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III. National Online Library - Major Components

A.

Content

Future digital content development at the Library requires the skills resident in the NDLP staff since they are not available anywhere else in the Library and would take many years to replace. We plan to use this core staff to continue the NDLP and redeploy them to digital functions not staffed now.

There are three major parts of the content component: (1) American Memory Historical Content (historical materials converted to digital form), (2) America and the World International Content, and (3) Born Digital (current material generated elsewhere and available only in digital form).

1. American Memory Historical Content

For the National Digital Library Program's American Memory the major thrusts for the next five years will be to continue to digitize domestic content and maintain the American Memory Web site. The five year goal is to amass a national asset of educational content for the taxpayer and the K-16 school program.

The National Digital Library Program today requires an annual operating budget exceeding $12,000,000. Personnel resources consume more than half of the annual NDLP financial resources. Approximately 70% of the current NDLP annual operating budget has been supported by private sector funds. NDLP has neither a stable appropriated budget base nor potential for continued private sector financial support at previous levels. The current $3 million annual appropriation authorized for NDLP operations expires after FY 2000. This plan requests a commitment by Congress to support a substantial restructuring of the NDLP business model.

The future NDLP program will move from what has been a quantity-driven mass digital content conversion operation towards a more focused, quality and user-driven digital content selection, conversion, and distribution business model. The NDLP will target digital content towards specific user audience needs. Target audiences include Congress, their constituencies, K-16 education, life long learners, and the online American public in general. The future program includes filling in the gaps in American Memory content coverage across subject areas and time periods, and expanding coverage to include international content in the context of the American experience. Further we intend to evolve the NDLP staff into a digital library resource that is capable of implementing and integrating the total, long-term, digital future vision of the Library.

American Memory Outcomes

Adding 70 collections of American History to cover the time period dating back to 1492 covering the following topics in nine major time periods: social history, political history, popular culture, natural environment, science and technology and law. See the Collections in Time and Subject Area chart on the following page. Establishing content and technology collaborations with 40-50 additional archives in America over the next five years.

Spreading the know-how to manage and deliver digital products to other LC staff.

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2. America and the World - International Content

The Library has already made significant efforts to develop a more international perspective and plans to expand these efforts in the next five years. In 1999 the Library launched the "Meeting of Frontiers" project, which highlights the parallel experiences of the United States and Russia in exploring, developing and settling their frontiers and the meeting of those frontiers in Siberia, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. "Meeting of Frontiers" already includes more than 2,500 items, comprising some 70,000 images, from the Library's rare book, manuscript, map, film and sound recording collections; materials that tell the stories of the explorers, fur traders, missionaries, exiles, gold miners and adventurers that peopled both frontiers and their interactions with the native peoples of Siberia and the American West. We now have agreements with two of the largest archives in Russia.

In the next five years the Library will launch America and the World which will place North America and the United States in its international context, beginning with the 1492 exploration and continuing through the mid-twentieth century. America and the World will focus on those individuals, social groups and institutions that brought the world to America and America to the world. It will demonstrate that despite isolationist rhetoric, America is a quintessentially international nation: populated by immigrants and internationalists, missionaries, writers, artists, and public servants who considered relations among nations to be not just between governments, but between people. America and the World provides a social history of America's international consciousness by providing access to primary source documents related to American immigrants and internationalists.

Archives in Spain, Italy, China and Brazil have expressed strong interest in contributing not only to America and the World, but also to other educational, historically significant initiatives highlighting the spread of democracy in the modern world and the history of statehood.

America and the World Outcomes

3.

Add major materials from ten countries to the educational content online over the next five years.

Build partnerships and work collaboratively with libraries and cultural institutions around the world.

Enhance the overall understanding of the international nature of our social, economic and cultural environment.

Born Digital Content

Increasingly, publications - such as journals - that used to be published only in print form are now being published only in electronic form. We propose to redistribute four of the current NDLP staff to launch this effort. Their first goal will be an analysis and options including cost projections for the various approaches the Library may take to ensure that important and historically significant digital materials are captured and retained as part of the permanent research collections of the Library. Just as we have done with the print world, we must now discover how best to capture and collect in the digital world.

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The major thrusts in the "born digital" arena for the next five years are: (1) to develop and implement the capacity to receive, examine, preserve and make permanently accessible to the public the electronic deposits received through the Copyright Office's CORDS (Copyright Office Electronic Registration, Recordation and Deposit System). Such deposits are currently estimated at 25,000 items in FY01, growing to 50,000 items by FY04; (2) to undertake a series of small pilots focused on specific kinds of "publications": electronic journals, web sites, and government documents; and (3) to continue developing various partnership models designed to ensure capture and permanent access to born digital materials in the most economic fashion. The Library has already completed pilot agreements of this sort with Bell & Howell and the Internet Archive. In FY00 the Library is actively pursuing partnerships with two major electronic journal publishers: the American Physical Society and Elsevier.

Born Digital Outcomes

Complete a series of pilots focused on specific kinds of "publications”: electronic
journals, web sites, and government documents available in digital form to assess the
costs and benefits of capturing certain types of materials.

Develop partnership models with publishers designed to ensure the capture and
permanent access to born digital materials in the most economic fashion, e.g. the
American Physical Society and Elsevier.

Develop the capacity to capture and make permanently accessible the Copyright digital
deposits that are now estimated at 25,000 items in FY01 growing to 50,000 in FY04.
Establish policies and methods, including partnerships, that will enable the Library and
Copyright Office to sustain their historic missions cost effectively.

B. Access Services

The digital revolution has created new opportunities for the sharing of information. Unfortunately, this potential is undermined by the fact that material is highly inaccessible in the digital universe. The digital environment lacks the librarians, publishing houses and traditions of peer review that regulate the print environment. Without such collaborative regulation, information-seekers are forced to wade through mountains of disorganized data in the hopes of finding reliable, authoritative and historically significant and useful content. Easy access is undermined by several factors, including the breakdown of traditional ways of cataloging (or organizing) information; and the collapse of distinctions between credible (or professional) and not-credible (or informal) knowledge-producers. Finally, there is a general lack of high quality educational and socially-important content online.

The Library is proposing five initiatives to extend access to Congress, educators, and the nation. These include: (1) Educational Services, (2) Geographic Information Resources, (3) Collaborative Digital Reference Service, (4) Digital Resource Access and (5) CyberLC.

1. Educational Services

Educational services will enable teachers to teach with technology. They will build on existing NDLP efforts and include the following:

online workshops and navigational tools helping K-16 teachers make use of the Library's online resources in the classroom. Teams of master educators will create sample teaching units that draw upon the Library of Congress on-line materials. These teacher-developed lesson plans and materials will be tested and then shared with other educators nationwide on an on-going basis via the Library of Congress Learning Page.

expansion of the Learning Page, which is a companion web site to the American Memory collections. It provides search and guidance to teachers and students who use American Memory primary source materials. The Learning Page also supports the National Digital Library's teacher-training initiative and other educational outreach efforts able to reach all classrooms with Internet access.

Educational Services Outcomes

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Providing access tools to high quality online content in schools, school libraries, public libraries and homes and methodologies for teaching with technology.

Promoting collaboration among teachers across the nation.

Providing substantial support for K-16 students, educators and librarians using online

content.

2. Geographic Information Systems

This initiative will provide Congress with research tools for sophisticated geographic digital imaging and analysis of statistics and other demographic data. This tool will enhance Congress' information base in support of public policy development. It responds to the dramatic increase in the direct requests from Congress to the Geography and Map division for the creation of maps and related products derived from emerging imaging data and software.

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