The Service Model of the Library of Congress in America

The online search of the Library of Congress includes:

First, public directory query

Second, the electronic resource information plan (ERIP)

Further expand the retrieval of collections and resources for readers' use, including the use of educational circles around the world; Collect and generate important (original) electronic publication data to ensure that the collection is still comprehensive and global; Join hands with major institutions at home and abroad to build global knowledge wealth, so that the Library of Congress can store, protect, provide and expand its resources; Establish a culture of technological and strategic innovation so that the Library of Congress can provide users with traditional and extensible resources. The plan incorporates digital information services into some basic principles, that is, librarians are protectors, interpreters and intermediaries of information and knowledge. All citizens have equal access to information and knowledge. The plan summarizes the characteristics of extended services, usage and education into an interrelated plan, and provides traditional and extended services to each end user.

Three. Global legal information network (GLIN)

In 1950s, GLIN conducted online exchanges and cooperation with parliaments of about 35 countries in the world mainly by manual indexing and abstract compilation. After the update, the network directly and remotely receives information from 14 member countries-all authoritative legal texts and laws of each country, and receives documents and materials from 24 other countries and prepares abstracts. From 65438 to 0999, GLIN handled 264000 times, including searching, receiving and updating its own files. 1999, the total number of GLIN's records reached nearly 80,000, so it can be said that GLIN is the future law library. 1March 1999, the new GLIN file was put into use. Member States can input legal texts into the database and link them with legal abstracts in the GLIN database. At the beginning of autumn, a new version of Subject Word Management System (LEXCON) was put into use. GLIN's keyword editorial Committee meets once a week to discuss the adoption of new keywords and their inclusion in the glossary.

GLIN project director's annual meeting is held once a year. In addition to the full members of GLIN, potential members will also attend. At the annual meeting of 1999, the African Development Bank expressed its willingness to fund African countries to participate in the global legal information network, and the Organization of American States also expressed the same willingness. GLIN workstation in Romania won GLIN Best Workstation Award. GLIN's partner institutions, such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Center for Economic Law Analysis and NASA, still expressed interest in providing start-up funds for countries willing to cooperate with GLIN in projects. With the support of the World Bank, Guatemala became a full member of GLIN. The Inter-American Development Bank agreed to provide support to Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil; The Economic Law Analysis Center provides Romania with funds to introduce Romania's previous laws into the economic and legal field of the network. The fund of this project is increasing year by year. By 2004, 3-4 new members can be added every year. The library intends to support the development of GLIN by paying fees to member libraries and sponsors, but the fees are insufficient, and only a large number of countries can ensure the success of the project.

At the suggestion of GLIN members of NASA, funded by Madison Building Committee of the Library of Congress, the Law Library purchased two sets of satellite antennas and placed them at Goddard Space Launch Center in Maryland to improve communication among GLIN members. GLIN and NASA have established an environmental legal system, which combines scientific and technological data with legal information and the first plan of digital earth information, so that members of American government agencies can share environmental information.

Fourthly, cooperative digital reference service (CDRS)

In order to provide advice to researchers anytime and anywhere through the international digital network of libraries and research institutions, the cooperative digital reference service guidance plan was continued in 2000. The plan is a model developed in cooperation with Ohio Online Library Center. Guide the application of new technologies, make online use of electronic advantages and the material resources and collections of global libraries, and provide reference services. Has entered the third stage. Initially, the National Pavilion had only 16 members, and now it has expanded to more than 60 libraries and international institutions, including national pavilions in Australia and Canada. When fully operational, member libraries will assist their users to link to the CDRS system, submit questions and get the best answers from experts from institutions around the world. I. Origin

The National Digital Library Project of the Library of Congress is a part of the National Pavilion Planning, which started at 1989/ 1990, that is, full-text information (including images, languages and sounds) is provided to users in the library or through online retrieval. Mainly using optical disk storage and photoelectric communication technology, the collection of various carriers of the National Pavilion is spread to all parts of the country in electronic form, which is directly used by readers and supports the study of American history and culture.

