Library of Congress
Report to the Digital Library Federation
January 30, 2002


TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • Collections, services, and systems
  • Projects and programs
  • Specific digital library challenges
  • Digital library publications, policies, working papers, and other documents


    I. Collections, services, and systems

    A. Collections

    National Digital Library Program
    In fiscal 2001, the Librarian of Congress established the position of Associate Librarian for Strategic Initiatives (ALSI) to develop a full range of digital policies and operations for acquiring, describing and preserving content created and distributed in electronic form and for life-cycle management of digital materials as part of its universal collection for the nation. Laura Campbell, director of the National Digital Library Program (NDLP) was reassigned to the position of ALSI in October 2000. Ms. Campbell retains her title as NDLP director, with responsibility for oversight of the office of Information Technology Services and leadership of a new internal information technology planning group that works with external partners. The primary focus of ALSI in fiscal 2001 was strategic planning for Congress' fiscal 2000 appropriation of $99.8 million to develop and implement a congressionally approved strategic plan for a National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The Library initiated a two-tier strategy to develop the NDIIPP. The first tier focuses on the Library's technology infrastructure and policies. The second concentrates on collaboration with the public and private sectors. The ALSI convened the National Digital Strategy Advisory Board on May 1, 2001 to advise the Library of Congress on national strategies for long-term preservation of digital materials, to promote collaboration among diverse stakeholders and to assist in developing a national fund raising strategy for the NDIIPP. Since its beginning in 1994, the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program (NDLP) has been the nation's premier resource for noncommercial, high-quality intellectual content on the Internet. More than 7 million items from the Library's collections are available to users anywhere anytime at www.loc.gov. The site, one of the federal government's most popular, handles more than 100 million transactions every month.

    America's Library
    America's Library is a Web site designed for children and families. The site combines kid-friendly graphics with the incomparable American historical collections of the Library in more than 1,000 stories about our nation's past. America's Library invites users to learn through multimedia materials that have rarely been on view. These materials include cartoons, baseball cards, early "special effects" captured on film, photographs, maps, prints, manuscripts, and audio and video recordings. Interactive elements such as a "Scavenger Hunt" and "Send a Postcard" encourage exploration of the site, and animated "teasers" on the main home page will delight users of all ages. Questions invite children to talk to their family and friends about what they have learned. The site was launched on April 24, 2000, the 200th birthday of the Library of Congress, and is supported by the Ad Council through a nationwide public service campaign: "There Is a Better Way to Have Fun with History ... Log On. Play Around. Learn Something." During fiscal year 2001 America's Library logged more than 135 million transactions during the year, an average of more than 11 million per month.
    www.americaslibrary.gov

    American Memory Historical Collections
    The NDLP continued to receive widespread acclaim as a provider of free, high quality, educationally valuable American cultural and historical resources on the Library's American Memory Web site. At year's end, 7.5 million Library of Congress items were available online or in digital archives. Twelve new multimedia historical collections were added to the American Memory Web site, bring the total to 102. Ten existing collections were expanded with more than 860,000 digital items. In fiscal year 2001 use of the American Memory collections increased by 50 percent, from an average of 19 million monthly transactions during fiscal 2000 to 28.5 million per month during fiscal 2001.
    http://memory.loc.gov/

    Cartographic Materials
    The National Digital Library Program for Cartographic Materials has available 4,713 maps online. A collection of Civil War maps grew substantially in fiscal 2001. A total of 450 maps are now online, and a joint project with the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Historical Society was initiated, allowing for collections from both institutions to appear on the Library's Web site.
    http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/

