LC National Digital Library Program announces release of Coolidge Collection

[Tamara Swora-Gober <tswo@xxxxxxx>]

This announcement is being widely posted.

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The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program announces the
release of  ?Prosperity and Thrift:  The Coolidge Era and the Consumer
Economy, 1921-1929?  at the American Memory website, with materials from
the following Library of Congress Divisions:  Manuscript Division,
Prints and Photographs Division, Collections Management Division for the
General Collections, and the Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded
Sound Division all at:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/coolhtml/coolhome.html

This online compilation, made possible with the generous support of
Laurance S. and Mary French Rockefeller, assembles a broad array of
Library of Congress source materials documenting the prosperity of the
Coolidge years, the nation's transition to a mass consumer economy, and
the role of government in this transition.  The themes of the collection
were identified by the American Memory project team in collaboration
with Library of Congress staff members and an advisory panel of
historians.  The collection materials draw attention on the one hand to
business concerns, such as advertising, marketing, merchandising, and
industrialization, and on the other to popular notions about responsible
consumerism, thriftiness, and efficiency in the home.  The collection
also focuses on President Coolidge?s idea of government, and on
Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover's standardization initiatives. 
Other materials document groups that could not participate fully in the
emergent consumer economy, notably farmers and immigrants.  Collection
materials suggest connections among some of the key technological
developments, government structures, social organizations, and cultural
assumptions that worked together to reinforce the mass consumer economy.

Among items of special interest are research studies and manuscript
materials that document the spending habits of African Americans, the
activities of African American businesses, and the northward migration
in search of better opportunities.  Other notable materials include
information on consumer activism; studies of urban and rural women as
consumers; selections from the papers of Edward L Bernays, a founding
father of public relations; and the diaries of White House physician
Joel T. Boone, giving his private view of the Coolidge family.

The collection is in a variety of formats and includes nearly 200
selections from twelve collections of personal papers and two
collections of institutional papers from the Manuscript Division; 74
books, pamphlets, and legislative documents from the General
Collections, along with selections from 34 consumer and trade journals;
over 60 speeches by Coolidge, 8 of which are published here for the
first time; 181 photographs from the National Photo Company Collection
held by the Prints and Photographs Division; and 5 short films and 7
audio selections of Coolidge speeches from the Motion Picture,
Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division.

Digitizing the Collection

The documents included in Prosperity and Thrift comprise manuscripts and
printed matter. Each document is reproduced as a set of facsimile page
images and a searchable text.  For 104 documents, the accompanying
searchable text consists of a transcription.  Although a few document
images were produced in 1998-99, most of the collection's documents were
scanned in 1994-95 using the Xerox (Kurzweil) K5200 scanner.  The Xerox
K5200 scanner does not accept pages over 8.5 inches in width.  Larger
pages, including many of the periodical issues in the collection, were
scanned on other tabletop scanners.

The digital reproductions of the 185 photographs in Prosperity and
Thrift were produced by scanning 8 x 10-inch negatives that represent
copies of prints in the collections of the Library's Prints and
Photographs Division. 

The original motion pictures included in Prosperity and Thrift are 35 mm
prints and these were transferred to BetaSP videotape.  In the video
mastering process, the playback speeds were adjusted to present the
appearance of natural motion to the greatest degree possible.  In order
to facilitate downloading by American Memory users, the file sizes of
the best quality (and hence largest) MPEG versions have been limited to
40 megabytes or less, which represents a running time of about four minutes.

The collection is accompanied by an alphabetically arranged guide
providing information about prominent individuals, organizations,
concepts, and publications of the Coolidge era replete with hyperlink
pointers to collection materials.  

There are now over 60 collections available at the American Memory website
http://memory.loc.gov

Please send any questions about this collection to NDLPCOLL@xxxxxxxx