Meeting of Frontiers and International Digital Library Cooperation: A Perspective from the Library of Congress

John Van Oudenaren
European Division, Library of Congress
Meeting of Frontiers Project Director

Introduction [1]

As the Library of Congress prepares to celebrate its 200th anniversary on April 24 of this year, it is engaged in extensive planning regarding its digital future, with emphasis on the development over the next five years of a new National Online Library. The factors driving the planning process include the expected completion, at the end of 2000, of the American Memory project, the initial results of the Library's efforts to internationalize its digital library efforts, and the continued development of the Internet revolution and the debate over the Library's role in the electronic age. As presented to the Congress in the January 2000 Library of Congress budget hearings (for the Fiscal Year 2001 budget), the proposed National Online Library will include three kinds of content: American Memory Historical Content, America and the World International Content (the international digital library), and Born Digital Content^[2].

American Memory

The core building block of the future National Online Library is American Memory, a five-year project that began in 1996 with the support of the U.S. Congress and private and corporate donors. With a total budget of more than $60 million, the project has the headline goal of digitizing five million items relating to American history by the end of 2000. Implementation of the project is the responsibility of the National Digital Library (NDL) Program, a separate unit within the Library that employs about 90 people and has an annual budget of $12 million.

As American Memory enters its final year, it has completed 70 collections comprising several million items, with an additional 42 collections in process. These collections range from the papers of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Civil War photographs, railroad maps, baseball cards, sheet music, and the early films of Thomas Edison. They represent the primary materials documenting American political, social, and economic history. They cover both high and popular culture and represent many different geographic regions, historical periods, and racial, religious, and ethnic communities.

Most of the materials in American Memory are from the Library's own collections, but some are from other American institutions. Under a grant from the Ameritech Corporation, the Library conducted a nation-wide competition for three years (1996, 1997, and 1998) which resulted in the awarding of funds to 36 institutions from throughout the United States to help these institutions digitize unique collections in their holdings for contribution to American Memory. Winning institutions included the New York and Denver Public Libraries, Harvard, Duke, the University of North Carolina and many other universities, the Ohio Historical Society, and private museums such as Mystic Seaport. Ameritech collections digitized or in process include unique collections of photographs of the American West, first-person narratives of the American South, texts, photographs and documents relating to the African-American experience in Ohio before 1920, and stereoscopic views of small town America from 1850 to 1910.

The thrust of American Memory is educational. It is used in U.S. schools and public libraries. Working with partners in the education and foundation communities, the Library has worked to promote accessibility and usability for students and teachers by developing such features as a "Learning Page" and the daily "Today in History" page, producing curriculum guides for teachers, and sponsoring an annual summer workshop for high school teachers that focuses on classroom use of digital material.

Major objectives of the planned National Online Library as they relate to American Memory are to keep the staff and resources of NDL intact, to maintain the existing online collections, and to continue adding digital content beyond the 5 million items to be completed in the initial five-year project. Current plans call for processing an additional 70 collections, with a focus on filling gaps in the coverage of topics and periods of history. The objective is to cover nine time periods from 1492 (Columbus) to the present relating to six broad categories: social history, political history, popular culture, natural environment, science and technology, and law.

The future program will move somewhat away from the quantity-driven mass content conversion operation toward a more focused approach that targets specific user audience needs. Target audiences include Congress, education from elementary school through college, life-long learners, and the American public in general. To reach out to the public at large, the Library is launching, in connection with the April 2000 bicentennial celebrations, a new project called "America's Story" that will package the many collections and items in American Memory into a coherent but basic historical narrative.

America and the World

A second major component of the planned National Online Library will focus on international content. As the title America and the World suggests, the objective here is not to digitize the most important international treasures in the Library's own collections, still less to acquire digital versions of all treasures from the other great libraries, museums, and archives of the world. Rather, it is to place North America and the United States in its international context, beginning with Columbus and continuing through the mid-20th century. It will focus "on those individuals, social groups and institutions that brought the world to America and America to the world^[3]". Contiguity, immigration, trade, foreign policy, missionary and philanthropic activity, and exploration are all ways in which America has interacted with the outside world, and all are grist for future international digital projects.

The first major project in this category is Meeting of Frontiers, a U.S.-Russian project that focuses on the parallels in the Russian and American experiences in exploring and developing their frontiers and on the Russian discovery and colonization of Alaska. The Library's contribution to Meeting of Frontiers also includes material about a number of noteworthy and interesting Americans who spent time in Siberia^[4].

