The American Memory Project

The American Memory Project is a digital collection of historical resources maintained by the Library of Congress and freely available to the public at large. Created initially as an educational resource, the project grew to a diverse historical and cultural collection, culled from a wide variety of American source materials. Originally, under the aegis of the National Digital Library Program, the American Memory Project undertook an ambitious collaboration with the private sector to make the treasures of its archives, and of the archives of other institutions as well, available to the general public in online formats and without cost. Numerous technological obstacles needed to be considered, particularly with respect to the selection of metadata to be used by the different organizations involved, the variety of types of materials to be digitized, and an overarching concern to make access to the content as widely available as possible to the intended users.