The American Memory Project, the digital artifact section of the Library of Congress, announced Thursday the 10 winners of their US$2 million grant project, moving rapidly to expand their online archives to "millions and millions" by the year 2000. With the 3-year grant from the phone service Ameritect, the AMP also stands to radically change the way that academics do research, taking the mustiness out of "source material" forever.
The award winners, including Harvard, Brown, Duke, and the Ohio Historical Society, have been given significant funding to move their archival material online by next year. The archives include sheet music by black Americans from 1850-1920, slave records and music, photos of the American frontier, and stereoscopic shots of 19th-century small-towns from the New York Public Library.
"Digitizing will reduce the amount of time researching from days to hours, will allow distant researchers to maximize their time at the collection, and give them access to materials out of circulation because of their fragility," says spokesperson Jill Brett.
But more importantly, while the database sets up a clearinghouse of some of the country's best - and most inaccessible - archives, it helps to preserve them in one fell swoop. Each of the winning institutions are expected to digitize their own materials, prompting them to jumpstart their digital storage and presentation programs.
Carl Goodman, curator at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York and self-described "big fan" of AMP, describes the site as a "beacon of hope." "People enjoy wading through a voluminous amount of material and finding what they want," says Goodman, "but not getting it all handed to them in a produced, Discovery Channel way."
Since 1990, the Digital Library has been storing their archives on CD-ROMs, but that project fell by the wayside in 1995 with the advent of the Internet. "The audience for the archives is so broad that we go directly to the Web," says Brett.
Ann Frazier of the Ohio Historical Society said they will be putting more than 22,000 pages of historical documents online.
"Traditionally, academics have been the ones who used our holdings, but they have not been available to a broad audience - only to the people who visited," Frazier says. "And now they become available to a world-wide audience." Beginning 1 September, the Society will begin scanning their documents, creating an archive on their server and a mirror site in Washington.
Some believe a digital archive could never match the live version. "When you're artifact-based, they're always a gap with the experience of the 3-D object - like Archie Bunker's chair in the Smithsonian," says Goodman. "You can experience a QuickTime panoramic of the chair, but you're missing something."
But Goodman adds that the digitized version of flat objects such as photographs "is very close to the thing in itself."
The site currently has exceptional artifact narratives, like their recovered Walt Whitman manuscripts and Houdini biography. The first of the new high-quality, digital databases will debut when the American Treasures Exhibition opens on 1 May. "It's the largest exhibition of photos the library has ever done," Brett says. "It's got shockwave and a real high-end photo quality."
From the Wired News New York bureau at FEED magazine.
