About -- Start -- Index -- Glossary

American Memory and Interoperability

Slides for panel session by National Digital Library Federation Architecture Task Force
Caroline Arms, 7/24/97

Four members of the Architecture Task Force for the National Digital Library Federation gave a panel presentation on interoperability at the ACM Digital Libraries '97 conference in Philadelphia (July 24-26, 1997).

• Dale Flecker of Harvard University chaired the session and briefly described the National Digital Library Federation.
• John Price-Wilkin described the services and architecture of the University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Service. His unit developed the architecture that underlies JSTOR and is also used for the American Verse Project, the Michigan contribution to Making of America, and several other digital library ventures.
• Caroline Arms attempted to describe in 15 minutes (!!) American Memory, the technical challenges associated with our heterogeneous body of content and "descriptive metadata", and the underlying architecture, focusing on how it will support the interoperability aspects of the LC/Ameritech competition. [Slideshow]
• Steve Worona of Cornell gave a brief rundown of the general technical issues that have been facing the Architecture Task Force in trying to establish a new level of resource-sharing through digital libraries.

Caroline Arms' Slideshow

Truth in advertising alert: The slideshow here includes a few slides that I did not have time to show and omits screen-dumps of American Memory highlights.

The slideshow is presented through the "page-turning" interface that David Woodward developed for American Memory materials that are available only as page-images of text, such as programs and playbills in the Variety Stage Collection. Rather than creating a hand-coded HTML page for each image, I simply converted my PowerPoint slides to GIFs (saving each slide in WMF format and converting & resizing using PaintShop Pro) and created a small file with one line per slide to serve as the page-turning "database." Many thanks to Dave for making this possible. CRA

About -- Start -- Index -- Glossary

Presentation to Digital Libraries '97 with NDLF Architecture Task Force

National Digital Library Program, Library of Congress
Comments: caar@loc.gov (08/16/97)