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The National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is a project by the United States
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...
to assemble a digital library of reproductions of
primary source In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called an original source) is an Artifact (archaeology), artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was cre ...
materials to support the study of the history and culture of the United States. The NDLP brought online 24 million books and documents from the Library of Congress and other research institutions.


History

Begun in 1995 after a five-year pilot project, the program began digitizing selected collections of
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...
archival materials that chronicle the nation's history. In order to reproduce collections of books, pamphlets, motion pictures,
manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has ...
s and sound recordings, the Library has created a range of digital entities: bitonal document images,
grayscale In digital photography, computer-generated imagery, and colorimetry, a greyscale (more common in Commonwealth English) or grayscale (more common in American English) image is one in which the value of each pixel is a single sample (signal), s ...
and color pictorial images,
digital video Digital video is an electronic representation of moving visual images (video) in the form of encoded digital data. This is in contrast to analog video, which represents moving visual images in the form of analog signals. Digital video comprises ...
and
audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound *Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum *Digital audio, representation of sound ...
, and searchable
e-text e-text (from "''electronics, electronic text''"; sometimes written as etext) is a general term for any Electronic document, document that is read in digital data, digital form, and especially a document that is mainly text. For example, a compute ...
s. To provide access to the reproductions, the project developed a range of descriptive elements: bibliographic records, finding aids, and introductory texts and programs, as well as
index Index (: indexes or indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, an item on the Halo Array in the ...
ing the full texts for certain types of content. The reproductions were produced with a variety of tools:
image scanner An image scanner (often abbreviated to just scanner) is a device that optically scans images, printed text, handwriting, or an object and converts it to a digital image. The most common type of scanner used in the home and the office is the flatbe ...
s,
digital camera A digital camera, also called a digicam, is a camera that captures photographs in Digital data storage, digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film or film stock. Dig ...
s, devices that digitize audio and video, and human labor for rekeying and encoding texts. American Memory employs national-standard and well established industry-standard formats for many digital reproductions, e.g., texts encoded with
Standard Generalized Markup Language The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on two postulates": * Declarative: Markup should de ...
(SGML) and images stored in
Tagged Image File Format Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is w ...
(TIFF) files or compressed with the
Joint Photographic Experts Group The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is the joint committee between ISO/ IEC JTC 1/ SC 29 and ITU-T Study Group 16 that created and maintains the JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, JPEG XT, JPEG XS, JPEG XL, and related digital image standard ...
(JPEG) algorithm. In other cases, the lack of well established standards has led to the use of emerging formats, e.g., RealAudio (for audio),
QuickTime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...
(for moving images), and MrSID (for maps). Technical information by types of material and by individual collections is also available on the site.National digital library program. (n.d.). Retrieved September 21, 2015, from Library of Congress website: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dli2/html/lcndlp.html The Library received funding from Congress and private sector donations, sponsoring a three-year competition to enable institutions like libraries to digitize their U.S. history collections.


See also

*
Digital curation Digital curation is the selection, Preservation (library and archival science), preservation, maintenance, collection, and archiving of Digital data, digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains, and adds value to repositories of digita ...
*
Digital library A digital library (also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, a library without walls, or a digital collection) is an online database of digital resources that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital ...
*
Digital preservation In library science, library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal process to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable in the long term. It involves planning, resource allocation, and appli ...
*
List of digital library projects This is a list of digital library projects. See also * Bibliographic database * List of academic databases and search engines * List of online databases * List of online encyclopedias * List of open-access journals * List of search engines ...


References

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External links


Global GatewayLC 21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of CongressLibrary of Congress, American MemoryThe Library of Congress, Sustainability of Digital FormatsThe Library of Congress, Web Capture
{{DEFAULTSORT:Library Of Congress National Digital Library Program Ebook suppliers American digital libraries
National Digital Library Program The National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is a project by the United States Library of Congress to assemble a digital library of reproductions of primary source materials to support the study of the history and culture of the United States. ...
Supercomputer sites University of California, San Diego Web archiving initiatives