The American Guide to the Past (1990- 1995) published by 1989 is the result of the research of1kloc-0/Joint Research Library and 5 1 State Library. This research shows the real demand for online services, including end-user evaluation, thousands of interviews, letter research, etc. In addition, it is determined that this project is dedicated to the study of multimedia digital collections. The complete user evaluation is conducted by the end-user evaluation system developed by the Library of Congress of the United States. The telephone number is 1992- 1993. At that time, the Library of Congress had provided ROMT CDs about American historical events to 44 schools, colleges and universities, as well as state and public libraries. The library members, teachers, students and the public who participated in the survey know how the digital materials they use transmit system data. The evaluation shows that higher education institutions are interested in public libraries, and the survey results strongly show that schools, especially middle schools, are very enthusiastic about it. The evaluation team realized that the educational reform has created a demand for the main historical information resources of the library. Teachers welcome digital collection, which helps to cultivate students' independent thinking ability; The school library has strengthened its research skills by using computers. These findings were confirmed in the extended education project initiated by the Library of Congress sponsored by Kellogg Foundation.

After five years of experiments, the project was officially launched in 1995. First, the archives of the Library of Congress are selectively digitized, which is a record of the country's rich cultural heritage. In order to copy books, pamphlets, animations, manuscripts and audio records, the library has created a large number of digital entities: two-color document images, black-and-white and color images, digital audio and video, and searchable texts. In order to provide access to these replicas, the project has developed a scope that describes the original elements: directory records, query help, introductory words and programs, such as full-text indexes of certain types of content.

Replicas are produced by various tools; Scanning, digital photography, audio and video equipment, and manually typed and encoded text. The United States used national standards in the past, and will establish industrial standard formats for many digital copies, such as storing documents with standard markup language text and TIFFL images, or compressing images with JPEG. On the other hand, due to the lack of good established standards, we have to adopt existing formats, such as RealAudio (audio), Quicktime (animation) and MrSid (map). According to the technical information of data type and personal collection information, it is being used.

Second, the status quo.

1. American history on the Internet

With the theme of American history, the project effectively combines pictures, words and sounds to carry out patriotic education and education reform for citizens, especially primary and secondary school students. The National Assembly Hall leads primary school teachers and librarians to consider how to make better use of the school's online resources. Participants in the Educators' Forum confirmed the early research results, that is, when the main resources are in great demand, teachers can use them effectively, and they need to add materials and subject descriptions to the collection structure, so new materials are constantly added to the website.

1997, the library started the American Past Follow-up Project, leading 25 pairs of children educators under 12 to explore the collection, and to develop lesson plan cases, teaching activities and websites that can be used for their local communication. 1997- 1998 is the school year. These educators participate in online forums as experiments and evaluate the materials they develop. In the summer of 1998, the library continued the follow-up project of the past in the United States, with the goal of winning the support of schools all over the country for the collection of the National Guild Hall. The National Assembly believes that expanding its research is not only an academic expansion of online collections that cannot be provided by traditional services in the Library of Congress, but also to ensure that the United States was developed into what readers really needed in the past.

By the end of 1998, the documents of Congress Hall1400,000 and the collections of other institutions 13900 have been digitized online, and the digitized precious American history collection of Congress Hall has been well received. The National Digital Library plans to continue to face educational institutions and enhance the understanding of historical past and present. In the same year, 50 educators from 18 states gathered in Washington, D.C., to discuss the utilization of basic education resources, make a curriculum plan, draw a grand plan for the library's online collection, and share the idea of online teaching.

1999, 2.5 million volumes of the Library of Congress and 85,000 volumes of other cooperative institutions are available for online use or digital collection. As part of the national cooperation project, about 2.5 million books of the Library of Congress and other institutions in the United States are entering the process of transformation. At the same time, 18 multimedia historical themes have been added to American websites in the past, bringing the theme content to 68. By adding digital varieties, eight existing collections have been expanded. All over the world have sent praise and praise to the website, saying that the online resources of American history and culture are of high quality, educational significance and convenient retrieval. In addition, four kinds of exhibitions have been added to the website of the Library of Congress. The online exhibition of fine products in the collection is updated regularly, so it includes exhibits that can be rotated.