    The Learning Page
    Designed for teachers, the Learning Page is a companion Web site to the American Memory collections. It provides search and curricular guidance to teachers and students who use American Memory primary source materials. During fiscal 2001, search indices were updated to include fifteen new American Memory collections and two existing collections with substantial content updates. Ten new "Learn More About It" collection-essays for classroom use were created, while five were updated. One new feature, An American Memory time line, and two substantially updated features, "Elections the American Way" and "Inaugurations," were added to the Learning Page. A new activity for students, "Copyright on the Web," and a substantially updated "Big Picture Puzzle" (a student activity) were made available. Nine new teacher-created lesson plans to use with K-12 students were added in fiscal 2001.The Learning Page also supports the National Digital Library teacher-training initiative and other educational outreach efforts available to all educators with Internet access. Fifteen workshops from the National Digital Library teacher-training initiatives were made available on the Learning Page. Descriptive indexes and reservation forms for workshops given in the Learning Center were created as well. A conference page of national and local presentations by Library staff and teachers working with the Library of Congress initiative was created and added to the Learning Page. A page of downloadable handouts for teachers was added. A quarterly electronic newsletter, written by teachers and school media specialists, was published on the Learning Page through collaboration with the Social Science Education Consortium.
    http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/index.html

    Prints and Photographs Division
    Important new collections of digitized images were added to the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC). These include the Prokudin-Gorskii Collection; Wright Brothers Negatives; World War I Posters; Spanish Civil War Posters; Photochrom Prints from ca. 1890-1905; the Brumfield Collection documenting the surviving architectural heritage of pre-Soviet Russia; and additions to the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection. After the Library's central catalog Web page added a link to PPOC, the number of online visits grew from 15,000 to 20,000 per month. Approximately 110,000 keyword searches were performed in PPOC during the fiscal year.
    http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/print/

    B. Services

    The Library of Congress makes its collections available to the nation's schools, libraries, and life-long learners through 20 public reading rooms; via interlibrary loan to Congress, federal agencies, schools, the public and other libraries, via the Internet; and via copyright-compatible copying. Internet-based systems include three World Wide Web services (e.g. THOMAS, http://www.loc.gov), the Library of Congress Online Catalog, and various file transfer options. The Library manages the largest and most varied archival collection of American creativity including motion pictures, sound recordings, maps, prints, photographs, manuscripts, music, and folklore covering a wide range of ethnic and geographic communities. The Library's digital services and systems include:

    Collaborative Digital Reference Service (CDRS)
    CDRS provides professional reference service to researchers anytime, anywhere, through an international, digital network of libraries and related institutions. The service is piloting the use of new technologies to provide the best answers at the lowest cost by taking advantage, not only of the millions of Internet resources, but also of many more millions of resources that are not online and held by libraries. CDRS supports libraries by providing them additional choices for the services they offer their end users. Participating libraries will assist their users by connecting to CDRS to send questions that are best answered by the expert staff and collections of CDRS member institutions from around the world. In 2001, CDRS increased worldwide membership to more than 200 participating institutions.
    http://www.loc.gov/rr/digiref/)

    Global Legal Information Network
    The Law Library's primary digital initiative, the Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) is an online parliament-to-parliament cooperative exchange of laws and legal materials (often in the vernacular) among some thirty-seven member nations. During 2001, Taiwan and Uzebikstan joined the network and the GLIN database became accessible to attorneys at the Departments of Labor, Treasury, and State as well as the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, as a result of interest generated by a demonstration at to the D.C. Bar Association in February. In fiscal 2001, steps were taken to enhance and expand GLIN. The Law Library awarded a contract for the development of a document type definition (DTD) to describe the structure of the basic legal elements in the GLIN database. The first deliverable is a DTD for court decisions. Additionally, the next phase of the contract calls for delivery of an annotated XML tagging scheme for the DTD and a description of a migration plan to XML for GLIN database components. In July, 2001, the Law Library began a retrospective project to convert entire official foreign law gazettes containing these legal instruments from microfilm into Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Through the end of fiscal 2001, a total of 4,089 pages and 536 foreign law gazettes were converted to full text files that will be linked to existing GLIN records and made available to all GLIN contributing members via the Internet. The Law Library continued to review foreign legal gazettes, select all appropriate legal instruments, summarize and assign legal subject terms and convert to PDF files. During the year, 6,798 pages and 778 records were added to the GLIN database by the Law Library covering 26 jurisdictions. These jurisdictions were primarily in the Americas but also included other Spanish, French and Portuguese speaking countries around the world.
    http://lcweb2.loc.gov/law/GLINv1/