Meeting of Frontiers builds upon and is similar in many respects to American Memory. As a cooperative project between the Library's European Division and NDL, it draws heavily upon the expertise and physical and human infrastructure of NDL. It attempts to use the same collections-based approach, with focus on completeness and comprehensiveness. It uses cataloging, naming, and search conventions developed by NDL for American Memory.

There are, however, important differences between the two projects. While seeking to remain true to a collections-based approach and to keep the emphasis on the presentation of primary source materials with a minimum of editorial content, Meeting of Frontiers is more theme-based than American Memory. It uses a coherent historical narrative to tell the "meeting of frontiers" story and to provide the framework into which the primary materials are inserted. It is also bilingual - Russian and English.

Above all, Meeting of Frontiers was conceived as a cooperative project that would result in the creation of virtual library of materials that are held not only at LC, but at other U.S. and especially Russian repositories. While American Memory took some steps in this direction with the Ameritech competition, the portion of non-LC material in American Memory is quite modest. Meeting of Frontiers aims at more of an even split, with perhaps half of its material coming from LC and the remainder coming from other U.S. and Russian partner institutions. The project is intended to promote access by American scholars and general audiences to Russian-held materials that for all practical purposes are inaccessible to American audiences, and to give audiences in Russia and indeed worldwide the opportunity to view materials that otherwise could only be seen by scholars with the means to travel to the United States.

Building upon the initial success of Meeting of Frontiers, the Library is discussing analogous America and the World projects with Spain, Brazil, China, and other countries. Planning for the next major project is most advanced with Spain. In October 1999 Librarian of Congress James H. Billington led an LC delegation to Spain to discuss cooperation on a project dealing with the Spanish settlement and exploration of the Americas. The Library subsequently concluded partnership agreements with two institutions, the Biblioteca Colombia y Capitular (the Library of Hernando Colon and the Cathedral) in Seville and the National Library in Madrid. The agreement with the National Library was signed in February 2000 on the occasion of the visit to the Library of King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia^[5].

The agreements call for joint efforts to digitize early travel books, chronologies, books of memoirs, maps, drawings, engravings and other materials that document the early exploration and settlement of the Americas by the Spanish. The framework for presenting these collections and items on the Internet will be a joint project entitled Spain, the United States and the American Frontier: Parallel Histories. A small pilot site for the project has been created by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress^[6].

With the launch of a U.S.-Russian project focused on Alaska and the Pacific Northwest and a U.S.-Spanish project covering the West and Southwest, the final piece of a comprehensive frontier digital library would a U.S.-French-Canadian project documenting the French role in the exploration and settlement of Canada and the U.S. Northeast and Midwest and the struggle between France and England for supremacy in North America^[7]. Such a project would be a logical follow-on for the European Division following completion of Meeting of Frontiers.

"Frontiers" is only one organizing theme that could be used in America and the World. Immigration, trade, missionary activity, war and diplomacy also will play important roles, particularly in cooperative projects involving countries in Asia, Africa, and the developing world. In all, the Library would like to launch a total of 10-12 international digital projects over the next five years.

Born Digital

The third main component of the planned National Online Library will deal with "born digital" sources of information that the Library must collect and store if it is to fulfill its mission to Congress and the scholarly and research communities. The Library recognizes that many journals that used to be published in print form now appear only in electronic versions. Many government documents also are available only in electronic form. Many web sites are important sources of information that should be preserved for future research needs.

The born digital component of the National Online Library is largely outside the scope of this paper. It is important to note, however, that LC efforts to develop national and international digital content will proceed in parallel with an expanded effort to ensure the capture and permanent access to born digital materials in the most economic fashion. The born digital activities of the Library are also certain to have an international dimension and involve extensive cooperation with national libraries and other partners in the setting of agreed standards and the cooperative acquisition of materials.

Meeting of Frontiers - The Pilot

As indicated, Meeting of Frontiers is significant as the Library's first major digital project involving international material and extensive cooperation with foreign institutions. It also enjoys a unique place in cooperation between the Library of Congress and Russian institutions.

