Message-Id: <199912291953.MAA28434@dns.ccit.arizona.edu> Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 15:06:43 -0500 From: Tamara Swora-Gober <mailto:tswo@LOC.GOV> Subject: LC announces release of Meeting of Frontiers Web Site To: mailto:IMAGELIB@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
This message is being widely posted*********************************************** LIBRARY OF CONGRESS - MEETING OF FRONTIERS WEB SITE CHRONICLES PARALLEL HISTORY OF AMERICA’S WEST AND RUSSIA’S EAST
The parallel experiences of the United States and Russia in exploring, developing and settling their frontiers and the meeting of those frontiers in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest is the focus of a new Web site created by the Library of Congress under a special congressional appropriation. The site is available at
"Meeting of Frontiers" includes more than 2,500 items, comprising some 70,000 images, from the Library's rare book, manuscript, map, prints and photograph, film and sound recording collections 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. The site is completely bilingual, in English and Russian, and is intended for use in U.S. and Russian schools and libraries and by the general public in both countries. Scholars, particularly those who do not have ready access to major research libraries, will benefit from the wealth of primary material included in “Meeting of Frontiers,” much of which has never been published or is extremely rare.
Collections available in “Meeting of Frontiers” include the Frank G. Carpenter Collection of photographs from Alaska in the 1910s; the John C. Grabill Collection of photographs of 1880s frontier life in Colorado, South Dakota and Wyoming; the Yudin Collection of papers from the Russian-American Company (1786-1830); and selections from the Alaska Russian Church Archives.
"Meeting of Frontiers" is a pilot project that was developed in 1999 at the Library of Congress by a team of Library staff and American and Russian consultants. The pilot will be expanded in the coming years through the addition of materials from the Library's own collections, from the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and from other U.S. institutions. It will also feature materials from partner institutions in Russia, including the Russian State Library in Moscow, the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg and the Institute of History of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk.
"Meeting of Frontiers" is funded by a special appropriation in the Library's FY 1999 budget, which is intended for the Library to obtain digital copies of unique and rare materials from Russia and to make those materials freely available through the Internet. Additional support for development of the project in Russia is being provided by the Open Society Institute of Russia. "Meeting of Frontiers" is the Library's first major digital project involving international material and extensive cooperation with foreign institutions to obtain materials for the Library's collections in digital form. It is the first component of an international digital library that will build upon the Library's National Digital Library Program.
The collection presentation links to items included in American Memory as illustrations of the Frontiers themes. The descriptive content for this site is bilingual ---English and Russian and the English HTML is searchable. You may have to adjust your browser's settings to view pages in Cyrillic properly (for <4.0 browsers). Instructions on how to do so are available via the Frontiers homepage and the About the Site page.
About the Site The design of the pilot site combines elements of two approaches used by the Library of Congress in presenting educational material in electronic form: the collections-based approach of the National Digital Librarys American Memory program, and the method of integrating items from many collections to tell a single story that is used in Exhibitions: An Online Gallery. http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/
The site is designed to operate on three levels.
First, it provides an overview of the historical experience of the frontier in Russia and America through six narrative sections: Exploration, Colonization, Development, Alaska, Frontiers and National Identity, and Mutual Perceptions. Each of these sections includes images that illustrate major events and themes, a bibliography with suggestions for further reading, and links to other web sites with related content.
Second, within each narrative section there are several modules that present in greater depth themes relevant to that section. These modules contain many more images and additional explanatory text. They highlight both the similarities and the differences in the American and Russian frontier experiences.
Third, Meeting of Frontiers contains complete or substantial parts of more than twenty collections that have been selected for digitizing because of their relevance to the American West and Siberia and the Russian Far East. Items used to illustrate the narrative sections and the thematic modules are drawn from but represent only a small portion of these collections.
Users who are new to the subjects treated in Meeting of Frontiers are advised to follow the narrative text and then explore the collections in depth. Users who already have a general grasp of the subject or who are interested only in a specialized aspect of American or Russian history may want to proceed directly to the collections.
Please direct questions about the Frontiers exhibition to mailto:mof@loc.gov