    Interlibrary Loan
    Interlibrary loan (ILL) requests from United States and foreign libraries totaled 58,835 requests, an increase of 11.4 percent over fiscal 2000. More than half of these requests were from academic libraries; nearly a quarter were from public libraries. In March 2001 all interlibrary loan requests began to be funneled through a single computer gateway, ILL Manager, purchased from the Research Libraries Group. The software channeled requests from libraries using OCLC, RLIN, and the Library of Congress Web into a single workstream. Plans for the future call for the program to automatically search the Library of Congress catalog and reply in the negative when no holdings records are found there. By the end of fiscal 2001, the Loan Division had digitized and delivered over the Web more than 100 small, fragile pamphlets requested by ILL patrons.
    http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/loan/

    C. Systems

    Culpeper, Virginia Storage System
    In August 1998, the Congress authorized the Architect of the Capitol (AOC) to acquire on behalf of the Library real property and improvements in Culpeper, Virginia for use as the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. The Center will implement digital archiving of the Library's collections of film, television, radio and recorded sound and will house the Library's film and audio and video preservation laboratories. In 2001, considerable effort was placed on addressing issues related to preparing the audio-visual collections for their move to the Center.

    Integrated Library System
    The LC ILS includes modules for cataloging, circulation, acquisitions and serials check-in as well as the Library of Congress Online Catalog. In FY2000, the Library added an Electronic Cataloging in Publication (ECIP) interface to receive digitized publisher data. The ECIP program expanded in 2001 to include all directorate staff who work on Cataloging in Publication galleys. The ECIP program now includes 1,067 publishers, 78 percent more than at the end of fiscal 2000. At the close of the fiscal year, the Operations director approved a plan for the New Books Project, an initiative to enrich catalog records for forthcoming books with a wide range of information, including tables of contents and images of book jackets. The project would also include a capability for catalog users to reserve forthcoming titles at local libraries that participate in the New Books local partnership program.

    II. Projects and programs

    A. Projects

    Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT)
    The Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT) was formed in December 1992 as a Cataloging Directorate program to develop tools to aid catalogers, reference specialists, and searchers in creating and locating information. The Team seeks to enrich the content of Library of Congress bibliographic records as well as improve access to the data the records contain, and conducts research and development in areas that can contribute to furthering these efforts. Additional information regarding BEAT and its work may be found at
    http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat/

    Projects in progress 2002:

    Additional Analytics Access
    This project determines which, from among social science monographic series titles of the "working paper/discussion paper" type that LC has (of those within scope for the project) are available in electronic form and adds the URLs to the LC catalog records for these series. By linking to these electronic versions, LC provides timely, comprehensive, and cost effective access to these series. A particular value added by this project is that the access (links) to the electronic versions frequently provide the researcher with significant information resources that offer full-text access to many of the titles in these series.
    http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat/analytics.html

    BECites+
    The BECites+ initiative is designed to substantially enhance traditional printed library bibliographies not only by placing themon the Web in electronic form but by including annotated citations, tables of contents, indexes, and back-of-book bibliographies or resources cited therein. Reciprocal links are made between all of these data files and to and from the online catalog record for each title in the bibliography as well as to the electronic bibliography in which it is cited. This cross-linkage results in enhanced information retrieval, as each of the links connects a searcher to other related resources and to an electronic bibliography or guide to materials on the same or similar theme. Finally, links to pertinent online journal indexes, other related web resources, and to applicable subject headings in the Library's catalog are also included.
    http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/guide/

    BEOnline+
    BEOnline+ (Business and Economics Online) began as a pilot project in 1996 and later became BEOnline+, which provided both bibliographic and direct access to selected online resources, enabling Library users to enjoy improved access to Internet information in addition to more traditional data obtained from searches of the Library's catalogs. The initiative is now the responsibility of the Library's Special Materials Cataloging Division, where it will continue to be expanded and where it is already incorporated into the regular Cataloging Directorate processing work flow.
    http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/business/beonline/

