. Veccia said the Library provides the

collections “as is”: a computer facsimile accompanied by detailed cataloging entries. “This is

why we call it plain vanilla,” Ms. Veccia said in

reference to the Library’s policy of making primary sources available with no frills or added

value. “One of the things we found when we

took them around the country was the teachers

really liked it because they could send their students out to do the research.”

Some of the creative teachers had already

turned “plain vanilla” into a learning tool. They

said they could ask the students three questions:

who collected the items, why they are important and where the originals are kept. The teachers said that coming up with the three answers

(librarians; because they were judged to be of

historic importance; at the Library of Congress)

would help their students start to develop critical thinking skills.

 —Guy Lamolinara and Yvonne French,

 Public Affairs Office

American Memory

pilot—seed of a universally available Library

The American Memory pilot was the seed

that eventually grew into the National

Digital Library Program, with its emphasis on digitizing the Library of Congress’s historical collections—the “nation’s memory.”

The pilot, which ran from 1990 to 1995, identified the audiences for digital collections, established technical procedures, wrestled with

intellectual property issues, demonstrated options for distribution and began institutionalizing a digital effort at the Library of Congress.

The American Memory pilot identified multiple audiences for digital collections in a special survey, an end-user evaluation and in thousands of conversations, letters and encounters

with visitors. In 1989, to help launch the project,

The success of

the pilot has

helped the

Library raise

private funds

and win

congressional

support to

continue and

expand the

effort.

a consultant surveyed 101 members of the Association of Research Libraries and the 51 State Library agencies. The survey disclosed a genuine

appetite for on-line collections, especially in research libraries serving higher education.

The most thorough audience appraisal resulted from an end-user evaluation conducted

in 1992–1993. Forty-four school, college and university, and state and public libraries were provided with a dozen American Memory collections on CD-ROMs and videodisks. Participating library staff, teachers, students and the public were polled about which digitized materials

they had used and how well the delivery systems worked.

A complete report on the end-user evaluation of the

American Memory pilot is available on-line from the

Library of Congress. The World Wide Web version may

be accessed at

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/usereval.html

For file transfer protocol, use

ftp://ftp.loc.gov/pub/american.memory/user.eval

End-user evaluation

continued on the next page

acting out a constitutional convention or designing a constitution for a nation or their school

and comparing it to that of the Founding Fathers.

The teachers asked that the documents be

comparatively scaled on the computer screen

by showing a picture of a person holding them

so the students could determine actual sizes.

 A refrain among the teachers as they were

given an introduction to the riches of the

Library’s collections was that they wished they

could go back to school themselves. As the

source materials appeared on the computer

screen, they often asked for links to related

materials. For example, when they looked at a

photograph of a one-room schoolhouse, they

wanted to be able to click on an icon that would

give a recorded narrative of what it was like in

school in the early 19th century.
THE NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM

6 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995

Memory from previous page Electronic collections were provided to the

44 end-user evaluation sites from 1991 to 1994

on a set of CD-ROM disks, some of which were

supplemented by videodisks that contained

still- and moving-image materials. Disks were

produced for IBM-compatible (DOS and Windows) and Apple Macintosh computers. One

CD-ROM employed the experimental “XA” format as a means to present sound recordings.

The production of CD-ROMs was more challenging than expected. For example, disk-production contractors had difficulty identifying

software that could search texts or bibliographic

records and also display document facsimiles.

The CD-ROMs produced in 1992 had to be reengineered in 1993 or 1994 when newer versions

of the underlying operating-system software

were introduced.

Meanwhile, two private-sector CD-ROMs

resulted from American Memory’s distribution

demonstration projects. Stokes Imaging of Austin, Texas, has published a Civil War photographs CD-ROM and World Library Inc. will

publish a CD-ROM with the full texts and illustrations of 192 books about California history.

Two other public-private demonstration

projects involve companies that are experimenting with on-line delivery: Bell Atlantic, a regional telephone company, and Jones Intercable,

a television cable company. In both cases, the

companies have a special interest in providing

access to school communities and are using

American Memory collections in test sites: Bell

Atlantic in Union City, N.J., and Jones Intercable

in Alexandria, Va.; Littleton, Colo.; and

Palmdale, Calif. The technologies for these two

on-line demonstrations are still evolving.

American Memory’s choices of technology

reflected the central feature of the on-line environment: digital diversity. In order to reproduce

collections of books, pamphlets, motion pictures, manuscripts and sound recordings, the

project created a wide array of digital entities:

bi-tonal document images, grayscale and color

pictorial images, digital video and audio, and

searchable texts. To provide access to the reproductions, the project developed a range of deThe evaluation indicated continued interest

by institutions of higher education as well as

public libraries. The surprising finding, however, was the strong showing of enthusiasm in

schools, especially at the secondary level.

The evaluation team learned that recent reforms in education had created a need for primary-source historical materials, such as those

in the Library’s incomparable collections.

Teachers welcomed digitized collections to aid

in the development of critical thinking skills;

school librarians used the electronic resource

to inculcate research skills.

The corollary to audience, of course, is distribution. The American Memory pilot explored

this topic through CD-ROM production for the

end-user evaluation, public-private demonstration projects and in the placement of selected

collections on the Internet’s World Wide Web.