By the end of 2000, there were 5.6 million articles on the website of China Pavilion, including 165438+ 10,000 articles from cooperative units. In the past, 20 kinds of multimedia historical collections were added to American websites, totaling 90 kinds, of which 12 kinds were for other institutions to participate in American technology plans. More than the original cooperation plan, 33 institutions accepted $654.38+$7500 to digitize their historical collections and use them on past websites in the United States.

Digital Future Group has set up an advanced library management organization, and completed the work it started in 1998-making a five-year strategy for digital library, emphasizing the development of content (all content is in electronic format), the use and stability of digital library infrastructure, and managing all kinds of new electronic content. At the same time, the curator of the National Pavilion commissioned the National Academy of Sciences to study the digital age, the future of digital libraries and the preparations for the National Pavilion. In July 2000, the report "2 1 Century: Digital Strategy of National Pavilion" was published, which encouraged libraries to pursue the future it described-collecting, describing and preserving electronic magazines and books, developing websites and linking them, establishing databases and other materials and transmitting them in electronic format. In 200 1 year, the library can use 98.8 million dollars for nationwide digital data collection.

As one of the initiators of the second phase of the Digital Library Initiative, the Library of Congress of the United States, through its National Digital Library Project, enables researchers to convert some collections through past events of visiting the United States. The library hopes that part of the development funds in the second stage will be used for the experiment and management of new technologies and the acquisition and confirmation of collections in a user-centered environment. In the second phase of the Digital Library Initiative, the National Pavilion provides the main catalogue to sponsors and researchers. American past collections: unified archival entities, such as selected photos or personal documents; Data accumulated in physical format, such as photos and movies in print format without copyright; Or NDLP collects selected works directly. For such a collection, the list shows the type and content of the document and provides a link to the technical summary.

For most of the available materials, the Library of Congress did not consider using any American copyright or any restrictions to restrict public access. Some collections can provide useful information for the access management of experimental paths. Applicants should read the general precautions of rights and restrictions and the special status of the collection they are using.

Technical records provide digital conversion methods for five types of data: documents, graphics and pictures, maps, recordings and animations. These records are also listed in the Favorites list, including the communication type. Small batch sample data and related directory records can be FTP. A single example is listed in the main list in the technical summary of each series. After confirmation, the details of digital content transmission can be arranged. This page provides a discussion of general options.

Among the millions of books, photos, printed matter, pictures, manuscripts, precious books, maps, audio materials and video materials in the library, only a small part are in digital format. The past events in the United States are the main part of the library digitization project. It provides American texts of multimedia collections, photos, audio materials, video materials and digital documents. With the permission of the American Foundation, the Library of Congress/American Digital Library allows public, research and academic libraries, museums, historians and archival institutions to create digital collections of major resource materials to supplement the contents of digital libraries.

2. Global Legal Information Network Project.

Global legal information network is a strict international cooperation network managed by law library. Its member countries put their authoritative legal texts and legislation in the law library, and nearly 40 member countries provide information to the website and share it through the Internet. 1March, 998, the new version of GLIN expanded the search capability and strengthened the security performance. At the fifth annual meeting of 1998, the library introduced a new category of legislative information. 1In July, 1999, the American Law Library Association approved the law library digitization project "One Hundred Years of New National Legislation: Documents and Debates in the US Congress", 1774- 1873. The project produced140,698 volumes of legislative documents11digital images, from 1774- 1829. This digital project has also won the best non-print publication award of the year, and has also been recognized by some universities and other research institutions. 1999 recorded 200,000 hits.