The Meeting of Frontiers project grew out of discussions between Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Librarian of Congress Billington about the possibilities of using the Internet to expand access to historical materials and to build links between Americans - especially students and young people - and their counterparts in other countries. Stevens was particularly interested in strengthening ties between Alaska and its Russian neighbors. He and Billington agreed that this could be done in part by highlighting the many commonalities in Russian and American frontier histories. The project was first discussed in 1997 and early 1998, a time when American Memory was far from finished but when its future success seemed probable and its huge potential for education was becoming apparent. Internationalization of NDL seemed like a natural step and was consistent with other recent initiatives, for example LC's participation in the G-7 Bibliotheca Universalis project that was launched under French-Japanese co-chairmanship in 1995^[8].

Funding for the project was secured in the Library's FY 1999 budget, which meant that work could start on October 1, 1998. A project team was formed in the fall of 1998, and began to work along two tracks. First, it began developing a pilot site of digital content using items from the Library's own collections. The idea was to tell the basic story of the meeting of frontiers, to show what the technology could accomplish, and to find solutions to basic technical and presentational problems, for example the use of Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The resulting site would provide the framework into which digitized collections from the Library and external partners could be added over time. Second, the LC project team began discussions with other partners in the United States (e.g., the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and the American Museum of Natural History in New York) and in Russia regarding the cooperative digitization of materials for Meeting of Frontiers.

The pilot site was developed in January-November 1999 by a team of Library staff and American and Russian consultants. It was launched in December 1999, following a preview to a Russian project advisory board in Moscow on November 30^[9]. It can be viewed at frontiers.loc.gov. At the time of its launch, it included 2,689 library items totaling some 70,990 digital images from the rare book, manuscript, map, film, general, and recorded sound collections of the Library.

Noteworthy collections include some 900 photographs from Alaska taken in the 1910s by Frank. G. Carpenter, the John C. Grabill Collection of photographs of 1880s frontier life in Colorado, South Dakota and Wyoming, and several hundred photographs documenting the Siberian exile system taken by the American explorer George Kennan in 1885. Manuscripts include the Yudin Collection of papers from the Russian-American Company (1786-1830), selections from the archive of the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska, and logs, letters and reports by Bering, Chirikov, and other early Russian explorers. Maps document the growth of geographic knowledge about the American West, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, beginning with 16^th century maps that show Asia connected to North America and culminating in the detailed hydrographic maps prepared by naval officers in the early 19^th century. Other noteworthy items include films of the Russo-Japanese war made by Thomas Edison in 1905, the recording of a song, sung in Russian in 1954 by an Alaskan descendant of the early Russian settlers and, courtesy of the National Archives, the log of George Washington De Long, the commander of the Jeanette, a U.S. Navy Arctic exploring ship that was crushed in the ice near the delta of the Lena River in 1879.

The content of the site is approximately half "Russian" and half "American," although these terms are somewhat difficult to define and distinctions between them can be arbitrary. Materials from the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska are both Russian and American, as are photographs taken by George Kennan in Siberia. Items in third languages - French, German, Spanish, Icelandic, Italian - also are represented, particularly in the sections dealing with early accounts by travelers to Siberia and early scientific expeditions. New material from LC's collections will be added to the site periodically, with the first major upgrade scheduled for late May-early June of 2000.

Partnerships

The second track of the project, as noted, has been to engage Russian and other U.S. partners in the Meeting of Frontiers effort. This track began in parallel with the development of the pilot site, but given its inherent complexities has lagged somewhat in producing tangible results. It now has become the main focus of the Meeting of Frontiers project and is expected to yield significant achievements in 2000 and beyond.

Under agreements negotiated in 1999, the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks will contribute digital versions of 200 rare maps and 30 rare books relating to the early exploration and settlement of Alaska and the northwestern Pacific, as well as a collection of photographs of women pioneers in Alaska. Rasmuson is also slated to become a processing center for materials from other Alaskan libraries and archives, most notably the St. Herman's Orthodox Seminary in Kodiak. Discussions are under way with the American Museum of Natural History to include in Meeting of Frontiers the photographs from the 1897-1902 Jesup North Pacific Expedition to Alaska, Canada, and northeastern Siberia.

