American Memory:   Technical summary

 George Washington Collection Images

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
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 [Site Map]
Collections available: [List] [Rights] [Samples] [Handover]
Technical notes: [Documents] [Images] [Maps] [Sound recordings] [Motion pictures]