3. Thomas Public Legislation Information System

Production background

Thomas legislative information is named after Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. If there is only one founder in every library, then Thomas Jefferson is the founder of the Library of Congress. His personal collection forms the core of the Library of Congress. Because his extensive interests determine the diversity of library collections and activities, a positive way of thinking is very important to the Jefferson government. Every member of congress has a problem that can be solved without consulting any information. He believes that the autonomous government must rely on the knowledgeable masses in order to obtain real freedom and truth. Today's library is developed from Thomas Jefferson Library, and it has become the epitome of promoting democratic politics following Jefferson's thoughts and beliefs. THOMAS is a federal comprehensive legal information website, which includes the full text of congressional laws and minutes of parliamentary meetings since 1989, abstracts of bills since 1973, reports of various committees of Congress, the work schedule of the legislature, and links to websites of other legal research institutions. You can use the powerful search tools provided to find suggestions and other reference materials of different standards.

Thomas Legislative Information System is based on the initiative of 104 Congress. 104 (1995-1996) At the beginning of Congress, Thomas Federal Legislative Information System was put on the Internet by the Library of Congress for free use by the general public. The retrieval function of the system is realized by hyperlink InQuery, and the system is maintained by the Intelligent Information Retrieval Center of the University of Massachusetts in amherst, Massachusetts, USA.

Initially, the database only contained bill texts, and then it added parliamentary record texts, bill abstracts and status, hot bills (no longer available), parliamentary record index and constitution (which is being established together with other historical conference documents and located in the historical file of Thomas' home page). System maintainers constantly modify and supplement the system in terms of retrieval methods and display formats to ensure the availability of legislative information and data.

4. Geographic Information System

The Ministry of Geography and Cartography works closely with the Congressional Research Service and the Office of Congressional Relations to provide geographic information for the two houses. At the same time, the Ministry also participated in the national digital library project, digitizing map materials for electronic access throughout the country. By the end of 1999, there were 1522 maps (497 1 frame) available in the world, and the pages received 350,000 hits every month. In 2000, the system cooperated with private sector G&; M teamed up to launch a map of American railway operation on the Internet, and planned to digitize 1800 maps during the American Civil War. There are/kloc-various maps drawn by American, Russian and European painters from the 7th century to the 20th century.

5. Cooperative digital reference service

The pilot project of Cooperative Digital Reference Service (CDRS) was launched in 2000, aiming at providing suggestions to researchers at any time through the international digital network of libraries and research institutions.

In 2000, the website of the National Pavilion handled nearly 654.38 billion hits a year. The number of users of American historical collections has increased by 25%-from 1999 to150,000 times/month to 20 million times/month in 2000. The American Library, a new website for children and families, has been in operation for eight months, with 60 million hits. The website of the National Pavilion has won many awards.

Three. Cooperation with the public and private sectors

Digital library is a costly project. In addition to the limited government funding, the Library of Congress attaches great importance to publicity, establishes good public relations and raises funds from private institutions. In 1999, the National Digital Library plans to obtain $48 million from the private sector, exceeding the target of $45 million from the private sector in the third year of the three-year plan. In the past three years, the Library of Congress has used funds provided by the AMERITECH Foundation to compete. In the third year, a total of $665,438+05,965 was provided to reward 65,438+02 award-winning institutions for digitizing American historical collections and moving these digitized products to American websites in the past. A total of 33 institutions were funded to carry out their own digital projects. The five institutions that won the funding through competition in 1997 have completed the digitization of documents, and included them in the website of the Library of Congress for the first time in 1999.

The Library of Congress is one of the initiators of the second phase of the Digital Library Initiative. The initiative has been funded by the National Science Foundation of the United States for several years, aiming at promoting the utilization and accessibility of information resources on the global decentralized network and encouraging existing and new institutions to pay attention to innovative application fields. One of the reasons why the Library of Congress participates in this initiative is to let the sponsored institutions use the past documents of the United States, and hope that they will support research and make all future users of the library use digital information. With the support of Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress cooperated with the new york Historical Society and the Chicago Historical Society to input their important files into the American History website of the Library of Congress. The museum also signed an agreement with Cornell University to provide the public with a series of 750,000 pages19th century publications, including Scientific American and Century.

