[PADG:915] LC National Digital Library Program announces new online collections

[Tamara Swora-Gober <tswo@xxxxxxx>]

This message is being widely posted

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The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program announces the
release of two new collections at American Memory where over 70 online
collections are now available.

?From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection,
1824-1909? at

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aapchtml/aapchome.html

?Omaha Indian Music:  From the American Folklife Center? at

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/omhhtml/omhhome.html

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?From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection,
1824-1909? contains 397 pamphlets written by African Americans and
others on a variety of subjects relating to African-American history,
including slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, and
Reconstruction, all from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
 The materials range from personal accounts and public orations to
organizational reports and legislative speeches.  Authors include Lydia
Maria Child, Alexander Crummell, Frederick Douglass, Kelly Miller,
Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington.  The
collection offers page images of each pamphlet as well as fully
searchable transcribed texts and browse lists organized by author,
title, and subject.  Although they do not offer a comprehensive history
of African-American life, these pamphlets provide insight into the ideas
and events of their day in a historically important physical format that
often fails to survive the test of time.  Those interested in publishing
will enjoy the variety of papers, type faces, and printing methods used
to produce these materials.  The collection complements the American
Memory Daniel A.P. Murray Pamphlet Collection at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aap/

Building the Digital Collection

The digital images that make up ?From Slavery to Freedom: The
African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909? were created at the
Library of Congress by contract staff using a variety of capture
devices.  Most pages were scanned as bitonal TIFF images using a Bookeye
overhead scanner.  Pages with illustrations and significant handwriting
were scanned as 8-bit grayscale TIFFs.  Color graphs and color covers
that were too dark for bitonal scanning were scanned as 24-bit color
TIFFs.  Grayscale and color scanning was performed on two devices. 
Small disbound or single-leaf items that could be inverted were scanned
on a UMAX 11 x 17-inch flatbed scanner.  Items that could not be
inverted or that were larger than 11 x 17 inches were scanned with a
PhaseOne Photophase Plus digital camera back mounted on an overhead Toyo
4x 5-inch studio camera. 

The preparation of the searchable texts occurred offsite, where a
subcontractor rekeyed the documents from the page images.. The text was
transformed with an OmniMark program to HTML 3.2 for indexing and
viewing with Web browsers, including links from the text to the page
images.  MARC records were enhanced to provide access to the collection,
with links either to the full text or to page images. In addition, a
page-turning feature allows consecutive viewing of the page images. 

>From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection,
1824-1909 can be found at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aapchtml/

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?Omaha Indian Music from the American Folklife Center? documents the
music of the Omaha Indian Tribe.  It includes 44 recordings made by
Francis La Flesche and Alice Cunningham Fletcher between 1895 and 1897,
as well as recordings made by staff of the American Folklife Center at
the 1983 Omaha harvest celebration pow-wow and the 1985 Hethu?shka
Society concert held at the Library of Congress.  Also included with
this collection are interviews with members of the Omaha tribe that
provide background information about the songs performed, field notes
and tape logs made by Center staff during the 1983 pow-wow, and
photographs and related publicity materials from the various
performances. 

Digitizing the Sound Recordings

The wax cylinder recordings presented in the online collection were
taken from the Omaha Indian Music: Historical Recordings from the
Fletcher/La Flesche Collection (AFC L71) preservation tape copy
recordings.  The cylinders were played back onto magnetic tape using a
modified Edison Home Phonograph.  The analog preservation copy tapes
were recorded in a half-track format at 7.5 ips.  These preservation
tape copies served as the source for the digital audio tape (RDAT)
copies which were, in turn, used to produce the digital files presented online.

The original recordings for the 1983 Omaha harvest celebration pow-wow,
the 1983 interview, and the 1999 interview sound recordings are analog
recordings made on Nagra tape recorders, generally in a stereo mode and
recorded at 7.5 ips.  At the pow-wow, a variety of microphone
configurations was used, some of which are documented in photographs and
fieldnotes included in this presentation.  The original 1985 Neptune
Plaza Library of Congress recording is also analog, recorded at the
concert on ten-inch open-reel tape. Each of these analog recordings was
transferred to digital audio tapes (RDAT) that served as the source for
the production of the digital files presented here.  The WAVE files were
created from the RDAT tapes at a sampling rate of 22,050 samples per
second, 16-bit word length, and a single (mono) channel.  The RealAudio
files were derived from the WAVE files by digital processing and were
created for users who have at least a 14.4 modem. 

Digitizing the Photographs

The original negatives and color transparencies in the Omaha collection
consist primarily of 35mm black-and-white negatives and color slides. 
In order to provide researchers with access to the entire body of
photographic documentation from the 1983 pow-wow and the 1985 concert,
the online collection includes both blocks of images and individual
selections.  For the black-and- white negatives, the blocks represent
original camera rolls and are the digital equivalent of a contact sheet.
 For the color slides, the blocks represent the storage holders used by
the American Folklife Center to archive the photographs.  Each holder
contains up to twenty images as selected and identified by the
photographer.  These photographer's selections are more or less in
"shooting order," with only the most redundant or poor-quality
photographs discarded.  Taken together, the digital proof sheets and
color storage units present all of the 1,090 photographs in the
collection.  The online collection also includes 326 individually
digitized black-and-white and color photographs.  These images were
selected by the team that assembled the online collection. 

Digitizing the Manuscripts

Manuscript materials were scanned onsite by the NDLP paper scanning and
text conversion contractor.  UMAX flatbed scanners were used to produce
the images of most of the manuscripts.  The Library's online
presentation of the data pages also employs a "page turner" or
"electronic binder" that permits the user to navigate the manuscript
pages, turning to the next or a previous image, or selecting an image by
number.  The inline service images displayed in the browser are GIF
images with a spatial resolution of about 495 x 640 pixels; a hyperlink
on the image provides access to the master image. 

?Omaha Indian Music from the American Folklife Center? can be found at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/omhhtml/

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Please direct any questions about these collections to ndlpcoll@xxxxxxx