041607: US Library of Congress marches into digital age

April 16, 2007
Updated 10:32:32 (Mla time)
Virginie Montet
Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON -- The centuries-old Library of Congress in Washington is battling to keep up with the Internet age by digitizing millions of books, manuscripts and photos in an operation that could take decades.

Two million visitors walk through the doors of the library each year. But in a sign of how times are changing, the same number of people consult its pages on the Internet every single day.

"It's a philosophical shift for the library," said Beth Dulabahn, one of the top advisors on the project. "The vast majority of what is digitized will be on the web."

When the plans first began 12 years ago, plenty of people inside the world's largest library -- and the oldest federal cultural institution in America -- were hard to win over.

"At first people were skeptical or not hugely enthusiastic. Some people said we were giving it away. But that's what we want to do," she said.

With 11 million items digitized so far, Dulabahn says this is "only the tip of the iceberg" because a "huge quantity of items and documents is always being poured in."

The work completed so far covers less than 10 percent of the 134 million books and documents filed along the 853 kilometers (530 miles) of shelves in the immense library which was first founded in 1800.

British troops in 1814 torched the Capitol building where the library was first housed, destroying its core collection, but a new library was built the next year with the purchase of Thomas Jefferson's personal collection of 6,000 books.

The library's older documents were among the first to be digitized, in part because documents published before 1923 fall into the public domain, allowing library officials to avoid the thorny issues involved with author copyrights.

But project advisors also wanted to showcase a unique historical selection for Internet users, including famous manuscripts, maps and pictures.

The collections, viewable on www.loc.gov, are showcased through windows such as "American Memory" featuring US historical items, or "Global Gateway" with multilingual contributions from foreign libraries.

"A child can go to (former US president) George Washington's letters, can look how his handwriting looks like and download a picture of Mt. Vernon where he used to live," said Jeremy Adamson, who heads the images department.

It's a "very democratic and liberating thing," he said. "People react with much more engagement."

And the library learns from the process, too.

"We got an e-mail from northern Europe after we put out a collection of early photographs of Russia before the (1917) Revolution," Adamson recalled. "They said, 'no, it was not this village, it was this one'."

The Library of Congress has spent 160 million dollars on digitization since 1994 and has received an extra $38 million in private funds toward the goal.

The work is hardly glamorous. A technician works in a dark room, taking digital pictures. A large color document could take 20 minutes or more, but in the general rhythm of a day's work, 75-200 documents are digitized.

Some non-exclusive contracts are signed with private partners. The search engine Google has also taken part, scanning 5,000 books that fall into the public domain and 18,000 Congressional documents.

The library is even stepping into other digital domains, by conserving websites such as those on US elections, Hurricane Katrina, the Olympic Games and Iranian blogs, whose lives on the web tend to be otherwise quite short.

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