LC National Digital Library Program announces collections from Brown Univ. and Univ. of Chicago

[Tamara Swora-Gober <tswo@xxxxxxx>]

This message has been widely posted

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The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program and the
Ameritech National Digital Library Competition announce the release of
two new collections

?American Environmental Photographs,1891-1936: Images from the
University of Chicago Library? at:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/icuhtml/

?African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920: Selected from the Collections
of Brown University? at:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/rpbhtml/

The American Environmental Photographs collection from the University of
Chicago Library consists of 4500 photographs documenting natural
environments, ecologies, and plant communities in their original state
throughout the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the
beginning of the twentieth century.  Produced between 1897 and 1931 by a
group of American botanists generally regarded as one of the most
influential in the development of modern ecological studies, these
photographs provide an overview of important representative natural
landscapes in their original, or nearly original, condition throughout
the United States.  They demonstrate the character of a wide range of
American topography, its forestation, aridity,  shifting coastal dune
complexes, and watercourses.  Comparison of these early photographs with
later views highlight the changes over the decades resulting from
natural alterations of the landscape, disturbances from construction,
mining, and industrialization, and effective natural resource usage. 
Henry Chandler Cowles (1869-1939) and other University of Chicago
ecologists took the photographs on field trips across the North American continent.

The African American Sheet Music collection from Brown University
consists of 1,305 pieces of African-American sheet music dating from
1850-1920.  The collection includes many songs from the heyday of
antebellum black face minstrelsy in the 1850s and from the abolitionist
movement of the same period.  Numerous titles are associated with the
novel and the play Uncle Toms Cabin. Civil War period music includes
songs about African-American soldiers and the plight of the newly
emancipated slave. Post-Civil War music reflects the problems of
Reconstruction and the beginnings of urbanization and the northern
migration of African Americans.  African-American popular composers
include James Bland, Ernest Hogan, Bob Cole, James Reese Europe, and
Will Marion Cook.  Twentieth century titles feature many photographs of
African-American musical performers, often in costume.  Unlike many
other sorts of published works, sheet music can be produced rapidly in
response to an event or public interest, and thus is a source of
relatively unmediated and unrevised perspectives on quickly changing
events and public attitudes.  Particularly significant in this
collection are the visual depictions of African Americans, which provide
much information about racial attitudes over the course of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The sheet music in this digital collection has been selected from the
Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library.  The full collection
consists of approximately 500,000 items, of which perhaps 250,000 are
currently available for use.  It is one of the largest collections of
sheet music in any library in the United States.  The sheet music,
primarily vocal music of American imprint, dates from the 18th century
to the present day, with the largest concentration of titles in the
period 1840-1950.  One of the most important categories in the Sheet
Music Collection is the African-Americana.  This consists of music by
and relating to African Americans, from the 1820s to the present day,
and consists of approximately 6,000 items.  Of that number, 1,700 items
are fully cataloged in MARC format, from which the titles digitized in
this project have been drawn.

In a section of the collection ?framing materials? for both of these
collections entitled ?Building the Digital Collection?, detailed
information is provided covering:  image specifications; capture,
quality review and delivery procedures; cataloging the collection; and
interoperability issues between the Library of Congress/ Brown
University and the Library of Congress/ University of Chicago such as
how the digital reproductions are presented, linking from catalog
records to the presentations, and the transformation and indexing of
catalog records.

The Ameritech Competition
With a gift from Ameritech the Library of Congress has sponsored a
competition from 1996 to 1999 to enable public, research, and academic
libraries, museums, historical societies, and archival institutions
(except federal institutions) to create digital collections of primary
resources.  These digital collections will complement and enhance the
collections of the National Digital Library Program at the Library of
Congress.  For information about the LC/Ameritech competition please
visit the competition home page which can be found at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award/index.html

Please send any questions about these collections and all other American
Memory Collections to NDLPCOLL@xxxxxxx