    Digital Tables of Contents
    The Digital Tables of Contents project creates HTML-encoded Table of Contents (TOC) data and makes these available on the World Wide Web where the data may be viewed through a Web browser accessing the Library's online catalog at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catalog or through searches conducted using Web search engines that have indexed the data. The process cross-links the TOC to underlying catalog records so that both the catalog records and the linked TOC may be viewed as a result. Following a TOC link to the catalog, a researcher can conduct additional searches for related information. At present more than 2,800 TOCs have been created and linked, and more than 500,000 hits have been recorded on the TOC files section of the Cataloging Directorate Web pages. For information regarding the Digital Tables of Contents project readers may contact Bruce Knarr, project chair at
    bkna@loc.gov

    Electronic CIP (E-CIP) support
    BEAT supports the Library's Electronic Cataloging-In-Publication (E-CIP) program, where the team has been instrumental in helping to implement a Tables of Contents component where TOC data are added to body of the catalog record. With the use of automated editing techniques, recent statistics show cataloging staff now adding TOC data for about 32% of the E-CIP materials. The hope is that ultimately TOC data will be reflected in as many as 50% of E-CIP titles. This activity is ongoing and is separate from BEAT's other TOC initiatives.
    http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cip/cip.html

    ONIX TOC Project
    ONIX (Online Information eXchange) is a means of representing book industry product information and is being used by some publishers today to communicate that data electronically. As with the digital Tables of Contents initiative, links are made from the TOC data to the catalog record, and the reverse, and researchers can move from the TOC to the Library's online catalog where they can search for additional material. To date the project has created more than 10,000 ONIX TOC records, and links to these from the catalog are being made in ongoing fashion.

    International Horizons
    Working with the Office of the Librarian, Library Services and Information Technology Services, the NDLP continued to contribute to International Horizons, a collaborative digitization effort. During the year, Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier: Historias Paralelas joined Meeting of Frontiers as the second component of International Horizons

    Meeting of Frontiers
    The Library launched the Meeting of Frontiers pilot site of 70,000 images chronicling the parallel experiences of the United States and Russia in settling their frontiers in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. The bilingual Russian/English Meeting of Frontiers/Vstrecha na Granitsakh Web site features photographs, albums, maps and postcards from three project partners, the Russian State Library in Moscow, the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, and the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Digital images of unique and rare materials in American and Russian collections are made freely available over the Internet. Additions to the Web site in 2001 brought the total of digitized items to 4,693, approximately 88,000 images.
    http://frontiers.loc.gov/

    Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier: Historias Paralelas
    The new site brings together unique collections of the Library of Congress with those of partner institutions in Spain, most notably the National Library of Spain and the Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular of Seville. The collection draws upon rich Library of Congress collections relating to Spain and Spanish America digitized from the Law Library, the Library's general collections and collections of the Geography and Map, Manuscript and Rare Book and Special Collections divisions.
    http://international.loc.gov/intldl/eshtml/

    German Digital Project
    The goal of the German Digital Project is to increase acquisitions of German digital publications and develop the capability to transmit and receive electronic data interchange (EDI) transactions. Working with the firm of Otto Harrassowitz, the Library gained access to dozens of German electronic journals to which it had subscriptions. It also laid the groundwork for conducting EDI transactions and began placing orders online. The German Digital Project gave way to the Digital Acquisitions Project (DAP), a similar project without geographic limitation. By the end of fiscal year 2001, the Library had obtained access to approximately 130 e-journals. In September, the Library signed a contract with TDNet, Inc., for an electronic journal management system. By year's end, the Library was ready to move EDI into production for receiving and paying invoices for serial subscription orders.

