December 18, 1996

Contact: Guy Lamolinara (202) 707-9217

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Library of Congress Named Among "The Best Web Sites of 1996" by Time Magazine

The American Memory historical collections, available from the National Digital Library (NDL) Program of the Library of Congress, are among "the best Web sites of 1996," according to Time magazine in its Dec. 23 issue.

Calling the site a "treasure trove of memorabilia converted into easily downloadable recordings, images and text," the magazine made special mention of the Mathew Brady Civil War photographs, the Houdini Collection and Walt Whitman's notebooks.

The Library also has been cited for its Web site's excellence by the Great American Web Site, which bills itself as "a citizen's guide to the treasures of the U.S. government on the World Wide Web."

The Library was recognized in the "Best Agency or Department Web Sites" category along with the sites of the Departments of State, Commerce and Defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Smithsonian Institution.

In the "Ten Best Individual Web Sites" category, the American Memory collections were called "the most wonderful of the Library's efforts, in a plan to digitize the greatest storehouse of knowledge in the world." American Memory took top honors in the "Best Sites to Explore U.S. History" category.

These citations are only among the most recent to be garnered by the Library for its electronic efforts. For example, the Library's Web site was among the six finalists in the "Education" category of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) Awards Program, one of the leading forums for the recognition of "extraordinary achievement" on the Internet.

American Memory, one of 60 finalists in 10 categories, was chosen from a field of nearly 1,000 nominees. The NII Awards Program recognizes work in 10 categories that "touch on all areas of America's work, play and community life."

American Memory (http://www.loc.gov/), a project of the NDL Program, aims to make freely available on the Internet millions of rare and unique Library of Congress items relating to American history. Current on-line collections include daguerreotype photographs; documents relating to slavery, the civil rights movement and women's suffrage; life histories from the Federal Writers' Project; sound recordings of political leaders; and early motion pictures of vaudeville acts, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and other subjects.

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PR 96-182
12/18/96
ISSN 0731-3527