„AMERICAN MEMORY“ Presentation of the digital public historical database of the Library of Congress INTRODUCTION „American Memory is ment to be a source of historical and creative documents. AM illustrates the historical and cultural development of the USA in many ways. The whole content of AM goes back to all kinds of documents which original are in the property the library of congress.

History Everything has begun with a project called „nation`s memory“ this project worked from successfull. „Nation`s memory“ dealed with the digitization of the historical collection of the congress and tried to find a way to make them easier to handle for everyone. The first idea within this project was the distribution of CD-ROMS to fourty four schools accross the country. The Resonance of teachers and students was huge and soon they demand more of this historical content in digitized form. In 1994 when the spread out of the internet has begun the members of this project took the chance to find a solution to offer a public access via WWW.

Technical information The whole database works with so called meta-data protocols. Furthermore it deals with current technologies of preserve documents of all formats like mentioned before. The whole database is changing permanently and getting better and easier to use by researchers and interested people.

Organisation structure The whole database consists of nine million items of american history and culture, which can be used there. The whole content is divided into more than 100 thematic collections depends on the origin format of these documents, their subject or who first created them. All these items can be found by different ways e.g. idividually with the possibility of full text search or you can even get in contact with the staff of a servise, which is called „ask the librerian“ here you can get advice and support for expert search.

Exampel 1 for a conventional full text search When you e.g. type in „Bill Clinton“ in the the upper right field for full text search (red marked)

COLLECTION TITLES UPPER RIGHT YOU CAN SEE THE NAME OF EACH COLLECTION SO YOU CAN SORT OUT WHAT IS MORE INTERESING FOR YOUR SEARCH AND WHAT IS NOT. ITEM TITLES UPPER LEFT YOU CAN FIND EACH TITLE OF THE HOSTED ITEMS THIS CAN MAKE IT EASIER IN THIS CASE TO FIND WHAT YOU SEARCH IN THE RIGHT CONTEXT.

Example 2: GALLERY VIEW FOR SEARCH RESULTS

The Gallery view is another possibility to get a fast overview of the content of each item.