President Proposes Digital Library for Education

February 3, 1999

By PAMELA MENDELS

President Proposes Digital Library for Education
ucked away in the $1.77 trillion dollar budget proposal submitted this week by President Clinton is a small item that could help bring digitized versions of photographs, memorabilia, documents and an assortment of other items from the nation's cultural treasure trove into American classrooms.
Clinton asked for $30 million for the creation of a "digital library for education." If the money is approved, it could eventually mean that images of items like the pages of Thomas Edison's lab notebooks and the hat worn by Abraham Lincoln the night of his assassination would be online, and freely available to students and the public at large.

Funding would go toward developing the Internet as a better tool for science and math education.

The proposal aims in part to bring into classrooms electronic versions of the wealth of archival and other material now in the hands of federal institutions. It comes on the heels of a major push by the Administration in recent years to have all classrooms connected to the Internet by the year 2000.
"The proposal is important because it's going to significantly increase the educational and cultural resources our children and all Americans will have access to," a White House official said in an interview this week.
About $10 million of the funding would go toward developing the Internet as a better tool for science and math education in part though the creation of new, higher quality content. Another $10 million would go toward creating digital versions of literary and non-fiction works in the public domain, on the assumption that new technologies will make it easier for students to download books and read them using lightweight devices.
But perhaps the centerpiece of the project is how the remaining $10 million would be spent. It would be divided between the Smithsonian Institution and the National Park Service so that they could put significant portions of their vast collections online.
The effort would follow a path already taken by the Library of Congress, which is in the midst of a mammoth National Digital Library Program to put many of that institution's non-book holdings online.
The Library of Congress project has already placed on the Web items like images of Thomas Jefferson's working drafts of the Declaration of Independence. The site has proved popular with surfers, garnering an average of about 3 million hits every working day, including visits from students and teachers.
"It's not just trinkets online," said Dr. James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress. "This is solid, proven substance and material that is an aid to teachers."
J. Dennis O'Connor, provost of the Smithsonian, said that if the budget item is passed, it will allow the Smithsonian to substantially expand its Web offerings, with perhaps two to three million images online. The institution would also begin developing curriculums for teachers.

Internet links of interest to readers of the Education column

It some cases, O'Connor says, Web site operators might choose to display three-dimensional images of objects, allowing viewers to see the material from various angles. O'Connor does not yet know what materials would be chosen for display online; that decision would be left largely to those who administer the collections at the 16 museums that make up the Smithsonian.
But some possibilities, he said, are images of George Washington's sword, Dizzy Gillespie's horn and the hat Lincoln wore on that fateful visit to Ford's Theater in 1865.
The National Park Service is generally thought of as the overseer of the nation's forest and wilderness areas, but like the Smithsonian, it, too, has vast collections of historical, cultural and scientific artifacts. Among the 90,000 items park service officials hope to post online are Thomas Edison's notebooks, diaries of the playwright Eugene O'Neill and an audio tour of the birthplace of President John F. Kennedy given by his mother, Rose.
"There are amazing things and people don't know that we have them," said Diane Vogt-O'Connor, senior archivist at the park service's Museum Management Project. "We've been dying to share it."
One piece of history students might be curious to see online is correspondence between the founding fathers and a man with whom they had a testy relationship -- King George III.
Were the letters polite, Vogt-O'Connor was asked? Generally, she said. "But they are also a tad confrontational."
The EDUCATION column is published weekly, on Wednesdays. Click here for a list of links to other columns in the series.

Related Sites
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Library of Congress
Smithsonian Institution
National Park Service online exhibits

Pamela Mendels at mendels@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.

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Funding would go toward developing the Internet as a better tool for science and math education.