[PADG:862] LC announces release of Meeting of Frontiers Web Site

[Tamara Swora-Gober <tswo@xxxxxxx>]

This message is being widely posted

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS - MEETING OF FRONTIERS WEB SITE CHRONICLES PARALLEL
HISTORY OF AMERICA?S WEST AND RUSSIA?S EAST

The parallel experiences of the United States and Russia in exploring,
developing and settling their frontiers and the meeting of those
frontiers in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest is the focus of a new Web
site created by the Library of Congress under a special congressional
appropriation.  The site is available at 

http://frontiers.loc.gov.

"Meeting of Frontiers" includes more than 2,500 items, comprising some
70,000 images, from the Library's rare book, manuscript, map, prints and
photograph, film and sound recording collections that tell the stories
of the explorers, fur traders, missionaries, exiles, gold miners and
adventurers that peopled both frontiers and their interactions with the
native peoples of Siberia and the American West.  The site is completely
bilingual, in English and Russian, and is intended for use in U.S. and
Russian schools and libraries and by the general public in both
countries.  Scholars, particularly those who do not have ready access to
major research libraries, will benefit from the wealth of primary
material included in ?Meeting of Frontiers,? much of which has never
been published or is extremely rare.

Collections available in ?Meeting of Frontiers? include the Frank G.
Carpenter Collection of photographs from Alaska in the 1910s; the John
C. Grabill Collection of photographs of 1880s frontier life in Colorado,
South Dakota and Wyoming; the Yudin Collection of papers from the
Russian-American Company (1786-1830); and selections from the Alaska
Russian Church Archives.

"Meeting of Frontiers" is a pilot project that was developed in 1999 at
the Library of Congress by a team of Library staff and American and
Russian consultants.  The pilot will be expanded in the coming years
through the addition of materials from the Library's own collections,
from the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks
and from other U.S. institutions.  It will also feature materials from
partner institutions in Russia, including the Russian State Library in
Moscow, the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg and the
Institute of History of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of
Sciences in Novosibirsk.

"Meeting of Frontiers" is funded by a special appropriation in the
Library's FY 1999 budget, which is intended for the Library to obtain
digital copies of unique and rare materials from Russia and to make
those materials freely available through the Internet.  Additional
support for development of the project in Russia is being provided by
the Open Society Institute of Russia.  "Meeting of Frontiers" is the
Library's first major digital project involving international material
and extensive cooperation with foreign institutions to obtain materials
for the Library's collections in digital form.  It is the first
component of an international digital library that will build upon the
Library's National Digital Library Program.

The collection presentation links to items included in American Memory
as illustrations of the Frontiers themes.  The descriptive content for
this site is bilingual ---English and Russian and the English HTML is
searchable.  You may have to adjust your browser's settings to view
pages in Cyrillic properly (for <4.0 browsers).  Instructions on how to
do so are available via the Frontiers homepage and the About the Site page.

About the Site
The design of the pilot site combines elements of two approaches used by
the Library of Congress in presenting educational material in electronic
form: the collections-based approach of the National Digital Librarys
American Memory program, and the method of integrating items from many
collections to tell a single story that is used in Exhibitions: An
Online Gallery.   http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/

The site is designed to operate on three levels. 

First, it provides an overview of the historical experience of the
frontier in Russia and America through six narrative sections: 
Exploration, Colonization, Development, Alaska, Frontiers and National
Identity, and Mutual Perceptions.  Each of these sections includes
images that illustrate major events and themes, a bibliography with
suggestions for further reading, and links to other web sites with
related content.

Second, within each narrative section there are several modules that
present in greater depth themes relevant to that section.  These modules
contain many more images and additional explanatory text.  They
highlight both the similarities and the differences in the American and
Russian frontier experiences.

Third, Meeting of Frontiers contains complete or substantial parts of
more than twenty collections that have been selected for digitizing
because of their relevance to the American West and Siberia and the
Russian Far East. Items used to illustrate the narrative sections and
the thematic modules are drawn from but represent only a small portion
of these collections.

Users who are new to the subjects treated in Meeting of Frontiers are
advised to follow the narrative text and then explore the collections in
depth.  Users who already have a general grasp of the subject or who are
interested only in a specialized aspect of American or Russian history
may want to proceed directly to the collections.

Please direct questions about the Frontiers exhibition to mof@xxxxxxx