American Memory: Technical summary
URL for collection:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html
Collection Overview
- Description
-
Correspondence, letterbooks, diaries, survey records, account books,
military papers and miscellaneous ephemera (1748-1799) accumulated by the
first President of the United States. The bulk of the 65,000 documents
were created during Washington's tour of duty as commander-in-chief of
the Continental Army and during his presidency.
- Source collection
-
Presidential Papers Series: The George Washington Papers,
Manuscript Division
LCCN
mm78-044693
[Link to catalog record (z39.50 query) will
not work when main cataloging system is not available.]
Text transcriptions derived from The Writings of Washington
from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799 , edited by John C.
Fitzpatrick while he was Chief of the Library of Congress Manuscript
Division.
LCCN
32-011075
[Link to catalog record (z39.50 query) will
not work when main cataloging system is not available.]
- Technical features
-
Handwritten letters, journals, financial records and ephemera.
Page-images produced from ca. 1960 microfilm.
Transcriptions for many items generated by converting (and marking up
in SGML)
The Writings of Washington
from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799 .
More information about the collection
and digitizing
the collection is available from the collection home page.
- Original material formats
-
- Manuscript (documents), English language.
- Number of original items
- 65,000
- Status of collection
- Letterbooks 1755-1799
released in February 1998. Other series will be released periodically
through 1999.
- Public access:
- The Library is not aware of any restrictions that inhibit public
access to this collection.
See notes on rights and
restrictions provided by the Library to users of this collection.
Aids to intellectual access
- Type & granularity
- Database with fields for author, title, uncontrolled subject terms,
date, item identifier, and links to related transcribed text and
page-image set.
Each database record describes a single item as described in the
microfilm inventory. For the letter-books, each letter is an item. All
items have page-images. Not all letters are available as transcribed text.
The online presentation in American Memory does not use the SGML
version of the The Writings of Washington directly. The SGML
document was processed to extract each transcribed letter as a separate
tagged record. These records are SGML-like, but not complete SGML
document instances. The file of tagged records is merged with the
database, indexed, and used to generate an HTML display on the fly.
- Linking to digital reproductions
- Database record contains identifier used in "directory name" for each
metaobject representing a document.
Naming system and page-turning dataset in place to link sequence and
present page images.
Filenames indicate page type, table of contents. Filename extension
differentiates image types.
Digital reproductions
Total file-space for digital reproductions:
47 Gbytes
Manuscript
(documents) |
Archival page image |
Service page-image |
Image for page-turning |
Source for searchable text
transcriptions |
Marker |
N/A |
Filename extension ".jpg" |
Filename extension ".gif" |
Filename extension ".sgm" |
Formats |
N/A |
JPEG/JFIF |
GIF |
SGML |
DTD |
n/a |
n/a |
n/a |
American Memory
(TEI conformant) |
Tonal
resolution |
n/a |
8 bit (grayscale) |
4 bit (grayscale) |
n/a |
Spatial
resolution
(approx) |
n/a |
200 dpi |
600x800 pixels |
n/a |
Quantity
(approx) |
N/A |
~12,000 in letterbooks |
~12,000 in letterbooks |
~40 |
Sample |
N/A |
Sample
service
|
Sample
page-turning
|
Sample
SGML
|
Note: The SGML files are not currently being
made available for public use. The online display is generated from
tagged text fragments derived from the SGML.
Library of Congress contribution to Digital Libraries Initiative - Phase II
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Technical notes:
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