National Digital Library Program

The NDLP brought online 24 million books and documents from the Library of Congress and other research institutions.

[1] Begun in 1995 after a five-year pilot project, the program began digitizing selected collections of Library of Congress archival materials that chronicle the nation's history.

In order to reproduce collections of books, pamphlets, motion pictures, manuscripts and sound recordings, the Library has created a range of digital entities: bitonal document images, grayscale and color pictorial images, digital video and audio, and searchable e-texts.

American Memory employs national-standard and well established industry-standard formats for many digital reproductions, e.g., texts encoded with Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and images stored in Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) files or compressed with the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) algorithm.

In other cases, the lack of well established standards has led to the use of emerging formats, e.g., RealAudio (for audio), QuickTime (for moving images), and MrSID (for maps).

Study for Discovery of the Land , a mural at the Library of Congress Hispanic Division, by Candido Portinari .