September 5, 1997

Contact:
Guy Lamolinara (202) 707-9217

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Library of Congress To Host First Meeting of National Digital Library Advisory Committee

On Sept. 12, the Library of Congress will host the first meeting of its National Digital Library (NDL) Advisory Committee, established to advise the institution on key policy issues related to its National Digital Library Program.

American Memory, a project of the Library's National Digital Library Program, is making freely available on the Internet the most important of the Library's American historical collections at http://www.loc.gov/.

The NDL Advisory Committee is a distinguished group of nine historians, educators and librarians. One of the group's chief duties will be to assist the Library in selecting which collections to digitize for American Memory by pointing out those materials that will best serve the educational and research needs of the nation. The committee will also advise on how to present the raw materials of American history to students, researchers and lifelong learners.

The one-day meeting on Sept. 12 will be followed in six months by another meeting that will conclude with the committee's first major recommendations.

Members of the National Digital Library Advisory Committee are:

Educators: James R. Giese, Social Science Education Consortium, Boulder, Colo.; Joy Joyce, Willowbrook High School, Villa Park, Ill.; Jacqueline Mancall, College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University, Philadelphia

Historians: Edward Ayers, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Thomas Holt, University of Chicago

Librarians: Charles Beard, State University of West Georgia, Carrollton, Ga.; Martin Gomez, Brooklyn Public Library; Deanna Marcum, Council on Library and Information Resources, Washington, D.C.; William Walker, New York Public Library

The National Digital Library Program has already made available more than 300,000 rare items from the Library's incomparable collections of American history. Recently added materials include important manuscripts dating from the 15th to the mid-20th centuries, panoramic photographs and images documenting the women's suffrage movement. Other on-line collections include selected notebooks of Walt Whitman, early films of Thomas Edison, sound recordings of political leaders and documents relating to the civil rights movement.

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PR 97-146
9/5/97
ISSN 0731-3527