Parade Magazine Article
The Learning Page
The Houdini Collection
The Atlantic Monthly Review
Furnished with the Library's Internet address, the public put down their newspapers, turned on their computers and visited the Library's web site in droves. As a result, a record number of transactions, or "hits," were logged on LC's systems on that Sunday, Sept. 29, and usage soared again on Monday, Sept. 30.
The most dramatic impact registered in usage of the American Memory historical collections, which were the focus of the article featuring Dr. Billington and a discussion of the NDL effort to digitize millions of items by the year 2000. The number of American Memory transactions on that Sunday was 12 times higher than on the previous Sunday. Usage on Sept. 30 was up about 80 percent over that of the previous Monday.
This pattern of usage appears to indicate that access to the Library's historical collections is primarily via home computers.
"We were thrilled with the public's reaction to the Parade article," said LC Public Affairs Officer Jill D. Brett. "With the help of national media exposure, the National Digital Library Program is reaching millions of the Library's constituents across the country."
The legislative information system, THOMAS, experienced three times the number of transactions on Sept. 29 compared to THOMAS usage the previous Sunday. THOMAS usage on Monday, Sept. 30, doubled that for a normal weekday. While visiting the Library's home page, users can easily click on to THOMAS.
Overall usage of the Library's World Wide Web offerings (which includes THOMAS and American Memory) was also six times higher on Sept. 29 than the previous Sunday, and more than twice as high on Sept. 30 as on an average week day.
Reduced response time as a result of this unprecedented amount of traffic no doubt caused consternation among some users. Among them was Laura Campbell, director of the National Digital Library Program, who was attempting to demonstrate the system during the peak period. "I tried three times to access the Library site, and each time I got a response that said "temporarily unavailable," Ms. Campbell said.
"We have been in the process of upgrading the RS 6000 server complex since early summer in anticipation of increased demand for access to the Library's Internet offerings," said Herbert Becker, director of Information Technology Services. "To date, three of the Library's five servers have already been upgraded from one processor to eight processors, with four times as much storage capacity," said Mr. Becker.
-- Audrey Fischer
Audrey Fischer is an editor-writer
with Information Technology Services.
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The "Back to School Special" includes a new area called "Learn More About It!" Here teachers and students will find pages full of helpful hints for using on-line documents, photographs, motion pictures and sound recordings available from the American Memory historical collections on the Library's website. For example, users can access illustrated guides to the U.S. history content covered by each on-line collection. Teachers will find ideas on classroom uses for electronic materials.
Working in partnership with the Center for the Book of the Library of Congress, the Learning Page also features book lists under the familiar banner "Read More About It," a hallmark of the center's literacy program. For each historical collection, "Read More About It" will offer general-interest and younger-reader lists.
The Learning Page's subject search guides, called Pathfinders, have also been upgraded for the "Back to School Special." Pathfinders for Events, People, Places, Time and Topics have been expanded to include new search assistance specific to education. A new Pathfinder based on historical eras has been added to the Time Pathfinder. Three new primary source collections that went on-line in July have been mapped into the Pathfinders: The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920; the Gottscho-Schleisner Photographs, 1932-1960, which offer images of U.S. building styles and trends; and the Theodor Horydczak Photographs, 1920-1950, which document Washington, D.C., as a developing city.
The Learning Page is featured in the latest issue of School Library Journal (Sept. 1996) in "History Repeats Itself: Primary Documents Go Online at the Library of Congress," by Martha Dexter, of the educational services area of the Library's National Digital Library Program.
-- Guy Lamolinara
Public Affairs Office
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The Houdini Collection is included in the American Variety Stage, one of two new collections available on the Library's World Wide Web site. The other new collection is "Inside an American Factory: The Westinghouse Works."
Houdini, known during his life as the "Genius of Escape Who Will Startle and Amaze," bequeathed his collection of rare books and manuscripts on the history of magic and personal documents to the Library of Congress. Highlights from these collections are available on-line as part of the National Digital Library Program, available at http://www.loc.gov/.
The American Variety Stage Collection is a multimedia anthology of materials that illustrate the vibrant and diverse forms of popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, that thrived during the period 1870-1920. These materials were drawn from many Library of Congress special collections and include English- and Yiddish-language playscripts, souvenir playbills and programs, and paper print films. Theater posters and sound recordings will be added in the near future.
Early motion pictures of American factories produced from the Library's collections of rare paper prints are also available on-line. (Before the amendment of the copyright law in 1912, motion pictures were registered for copyright protection following the procedure for still photographs. Motion picture producers were required to deposit with the Library paper contact prints made directly from the film negatives. These prints ranged in length from a few frames to the entire motion picture.)
The other collection, "Inside an American Factory: The Westinghouse Works" provides a glimpse of turn-of-the-century industrial life, including footage of working machinery and scenes of male and female workers performing their various duties. The Library's web site includes background information about working conditions in these plants and other projects of the time, such as the New York subway system and the conversion into electrical power of Niagara Falls.
-- Guy Lamolinara
Public Affairs Office
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"The world's largest library is now an established presence on the Web, offering access to reference materials, catalog data, legislative texts, copyright information and much more," the article, called "Web Citations: A Weekly Review," said.
This is not the first time the Library's World Wide Web initiative (http://www.loc.gov/) has been commended. Recently, the site was placed among the "Top 5% of All Web Sites" by Point Communications, an Internet rating service.
The Atlantic piece said, the "historical and cultural content these exhibits provide is first-rate, but what is most compelling is the access offered, at the click of a mouse, to a copy of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's handwriting, or a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Soviet memo ordering the forced collectivization that led to the horrific Ukrainian famine of the 1930s."
The Library will continue to place its major exhibitions on-line, including the upcoming showcase for the treasures of the Library, to open in spring in celebration of the centennial and completed restoration in 1997 of the Thomas Jefferson Building.
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