2. America and the World - International Content

The Library has already made significant efforts to develop a more international perspective and plans to expand these efforts in the next five years. In 1999 the Library launched the "Meeting of Frontiers" project, which highlights the parallel experiences of the United States and Russia in exploring, developing and settling their frontiers and the meeting of those frontiers in Siberia, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. "Meeting of Frontiers" already includes more than 2,500 items, comprising some 70,000 images, from the Library's rare book, manuscript, map, film and sound recording collections; materials that tell the stories of the explorers, fur traders, missionaries, exiles, gold miners and adventurers that peopled both frontiers and their interactions with the native peoples of Siberia and the American West. We now have agreements with two of the largest archives in Russia.

In the next five years the Library will launch America and the World which will place North America and the United States in its international context, beginning with the 1492 exploration and continuing through the mid-twentieth century. America and the World will focus on those individuals, social groups and institutions that brought the world to America and America to the world. It will demonstrate that despite isolationist rhetoric, America is a quintessentially international nation: populated by immigrants and internationalists, missionaries, writers, artists, and public servants who considered relations among nations to be not just between governments, but between people. America and the World provides a social history of America's international consciousness by providing access to primary source documents related to American immigrants and internationalists.

Archives in Spain, Italy, China and Brazil have expressed strong interest in contributing not only to America and the World, but also to other educational, historically significant initiatives highlighting the spread of democracy in the modern world and the history of statehood.

America and the World Outcomes

3.

Add major materials from ten countries to the educational content online over the next five years.

Build partnerships and work collaboratively with libraries and cultural institutions around

the world.

Enhance the overall understanding of the international nature of our social, economic and cultural environment.

Born Digital Content

Increasingly, publications - such as journals - that used to be published only in print form are now being published only in electronic form. We propose to redistribute four of the current NDLP staff to launch this effort. Their first goal will be an analysis and options including cost projections for the various approaches the Library may take to ensure that important and historically significant digital materials are captured and retained as part of the permanent research collections of the Library. Just as we have done with the print world, we must now discover how best to capture and collect in the digital world.

The major thrusts in the "born digital" arena for the next five years are: (1) to develop and implement the capacity to receive, examine, preserve and make permanently accessible to the public the electronic deposits received through the Copyright Office's CORDS (Copyright Office Electronic Registration, Recordation and Deposit System). Such deposits are currently estimated at 25,000 items in FY01, growing to 50,000 items by FY04; (2) to undertake a series of small pilots focused on specific kinds of "publications": electronic journals, web sites, and government documents; and (3) to continue developing various partnership models designed to ensure capture and permanent access to born digital materials in the most economic fashion. The Library has already completed pilot agreements of this sort with Bell & Howell and the Internet Archive. In FY00 the Library is actively pursuing partnerships with two major electronic journal publishers: the American Physical Society and Elsevier.

Born Digital Outcomes

Complete a series of pilots focused on specific kinds of "publications": electronic

journals, web sites, and government documents available in digital form to assess the

costs and benefits of capturing certain types of materials.

Develop partnership models with publishers designed to ensure the capture and
permanent access to born digital materials in the most economic fashion, e.g. the
American Physical Society and Elsevier.

Develop the capacity to capture and make permanently accessible the Copyright digital
deposits that are now estimated at 25,000 items in FY01 growing to 50,000 in FY04.
Establish policies and methods, including partnerships, that will enable the Library and
Copyright Office to sustain their historic missions cost effectively.

The heart of our digital future is the creation of an institution-wide digital repository (hardware and software) and repository architecture for managing large bodies of both original and converted historical digital content in multiple media and formats. The technical requirements of the digital repository are new state-of-the-art software as well as systems architecture that is not readily available in the market place. We will need one central architecture to take in electronic copyright deposits, to manage the NDL historical (converted) digital files, to acquire electronic materials online and make them available in our reading rooms, and to serve various parts of the institution that need to acquire, manage and make available digital content to their customers.

b.

Retention of the National Digital Library Program Staff

Key to the Library's approach for the future is retention of the human asset we have developed in the NDLP. The Crosswalk chart presented in Section IV illustrates the critical importance of retaining the existing NDLP staff positions both to continue the current National Digital Library Program and to seed critical evolving digital future functions. The Library intends for the NDLP staff positions requested in the FY 2001 budget to support more than two thirds of the digital future activities proposed.

The overall budget plan for FY2001 requests 133 FTEs, of which 90 are existing NDLP NTE (not-to-exceed) positions. Specifically, we propose to redistribute NDLP positions as follows:

retain 60 positions to continue to build and expand American Memory

content

re-assign 4 positions to develop the born digital program options.

re-assign 1 position to digital preservation activities

re-assign 6 positions to digital repository activities

retain 14 positions to continue public outreach and education services begun by the National Digital Library Program, including maintaining the Learning Page, the Learning Center, and general public outreach Web activities such as Today in History

re-assign 5 positions to develop new GIS services for Congress and to
seed a pilot program for online reference services

An additional 43 new positions are being requested in the areas of infrastructure and access services.

C. Digital Future Components

Our Digital Future Initiative for a National Online Library consists of three major components described in detail in Section III. The Components include Content, Access Services and Technology Backbone. In addition, Section VI, Resource Requirements, presents cost estimates for each component with related costing assumptions.