[PADG:1467] Library of Congress National Digitial Library Program announces release of Samuel Morse Papers

[Tamara Swora-Gober <tswo@xxxxxxx>]

This announcement is being widely posted.

****************************
The National Digital Library Program of the Library of Congress and the
Manuscript Division announce the release of the online collection of the
Samuel F.B. Morse Papers available at the American Memory Web site at:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/sfbmhtml/

Through the generous support of the AT&T Foundation, a selection of
6,500 library items, or approximately 50,000 digital images from the
collection is now available.  The Morse Papers consist of
correspondence, letterbooks, diaries, drawings, clippings, printed
matter, maps, and other miscellaneous materials documenting Morse?s
invention of the electromagnetic telegraph and his participation in the
development of telegraph systems in the United States and abroad, as
well as his career as a painter, family life, travels, and interest in
early photography and religion.  The online collection, dating from
1793-1919, offers a well-rounded portrayal of the life of Samuel F.B. Morse.

Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on April 27, 1791.  He was
a graduate of Yale and trained as an artist at the Royal Academy of Arts
in London, England.  Morse showed great promise and was well-respected
as a painter; he tried to earn a living painting portraits but found
little financial success.  It was on his sea voyage home from studying
art in Europe in 1832 that Morse first conceived the idea of the
electromagnetic telegraph.  For twelve years, he worked on and off to
gather enough knowledge and experience to build his telegraph.  In 1843,
Congress appropriated $30,000 for Morse to build an experimental
telegraph line from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland.  On May
24, 1844, he sent his famous message, "What hath God wrought?" from the
Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol to the B&O Railroad Depot in
Baltimore.  That original tape is a major highlight of the collection
and one of the treasures of the Library of Congress.

Morse also made a foray into early photography.  After meeting the
French artist and inventor of the daguerreotype, Louis Jacques Mande
Daguerre, while in Paris in 1838, Morse returned home to be among the
first to practice photography in America.  He even taught the
daguerreotype process to a number of students, including Mathew Brady.

The collection also includes sketches relating to the telegraph, art,
and places Morse visited in Europe, as well as correspondence from many
nineteenth-century American artists and historical figures such as James
Fenimore Cooper, Thomas Cole, the Marquis de Lafayette, William Henry
Seward, Roger Brooke Taney, Mathew Brady, and Eli Whitney.

Creating the Digital Images

The Samuel F. B. Morse Papers were microfilmed by the Library of
Congress Photoduplication Service in 1975.  All thirty-five reels of
this microfilm were digitized, producing approximately 50,000 images. 
Digitization of the microfilm was performed offsite by Preservation
Resources of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, under contract to the National
Digital Library Program. 

The Morse Papers were scanned as 200 dpi, 8-bit grayscale images that
were compressed using JPEG compression, producing images in the JPEG
File Interchange Format (JFIF).  This format is typically used to
digitize historical manuscripts because of its ability to capture and
display the diversity of tones in manuscripts and the varying nuances
produced by handwriting, pencil, and ink.  Because JPEG images require
considerable time to download, grayscale GIF images were created for
convenient access when using the NDLP page-turner feature. 

Twenty-two original letters from the Addition series were digitized as
300 dpi grayscale images with a Phase I camera by the Library of
Congress Information Technology Services Digital Scan Center. 

Issues Affecting Image Quality

The quality of the microfilm of a manuscript collection can affect the
resulting digital images as can the condition of the original
manuscripts and the way the collection was microfilmed.  A wide range of
tonal values, document sizes, and document orientations appears on the
Morse Papers microfilm.  The physical state of the original manuscripts
varies from good to poor, and the microfilm images reflect this.  Many
of the original materials are discolored, stained, or fragile.  Their
digital images may therefore show discolorations, heavy fold markings,
and various tones in the paper.  Items may sometimes show bleedthrough
that even the grayscale format could not suppress.  Also, some digital
images of documents appear to have light or faded text that may be
difficult to read.  This is often either because the handwriting strokes
are very thin or because the ink or pencil has faded on the original
materials.  In addition, some correspondence shows what is known as
writing-over, or text over text: to save paper, the writer has turned a
completed page sideways and written new text over and at right angles to
the text already on the page.  Letterbook images may be especially
difficult to read for a different reason.  Letterbooks contain
letterpress letters, or copies of letters which have been pressed onto
tissue-thin paper.  The resulting copy can have bleeding handwriting,
very faded text, wrinkles, ripped and frayed edges, and other conditions
that affect legibility. Some pages are completely illegible.  Finally,
the Morse Papers consist chiefly of correspondence, the bulk of which
has been mounted onto pages of bound volumes. The manuscript leaves were
affixed to the pages with a special tape that occasionally obscures text
on the edges. 

Enhancing Visual Access

Preservation Resources made special efforts to ensure that all images
are visually accessible. Large items had been filmed in segments, and
especially long items were often folded and filmed in segments as well. 
Preservation Resources then reunited the segments to recreate the entire
item.  Book or manuscript pages containing text not oriented for reading
in the microfilm were reoriented for reading as digital images.  The
contractor also reversed negative photostatic images to positive to
enhance visual access. Most book like materials, such as diaries and
notebooks, were originally filmed in an open-book format with two pages
to a frame.  However, during digitization, the frame was split into
single-page images to improve visual access. (Double-page images of the
smaller diaries, however, were kept intact.)  Individual manuscript
leaves, originally folded to make two to four pages or writing surfaces,
were also divided into single images for each component, thus enhancing
their readability.  Exceptions to this treatment were made in a few
cases, such as account books, in which splitting the frame would make
the resulting content harder to understand. 

Special Presentations

The Morse Papers site includes numerous special presentations including
?Collection Highlights?, a ?Timeline? of his life as well as a Morse
?Family Tree?.  Two essays by Leonard Bruno, Specialist in the
Manuscript Division are also available, ?The Invention of the Telegraph?
and ?The Lesser-Known Morse: Artist, Politician, Photographer?. 

*******************

American Memory is a gateway to rich primary source materials relating
to the history and culture of the United States.  The site offers more
than 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical collections.

Please direct any questions to NDLPCOLL@xxxxxxx