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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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