The Library of Congress
Reviewed:
26th March 1996
By:
Andrew Cox
Sceptics about the quantity or quality of information on the Internet should take a look at the
Library of Congress Home Page. There is much current and substantial information here from an authoritative source,
on a wide range of topics: including history, the law, political science. This very brief summary review focuses on the site from the point of the users of
my own library, Thomas Parry Library, University of Wales Aberystwyth, who are students and
researchers of library and information science. Hopefully it should be of interest to all librarians.
Library of Congress Web site.
The Web site is divided into seven areas:
- General Information and publications
Gives basic access details for the library,
including illustrated guides to some of the collections, Library of Congress
Manuscripts an illustrated guide for example, which contains images from sample documents.
The section also contains some interesting full text
documents
- Government, Congress and Law - much full text information, and a
searchable database THOMAS: legislative information on the Internet.
Links to Government information world-wide.
- Research and collections services
This section includes the library's searchable/browsable multimedia digital collections of primary material
on various topics in American history called American Memory. Topics currently include: photographs taken for the New Deal and World War Two (Farm Security
Administration), The National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1860-1920 (165 books, pamphlets and artifacts
relating to the Suffrage movement in the States), Early motion pictures and sound recordings
and much else.
Also available is A periodic report from The National Digital Library Program
The section also covers library related matters such as:
- Copyright lots of information, including on copyright in
the electronic sphere.
- Library of Congress Online Services chief among the services is access
to the Library of Congress OPAC, LOCIS; but LC
are also heavily involved in the development of Z39.50,
and they have a Library of Congress Z39.50 Gateway,
which among other things contains a long list of Web searchable catalogues.
- Events and Exhibits - unless you are planning a trip to the states
the most interesting section is likely to be Library of Congress Electronic Exhibits
which include an interesting exhibition of Revelations from the Russian Archives
- Explore the Internet, contains a directory
of Internet sites organised so that you can browse Internet resources by
subject; and links to many guides to
using the Internet, the history of the Internet, and a particularly
good section on Internet policies.
Searching
On such a large site it is difficult to find things, even though information has been fairly carefully organised,
so the search option is essential. LC are using Harvest software
which supports the boolean operators 'and' and 'or', and will search for phrases.
Case sensitivity can be turned off and on. Results are delivered as a URL with (in most cases) a one
line description of the document. Compared to many internal search
engines this is pretty informative; but often I found the search engine
returned a lot of hits, and the information provided
was not sufficient to work out how relevant the document was likely to be.
Some of the LC's subsidiary pages also have their own search engines.
There is also a good What's new section arranged by month,
with an abstract describing newly added items, so that on re-visiting the site one can quickly find new material.
Material on this page is copyright
Ariadne/original
authors.
This article last updated/links checked on 11-Jul-1997