At the Library of Congress, this set of descriptive records is treated in the same way as records for a collection digitized by the Library. When a user's web browser presents the bibliographic display generated by the Library of Congress, it retrieves and embeds an image file from Austin for the thumbnail. Clicking on the thumbnail links to a service image, also retrieved from Austin. The competition guidelines allow awardee institutions to deliver digital reproductions to the Library of Congress or to mount them locally. The digital reproductions of the Runyon photographs are mounted at the University of Texas.
Every file has a URL associated with it.
One problem with URLs as links is that they usually refer to specific computers and specific files. The links in these records might fail when the computer systems at the University of Texas must be upgraded or re-organized. Another potential level of interoperability would have been distributed searching of remotely stored records, perhaps using the Z39.50 protocol for search and retrieval. Requiring participants to support access via this protocol, which was developed in the library community, however, would have excluded small libraries, archives, and historical societies. The Library of Congress and the Ameritech Corporation were anxious to extend the competition to such institutions.