1999, with the donation of Microsoft, the National Pavilion renovated the reception center of the National Digital Library and renamed it the Learning Center. The center includes an improved theater, a new classroom with 16 seats and a TV conference room. The center held 565,438+03 activities for 7,865,438+08 visitors throughout the year, and answered 4,740 inquiries by e-mail. The learning center received members of Congress and their guests, foreign scholars and celebrities. The center receives ordinary tourists every day and shows them the online resources of the Library of Congress.

Fourth, severe challenges.

As a banner of the library industry, the National Pavilion is not only the maintenance organization of many important standards, but also the largest digital library project so far. The evaluation report "National Pavilion 2 1 Century: Digitization Strategy of National Pavilion" by the National Academy of Sciences fully affirmed the National Pavilion, but it also pointed out the existing problems from the aspects of digital collection construction, digital data preservation, digital information organization, library management and information technology foundation, and revealed the challenges faced by digital libraries. If we want to create a large-scale and effective digital library in the 2 1 century, in some cases, we should not only solve technical challenges, but also have shared ideas. The emergence of new ideas may help to change the mechanism, such as the decision-making of the Library of Congress on major issues. Challenges may arise in the following areas: resource construction, interoperability, intellectual property rights, effective access and resource sustainability. Libraries hope that creative and innovative ideas can solve these challenges. (1) First of all, it serves the U.S. Congress and the U.S. government in a broad sense, so it needs to have all the books and materials needed by all members and officials to perform their official duties, not only to completely record the history and development of the United States; We must also include the knowledge of all mankind to meet the potential needs of Congress and the government. Maintaining the world's largest treasure house of human knowledge and using its resources to provide services are the basic tasks of national guilds. (2) Secondly, the Library of Congress faces American academic circles, so it has all the books and materials that record the life and achievements of the American people. At the same time, the collections used by scholars involve interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, multimedia and multilingual. (3) Serving the public can improve the creativity and intelligence of the public, reflect the importance of the library to the prosperity and future development of the country, and enhance the social education function of the library, which can not only promote the free exchange of ideas, but also highlight patriotic education by showing the reliable records of American social forms and national history, so as long as it is related to the American people, information will be collected.

After the Second World War, due to the increasingly important position of the United States in the world, the concern for the whole world led Congress to systematically select overseas offices, agents, businessmen and special procurement teams of the Library of Congress. Publications, and timely provide bibliographic information of these materials. Due to the protection of various laws and regulations, the Library of Congress now receives 22,000 documents/volumes every working day, of which about 10000 are collected. The main sources of the collection are obtained through the registration channels of the Copyright Bureau, as well as materials from gifts, purchases, government agencies (such as federal, state and local governments), cataloguing in print and international exchanges. Documents not in Tibet are exchanged or donated to educational institutions, public facilities and non-profit organizations.

Government documents in the collection, especially parliamentary publications, deserve attention. 1979, the National Assembly Hall became the library of government publications, and published the monthly catalogue of government publications. The library also manages a large number of foreign parliamentary publications and publications of international intergovernmental organizations. In addition, there are dissertations, including dissertations of most American universities since the 1940s (when microfilm was available). Since 1978, all dissertations have been microfilmed, and more than 30,000 new dissertations have been received every year. The Library of Congress is the only public institution that collects such papers.

The shortcomings of the current collection: ① some of the serial publications are missing, most of which are stolen or not received at all; (2) It is difficult to evaluate the value of collectibles due to the increasing dependence on minimum cataloging; (3) Theft and other reasons have caused great losses to the collection, mainly children's books and books about African Americans, and measures have been taken to prevent such incidents; (4) There is not enough money to supplement the lost volume. However, the collection of national halls must be kept intact to adapt to the rapid development of information materials. China Pavilion is the only library in the world with a global collection. If this tradition is not preserved, the federal government and the American free enterprise system will suffer greatly.