James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress, on July 7 will announce the availability of guidelines for the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition. His announcement will be made during the President's Program of the American Library Association Annual Convention in New York City.
Made possible by a $2 million grant from Ameritech to the Library's National Digital Library Program, the competition will allow all libraries, archives, historical societies and other repositories in the United States (except federal libraries) that hold primary source materials in American history and culture to apply for awards to digitize their collections. These electronic collections will become part of the National Digital Library.
"Making collections of other institutions available from the National Digital Library helps fulfill the promise of the collaborative nature of this project," said Dr. Billington. "With Ameritech's help, the National Digital Library becomes truly national in scope."
The goal of the National Digital Library Program is to make freely available 5 million items on the Internet by the year 2000. The Library's homepage at http://www.loc.gov/ will offer access to the collections digitized by the competition's winners as well as continue to offer collections of the Library of Congress.
For the first year of the competition, preference will be given to collections that illuminate the period 1850-1920, as this is already a focus of many of the Library's electronic collections. Applicants are advised to view these American Memory collections online to determine ways in which their holdings complement or augment what is currently available.
Complete guidelines are available on the World Wide Web at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/award/. They are also available at http://www.ameritech.com/. Applications forms will be available from the same Web sites no later than Aug. 19.
To request guidelines and applications (when available) in printed form, contact Barbara Paulson at the Library of Congress at (202) 707-1517; fax (202) 707-6336; e-mail bpau@loc.gov or Crystal Ashton, Ameritech Library Services, at (801) 223-5330; fax (801) 223-5202; e-mail cra@amlibs.com.