Among treasures

from the American Memory pilot

and now on-line

through the

Internet is the

Walt Whitman

collection, which

includes this

photograph from

sometime

between 1873 and

1883. Whitman

posed with his

cardboard moth

(also in the

collection—see

page 8), which

was among four

recently recovered Whitman

notebooks.

continued on the next page

Reproduced from the collections

of the Library of Congress
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995 7

The greatest

challenge in the

digitization of

historical collections is finding

appropriate ways

to handle rare

manuscripts, glass

plate negatives,

bound books and

other fragile

originals.

esting mix of rights issues, including what most

people perceive as the “copyright archetype,”

an item for which the identity of the copyright

owner is known. In one instance, the American Memory team sought and received permission from a dozen publishers and artists to reproduce 200 political cartoons on an evaluation

CD-ROM. In another case, the team searched

about 500 copyright records for a group of photographs and determined that none of the original copyright registrations had been renewed,

thus permitting the Library to provide electronic access to the collection.

Issues other than known-owner copyright,

however, are more frequent and challenging in

archival collections. In the case of a group of

folk music recordings, for example, the team

faced not only the question of identifying composers, but also accommodating the rights of

the song collector and the folk performers. (This

complex investigation is still under way.) Meanwhile, privacy and publicity rights emerged in

the case of photographs. One collection, for

example, included portraits of celebrities. The

pilot team began to establish procedures for

cases such as these, but many details remain

unresolved.

The selection of collections to digitize was

strongly influenced by the elements described

above. Considerations of audience, including

a desire to serve the nation’s schools, for example, guided the Library to collections that

illuminate American culture and history. The

evaluation indicated that content that relates

to school curricula has high value. In addition,

emphasis was given to the Library’s unique

special-collections holdings.

 Another important consideration in selection is the “fit” of certain formats to technology, meaning both the technology to digitize

and the technology for distribution. Photographs and other pictorial materials, manuscripts and printed matter were favored, because their methods for capture and digital formats are well established. In contrast, the sheer

size of the digital file required to contain a legible image weighed against the selection of

maps for the pilot.

scriptive elements: bibliographic records, finding aids, introductory texts and programs and

searchable full texts.

The reproductions were produced with a

variety of tools: scanners, digital cameras, audio and video digitizers and human labor for

rekeying and encoding texts. American

Memory employed national-standard and industry-standard formats for many digital reproductions, for example, texts encoded with

Standard Generalized Markup Language

(SGML) and images stored in Tagged Image

File Format (TIFF) files or compressed with the

Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) algorithm. In other cases—notably for moving images and recorded sound—the lack of widespread formats forced the pilot program to use

ad hoc solutions.

Of particular note is the Library’s development of an SGML markup scheme for historical texts and documents. The scheme conforms

to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, an international-standards effort promulgated by humanities scholars in a number of

universities and other institutions.

The greatest challenge in the digitization of

historical collections is finding appropriate

ways to handle rare manuscripts, glass plate

negatives, bound books and other fragile originals. During the pilot, specialist contractors

brought their equipment to the Library and

digitized the physical artifacts under the watchful eyes of Library staff members.

The cataloging and other descriptive data for

access were created by Library staff. The participating divisions made a special effort to find

efficient means to produce these data, often

using a new PC-based cataloging software introduced to the Library by American Memory

with the cooperation of the Library’s Automation Planning and Liaison Office (APLO). For

two collections, access to the items was furnished by a set of hierarchical menus, a roughand-ready precursor to the on-line finding aids

now being developed by the National Digital

Library Program.

concludes on page 8

The collections that were digitized during

the American Memory pilot provided an inter-
THE NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM

8 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Printed on recycled paper.

60 percent reclaimed products.

FIRST CLASS MAIL

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WASHINGTON, D.C.

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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

EXTERIOR

THIS REPORT

IS ON THE WEB*

conclusion of American Memory

Selection was also influenced by a

collection’s copyright status, readiness of

cataloging and the degree to which selection will support other Library of Congress activities, ranging from arrearage

(backlog) reduction to exhibitions and

publications.

The American Memory pilot provided

a model for digital access to historical collections as well as a method for institutionalizing the effort at the Library. It

demonstrated that achieving this goal required the contribution of many Library

units or—put another way—that the

work of digitization must be dispersed

broadly within the institution. In this, the

American Memory pilot followed the

path charted by the Library’s Optical Disk

Pilot Project (1982–1987); in fact, several

members of the American Memory team

were veterans of that earlier effort.

During the American Memory pilot,

interoffice cooperation was manifest in a

number of ways. For example, the project

received regular and helpful guidance in

matters of intellectual property from the Copyright Office. In 1991–1992, American Memory

and Information Technology Services (ITS), the

Library’s computer center, demonstrated an

early model for on-line access with assistance

from IBM. In 1994, ITS and the American

Memory team began preparing collections for

the World Wide Web.

The Preservation Office provided conservation treatment for a number of American

Memory collections. In a special experiment,

American Memory staff and Preservation Office conservators digitized four Walt Whitman

notebooks and placed the resulting images on

the Internet. The experiment also produced a

preservation microfilm.

The American Memory pilot offered a microcosm of the digitization of historical collections and helped blaze the trail for the National

Digital Library Program’s historical collections

activity. The success of the pilot has helped the

Library raise private funds and win congressional support to continue and expand the effort.

 —Carl Fleischhauer,

 Coordinator, American Memory Project

202/707-6233; cfle@loc.gov

Reproduced from the collections of

the Library of Congress.

INTERIOR

WALT

WHITMAN’S

BUTTERFLY