    Open Archive Initiative (OAI)
    The Library continues to collaborate with Cornell University on a project to foster access to preprint archives across institutions.
    www.openarchives.org

    Portals to the World
    With Area Studies representation on the Team, BEAT supports the Area Studies Portals initiative. This project is designed to provide access to online resources for all international regions of the world. Portals are created using OCLC's Cooperative Online Resource Catalog's (CORC) Pathfinders, and each country's page has subject categories that are linked to CORC pages. To date, more than 700 Pathfinders have been created. Portals to the World opened on November 1, 2001.
    http://www.loc.gov/rr/international/portals.html

    Web Preservation Projects
    The Library of Congress continues to development a Web Preservation Project, Mapping the Internet Electronic Resources Virtual Archive (MINERVA), initiated in fiscal year 2000 to capture, save, and preserve collections from select Web sites for use by future generations of researchers. During phase I of the project, the Library designed a prototype Web site, selected pilot sites to archive and developed general guidelines. Bibliographic records were created and open access was provided for the captured Web sites. The second pilot, conducted in collaboration with Alexa Internet, developed a thematic archive, targeting web sites devoted to the U.S. National Election of 2000. The collection comprises more than two million megabytes, or about 87 million pages, of election-related information gathered between August 7, 2000 and January 14, 2001. This subject specific web archive may be viewed at http://archive.alexa.com. Additionally, the Library of Congress, in collaboration with the Internet Archive, webArchivists.org and the Pew Internet & American Life Project, launched a September 11 Web Archive. This new archive preserves the Web expressions of individuals, groups, the press and institutions in the United States and from around the world in the aftermath of the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.
    http://september11.archive.org/

    B. PROGRAMS

    Ameritech Competition
    Four award-winning LC/Ameritech collections debuted online in 2001, bringing the total to sixteen. Beginning in 1997, the Library of Congress sponsored this three-year competition with a gift from the Ameritech Corporation to enable public, research, and academic libraries, museums, historical societies and archival institutions (with the exception of federal institutions) to digitize American history collections and make them available on the Library's American Memory Web site. Thirty-three institutions have now received $1.75 million of support to digitize twenty-three projects.
    http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award/index.html

    Information Technology Services (ITS)
    ITS support for multimedia projects and programs increased significantly in 2001. Cyber LC, located on the Library's Web site www.loc.gov/loc/cyberlc, (see The Library Today) carries products captured, digitized and presented by ITS multimedia staff. The growing list includes symposia from the Globalization series; poetry readings; and a series of author's talks sponsored by the Science, Technology and Business Division. The ITS Digital Scan Center (DSC) produced 13,500 image files for an expanding customer base throughout the Library. During the year, the center's service capabilities grew with the addition of a third high-resolution digital scanner and an archival quality printer. Improved quality assurance and procedures positioned the Scan Center to meet the Library's growing demands for digital scanning services. The DSC initiated and helped develop a unique scanning technique to digitize the Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii collection. The technique, digichromatography, provides for the exact registration of the three color-encoded grayscale images, and the production of vibrant, natural color images from tri-part glass plate negatives. The results were manifested in the exhibition titled The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated.

    National Library Service for the Blind & Physically Handicapped (NLS/BPH)
    NLS/BPH completed a four-year collaborative effort, under the auspices of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), to develop a 130-page national Digital Talking Book (DTB) standard. The completed document provides detailed specifications applicable to all aspects of DTB production and playback. When adopted by NISO voting members, it would ensure that organizations developing production tools and DTB players will produce software or devices that are interoperable. To ensure that NLS/BPH has an adequate store of digital materials available when it begins its transition from analog to digital distribution, all contractors producing audio books for NLS/BPH have been given a schedule for converting their studios, culminating in 100 percent digital mastering in fiscal 2004. NLS/BPH has begun consideration of storage, security, and temperature control for housing review copies of the digital files that make up DTBs. Web-Braille allowed access to more than 3,880 digital braille book files, twenty-five national magazines, and five national sports schedules. At the close of fiscal 2001, 1,623 users were registered for this new Internet service. The NLS International Union Catalog for braille and audio materials also linked to Web-Braille. As a result, Web-Braille books could be accessed directly from the catalog by using author, title, subject, language, keyword, and other search parameters. The Union Catalog now contains more than 388,000 catalog records, an increase of almost 20,000 from last year.

