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Background

The Library of Congress is pleased to participate as a sponsor of the Digital Libraries Initiative - Phase II announced by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in February 1998. In addition to NSF, the Library of Congress joins the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Library of Medicine (NLM), The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Endowment for the Humanities in sponsoring this second phase of the Digital Libraries Initiative. The Library of Congress is committed to digital libraries not only as an expansion of the traditional service offered by the nation's libraries but also as a new resource created by many hands and accessible via national and international computer networks.

The Digital Libraries Initiative - Phase II is intended to extend the research carried out during the initial awards announced in 1994, then sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Aeronautical and Space Administration. The first phase funded six research projects over a five-year period and signaled the beginning of a national conversation about digital libraries, promoting discussion of "the importance of improving the utility, effectiveness, performance, scalability and sustainability of current and future digital services and collections." Plans for the next steps in this important initiative were made in a 1996 workshop whose participants agreed that research should be conducted with real collections and real users in mind.  For more information, consult Digital Libraries Report of the Santa Fe Planning Workshop on Distributed Knowledge Work Environments.

The Phase II initiative includes content providers among the sponsors, thus guaranteeing the availability of a testbed that researchers may use to validate new technology in collections-and user-centered environments.  For this purpose, the Library of Congress is offering many of its American Memory collections, a substantial body of multimedia content: document and pictorial images, searchable text, recorded sound, maps, and motion pictures.  The Library hopes the research and collaborative efforts that emerge during the Digital Libraries Initiative - Phase II will lead to new technologies, new practices, and new communities of collection producers, content shapers, and end-users.  By stimulating a dialog among the tool builders, the content providers, and the users of digital materials, we hope to establish a tighter feedback loop for sharing findings associated with building, maintaining, using, and sustaining digital libraries.

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 Library of Congress
 2-20-98

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