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Library Of Congress To Digitize 5
Million Items 10/24/94 WASHINGTON,
D.C., U.S.A., 1994 OCT 24 (NB) -- The
Library of Congress intends to
convert millions of items to digital
form and start distributing them
through the Internet and on CD-ROM to
individuals and libraries around the
US. The items include: Mathew Brady's
Civil War photographs; speeches by
President Warren G. Harding; and maps
that pioneers used as they moved
west.
The library has unveiled its
multi-million dollar National Digital
Library project, with five million
rare American artifacts to be
available digitally by the year
2000.
"We have a responsibility to
share more information with more
people, Librarian of Congress James
Billington said at a news conference.
He hopes that someday the library's
mammoth collection -- more than 100
million items, including 35 million
books -- will be fully digitized.
Billington says he wants to
construct "a kind of electronic
version of what Andrew Carnegie did a
century ago" when he financed the
building of local libraries all over
the nation, creating the US public
library system.
Like Carnegie's project, it will
not come cheap. The library has lined
up $10 million in private support for
the first part of the program, and
estimates the five million items will
eventually cost $20 million. The
National Science Foundation has
awarded $24 million in grants to six
university-led teams to work on
digital library technologies.
But there will be limits. First,
the library is beginning with items
that are in the public domain,
because it does not want to deal with
the copyright issue just yet. A White
House taskforce under Patents and
Trademark Commissioner Bruce Lehman
is working on the issue and expects
to have recommendations early next
year.
Billington added that the library
will be producing only "plain
vanilla" digital versions of its
collection, provided in locations
available to everyone, "so that there
is no 'have and have-not' problem." A
Brady photo, for example, might also
carry a simple explanatory caption.
But it would be up to third
parties, Disney perhaps, to combine
the Brady photo with period music, a
narration, and battlefield maps to
produce a commercial Civil War CD-
ROM. That is exactly the way the
Library operates today with its
public domain archival material.
Billington's plan won praise for
the Washington Post. In an editorial,
the paper said, "Decisions the
library makes at this stage, even
seemingly minor ones, are likely to
have a substantial effect on how
cyberspace actually 'looks' -- who is
hooked up to what on the Internet or
information superhighway, via what
institutions or middlemen and for
what kind of fees."
(Kennedy Maize/19941024/Reader
Contact: Laura Campbell, 202-707-
5543)