    Network Development & MARC Standards Office (NDMSO)
    The Network Development & MARC Standards Office (NDMSO) is the focal point for technical library, network and digital standards and related planning in Library Services. NDMSO is involved with many facets of network development and digital library tasks including: standards, which are basic to efficient, long-term interchange of digital material with other systems, such as those for Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC), Information Retrieval (Z39.50), Encoding Archival Description (EAD), Metadata Encoding and Description Schema (METS) and various SGML and XML DTDs; planning, which involves working out detailed models and specifications with other institutions and with internal Library units; and coordinating and testing implementation, which takes standards development and digital planning to fulfillment through the completion of operational networking systems.
    http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/ NDMSO highlights for fiscal year 2001 include:

    CDNL Persistent Identifiers Task Force
    NDMSO provides technical support for the Conference of Directors of National Libraries (CDNL) Committee on Persistent Identifiers (URNs) as used by National Libraries. Winston Tabb, the Associate Librarian for Library Services, chairs this initiative. In FY01, CDNL participants submitted and obtained approval for a namespace registration for both the National Bibliography Number (NBN) and the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) from the Internet Engineering Steering Group, the major review body for Internet standards. Independently submitted, a namespace for the related ISSN was also approved.

    MARC and SGML/XML
    NDMSO continues to maintain and make available a Document Type Definition (DTD) and a set of utilities (computer programs written in the Perl programming language) created for the purpose of converting MARC records to SGML. During FY01 NDMSO converted the DTD from SGML to XML and worked with Information Technology Services to create new versions of the conversion utilities that output XML with special character conversion to Unicode, as required for XML. These tools are made available for download on NDMSO's Web site.

    Metadata Encoding and Transmission Schema (METS)
    NDMSO participated in the development of the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Schema (METS), a schema for creating XML documents that express the hierarchical structure of digital library objects, the names and locations of the digital files that comprise those objects, and the associated metadata. METS is an important component of digital repository management. NDMSO has assumed the maintenance agency responsibility for the emerging standard. The METS Development Group, an initiative of the Digital Library Federation, has issued a beta version of the schema that is currently under review. NDMSO created and maintains the official METS Web site and a METS listserv with over 120 subscribers.

    Open Ebook
    The Library is working cooperatively with the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) to develop standards for electronic book encoding. NDMSO is a participant in the working groups of the Open Ebook Forum, an association of hardware and software companies, publishers, authors and users of electronic books whose goals are to establish common specifications for electronic book systems, applications and products.
    www.nist.gov/itl/div895/isis/projects/ebook/

    Z39.50-International: Next Generation (ZING)
    The Library of Congress has organized an initiative, Z39.50-International: Next Generation (ZING) to evolve Z39.50 to a web platform protocol, attractive to information providers, vendors, and users. As part of this initiative, LC hosted a meeting in June to develop specifications for a new Web service definition based on Z39.50 together with Web technologies. This is a proof-of-concept initiative with the goal to develop a standard search and retrieve service enabling development of value-added applications such as the scholar's portal that will integrate access to various networked resources. The intent is to lower barriers to implementation while preserving the existing intellectual contributions of Z39.50 that have accumulated over 20 years, discarding aspects no longer useful.

    NewBooks Program
    NewBooks has now been approved as a Library of Congress Cataloging Directorate initiative and is designed to provide the library community and the general public with a rich source of information about soon-to-be-published and just-published books. Under the program participating publishers will provide information about forthcoming books and the Library of Congress will in turn make information available on its Web page as well as through "New Books records" (which are not traditional catalog records) to be distributed by the LC Cataloging Distribution Service to libraries and booksellers worldwide. When accessed via the Library of Congress home page, a New Books record may include substantially enhanced information about the item, as well as other information or options. John Celli, chief of the CIP Division is the principal for this project and is also a BEAT Team member.
    http://lcweb2.loc.gov:8081/ecip/celli/welc01.html

    Open Archives and Cultural Materials Initiatives
    The NDLP engaged in efforts to broaden access to the unique materials digitized for American Memory and to encourage interoperability among cultural repositories. As a beginning, the descriptive records for four American Memory collections have been made available for sharing with other institutions using the emerging standard of the Open Archives Initiative. The records now available are either in MARC format or presented as Dublin core records. Five American Memory collections were contributed to the Cultural Materials Initiative, a pooled resource being assembled by the Research Libraries Group, from digital resources of participating members.

