A periodic report from

The National Digital Library Program

The Library of Congress

November/December 1995 (No. 4) ISSN 1083-3978

A National Digital Library: a shared goal

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. 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.

Cornell University and the University of Michigan are cooperating on a project to digitize Civil War documents, and the National Agricultural Library, the Smithsonian Institution, 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 Bibliotheque 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 National Digital Library Program

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Continued enhancement

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. 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

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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 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.

-Laura Campbell,
Director of the National Digital Library Program
202/707-3300, lcam@loc.gov

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Educators Forum feeds Library effort to reach K-12 scholars

Twenty-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.

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 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 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.

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

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End-user evaluation

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, 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.

The 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.

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 re-engineered 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 descriptive 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 rough-and-ready precursor to the on-line finding aids now being developed by the National Digital Library Program.

The collections that were digitized during the American Memory pilot provided an interesting 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.

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

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Visit Digitized Historical Collections via American Memory

Library of Congress