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The Library of Congress Ameritech competition and the National Digital
Library Program announce the release of collections from the

University of Washington Libraries:
“American Indians of the Pacific Northwest and History of the American
West, 1860-1920” at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/wauhtml/

and from the Denver Public Library
“History of the American West, 1860-1920” at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/codhtml/

With a gift from Ameritech, the Library of Congress sponsored a
three-year competition to enable public, research, and academic
libraries, museums, historical societies, and archival institutions
(except federal institutions) to create digital collections of primary
resources. These digital collections complement and enhance the
collections of the National Digital Library Program at the Library of Congress.

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The American Indians of the Pacific Northwest is the product of the
University of Washington Libraries and this digital collection
integrates over 2,300 photographs and 7,700 pages of text relating to
the American Indians in two cultural areas of the Pacific Northwest, the
Northwest Coast and Plateau. These resources illustrate many aspects of
life and work, including housing, clothing, crafts, transportation,
education, and employment. The materials are drawn from the extensive
collections of the University of Washington Libraries, the Cheney Cowles
Museum/Eastern Washington State Historical Society in Spokane, and the
Museum of History and Industry in Seattle.

Building the Digital Collection
The digital images of the heterogeneous pictorial and textual material
in this collection were captured using a variety of scanners. Most
items were scanned directly from originals, but photographic
intermediates were sometimes used. The textual materials have not been
transcribed or converted, but are presented through a page-turning
interface. This interface is one component of the CONTENT system used
by the University of Washington Libraries to manage the collection and
deliver a local presentation of the collection. The CONTENT Software
Suite is developed and supported by the Center for Information Systems
Optimization in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the
University of Washington.

Intellectual Access to the Collection
Descriptive records for the items in this collection were generated
using two distinct but consistent data dictionaries, one a data
dictionary for the pictorial images and one for the text resources. The
data elements in each dictionary were chosen to allow recording of
details appropriate to the different forms of content (e.g. studio name
for photographs). The elements in each set can be mapped to the fifteen
simple Dublin Core elements to allow coherent cross-collection searching.

Interoperation between the Library of Congress and the University of
Washington
Sets of descriptive records for the pictorial and textual components of
the collection were delivered to the Library of Congress, where they
have been indexed with InQuery to allow full integration into American
Memory. Each record has a link to a presentation of the corresponding
item that is generated dynamically by a server at the University of
Washington.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/wauhtml/

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The second collection, History of the American West, 1860-1920 was
created by the Denver Public Library. It includes over 30,000
photographs, drawn from the holdings of the Western History and
Genealogy Department at Denver Public Library. These photographs
illuminate many aspects of the history of the American West. Most of
the photographs were taken between 1860 and 1920. They illustrate
Colorado towns and landscape, document the place of mining in the
history of Colorado and the West, and show the lives of Native Americans
from more than forty tribes living west of the Mississippi River. Also
included are World War II photographs of the 10th Mountain Division, ski
troops based in Colorado who saw action in Italy.

Building the Digital Collection
Since 1995, the Photography Department of the Western History/ Genealogy
Department of Denver Public Library has been scanning photographs from
its collection of over 600,000 photographs with the aim of using digital
images as a substitute for study of the original photographic materials
and to protect the original negatives and prints from handling. Since
November 1995, images have been accessible on the Denver Public
Library's internal network. In the 1996/97 round of the Library of
Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition, Denver Public
Library received an award to support the scanning of 7,500 of these
photographs and to allow access through American Memory to additional
photographs that illustrate the history of the western United States.
At the same time, Denver Public Library was working with the Colorado
Historical Society and the Denver Art Museum and the Colorado Alliance
of Research Libraries to develop a combined catalog for photographs that
would support online access to the digitized images. This catalog was
made accessible over the World Wide Web in December 1998.

Bibliographic records for over 30,000 photographs digitized by the
Denver Public Library were delivered to the Library of Congress by the
Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries for indexing as part of American
Memory. These records, in the MARC format, include detailed subject
headings. Denver Public Library delivered the corresponding thumbnail
images. Copies of the same records are integrated into the vast WorldCat
union catalog maintained by OCLC. The 856 field in each records
includes a URL for the image as presented through Denver Public
Library's own online photography collection. The same presentation is
therefore integrated into American Memory, WorldCat, and Denver Public
Library's own photography collection catalog. The URLs have the form
http://gowest.coalliance.org/cgi-bin/imager?nnnnnnnn. The use of a
dynamic program or script with a unique identifier number for each image
as a variable parameter (rather than a static HTML page) ensures that
Denver Public Library can modify its display or reorganize the
underlying file structure without the need to modify the catalog records
or worry about bad links in other copies of the records This approach
ensures a reasonable degree of persistence for the URL as an identifier
and link.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/codhtml/

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Information about the LC/Ameritech Competition can be found at the
following URL:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award/

Please direct any questions about the collections to [log in to unmask]


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