    Preservation Digital Reformatting Program
    The Preservation Digital Reformatting Program converted paper and photographic materials to 12,350 digital images. In a collaboration with the Conservation Division and the Music Division, the Preservation Reformatting Division managed the digitization and Web presentation of De Musica. Attributed to Johannes Afflighemensis, this 12th Century Latin musical treatise was handwritten on vellum. The growth in digital images from the Library's collections available on the American Memory site and the Prints and Photographs Division's online catalog (PPOC) were two factors that contributed to an 8 percent increase in non-microphotographic orders processed in fiscal year 2001. Requests for scan-on-demand and digital print-on-demand services increased, particularly among academic and commercial publishers, museums, and other businesses.
    http://www.loc.gov/preserv/

    III. Specific Digital Library Challenges

    Collections Access, Preservation, and Security
    The digital explosion has imposed on the Library of Congress a new mission-critical workload and the need to expand high-quality, free online services to the Congress, K-12 educators, and the American public. This task must be superimposed on the Library's equally critical traditional services of acquiring, cataloging, preserving, serving and storing artifactual materials. The Library of Congress must continue to construct digital-repository architecture and basic technology infrastructure to preserve current and future digital assets. As the Library's massive multiformat collections grow, it must continue to invest in securing and preserving these cultural records. The Library's ability to launch, deliver, preserve and secure digital content and services for the Congress and public depends on congressional support.

    Digital Arena
    The Library's main priority is to help the Congress and generations of researchers quickly gain access to relevant and verifiable information in digital formats, while ensuring that the rights of content creators and producers are respected. The exponential growth of the Internet is fostering an explosion of material that increasingly is produced only in digital format. The Library is facing the massive challenge of applying its traditional strengths of acquiring, preserving, describing, and making accessible knowledge and information to the rapidly growing but often ephemeral mass of material produced only in digital form. The Library must apply its unique experiences and resources for organizing knowledge and information with in-depth subject and language expertise to the unstructured and unfiltered world of the Internet if it is to continue informing and serving the Congress and the nation.

    National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program
    As part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act 2001, the Congress provided to the Library a special $99.8 million appropriation to develop a cooperative nationwide collection and preservation strategy for digital materials. In collaboration with other Federal and non-Federal entities, the Library is mandated to develop a phased implementation plan that will lead to a national strategy for a network of libraries and other organizations to share responsibilities for collecting, maintaining and providing permanent access to digital materials. The plan will also develop, in concert with the Copyright Office, strategies for defining national policies and protocols for the long-term preservation of digital materials and for the technological infrastructure that will be required for the Library to play its key role in the collaborative national network. Of the total appropriated, $75 million is to be made available as this amount is matched by non-Federal donations, including in-kind contributions, through March 31, 2003.

    IV. Digital library publications, policies, working papers, and other documents

    "Collaborative Digital Reference Service (CDRS) -- LOC," The Scout Report, vol. 7, no. 34, September 14, 2001.

    Kresh, Diane Nestor. "From Sshh to Search Engine: Reference.net on the World Wide Web, Information Technologies and Libraries, vol. 20, no. 3, p. 139, September 2001.

    Kresh, Diane Nestor. "High Touch or High Tech: The Collaborative Digital Reference Service as a Model for the Future of Reference," Advances in Librarianship, 2001. (forthcoming)

    Kresh, Diane Nestor. "Libraries Meet the World Wide Web: The Collaborative Digital Reference Service," ARL Bimonthly Report 219, December 2001.

    Scores of talks given by Library of Congress staff on CDRS throughout 2001 at meetings of professional associations. Slide shows of all talks are located at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/digiref/tech-docs.html

    "Two Archive sites," The Scout Report, vol. 7, no. 39, October 19, 2001. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/2001/scout-011019.html

    Weiss, Todd R., "Sept. 11 Web Site Postings Archived," Computerworld IT Reports, November 19, 2001. http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO65875,00.html