With regard to Russia, in November and December 1999 the Library of Congress concluded separate agreements with the Russian State Library in Moscow and the National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg for the installation of equipment to be used over a period of at least three years to produce digital images for Meeting of Frontiers. Both libraries have large repositories of material relating to Siberia, the Far East and Alaska that justify the investment in such equipment. Both are also well along in selecting interesting and in many cases unique photographs, books, lithographs, maps, and even original watercolors by Siberian artists for inclusion in the project. The Russian-German firm Pro-Soft has been awarded a contract to install and maintain scanning equipment at both institutions. Scanning operations are expected to begin in May-June 2000.

Efforts to include partners outside the two major cities - in Siberia, the Russian Far East, and the Russian North - also are proceeding. The Library of Congress plans to work with the Open Society Institute (OSI) of Russia, using the OSI network of Internet centers throughout the Russian Federation. OSI and the Library will launch a program of small grants under which scholars and curators from Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Tobolsk, Khabarovsk, Yakutsk, Vladivostok and other cities may obtain support to identify especially interesting collections relevant to Meeting of Frontiers which then can be digitized at the OSI regional centers.

Russian contributions to Meeting of Frontiers are being coordinated by a Russian advisory committee that met for the first time in Moscow in November 1999. OSI, which has pledged to make a substantial contribution to the realization of the project, hosted the meeting, which was co-chaired by Dr. Billington and OSI President Ekaterina Genieva. Members of the committee include Viktor V. Fedorov, Director of the Russian State Library, Vladimir Zaitsev, Director, National Library of Russia, and leading scholars and representatives of government ministries.

Problems, Decisions and Lessons

In planning Meeting of Frontiers, the project team was able draw upon the experience and established work practices of American Memory - a pioneering project carried out on a grand scale. Nonetheless, there were important differences between the two projects that gave rise to situations in which the Meeting of Frontiers team, working under the direction of the Librarian of Congress and within the parameters of the legislative authority for the project, had to make decisions on issues that did not arise in American Memory. New issues that presented particular challenges included language, selection, the balance between theme- and collections-based approaches, the mirroring of partner institution sites, and integration of materials from different repositories into a single site.

Language. From the beginning, it was decided to avoid a bifurcated approach in which users would choose between a Russian and an English site and thereafter not be exposed to the other language. English and Russian were to be used together as much as possible, down to the level of individual captions. One of the objectives was to encourage language study and awareness of the importance of foreign languages to American students. The bilingual character of the site also should help Russians studying English. The approach chosen required solving a number of technical problems relating to the inclusion of both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets on the same HTML pages and dealing with concerns about clutter and readability.

The bilingual approach had its limitations. Translation of "everything into everything" was not adopted for the primary source items digitized in the project. For textual materials, if the original was in English, a summary was provided in Russian; if the original was in Russian, a summary was provided in English. (For third languages, summaries will be provided in English and Russian.) For handwritten manuscript materials that are difficult to read even for native speakers, transcripts are provided along with annotations and summaries in the other language. For the Bering and Chirikov logs and journals, for example, Meeting of Frontiers presents the digitized image of the original hand-written Russian, a transcript in modern Cyrillic, and an English summary and annotations.

Searching is not fully bilingual. Because Meeting of Frontiers (like American Memory) is dynamically generated using LC catalog records, bibliographic entries can be searched using English or transliterated Russian, but not Cyrillic. Similarly, items that are accessible only through the browse lists (i.e., that are not associated with a static HTML page) can be found only by English or transliterated searches, and are not identified with Cyrillic captions or bibliographic records.

The bilingualism of the site thus relates mainly to HTML pages and non-searchable images of Cyrillic texts. This is not an ideal long-term solution, particularly as thousands of items are received from Russian institutions. There thus may be prospects for improvements, particularly if the Russian institutions were to take a leadership role in proposing solutions.

Selection. Selection of materials for digitization was perhaps the key step in the project. Initial selections were made by Professor Thomas Barrett of St. Mary's College of Maryland, a Russian and frontier historian who worked as part of the project team throughout 1999. The general approach was to avoid large archival collections, since these were seen as uninteresting to primary and middle-school students. Exceptions were made, however, for some materials, e.g., the early Russian explorers such as Bering, where it was thought that showing logs, lists of stocks and supplies, and journal entries would convey a sense of immediacy even if the original sources were difficult to read. Certain manuscript items (e.g., Russian-American Company papers from the Yudin Collection) also had never been published, and Meeting of Frontiers provided an excellent opportunity to present these papers for scholarly use.

Meeting of Frontiers is considerably more book-heavy than American Memory. Inclusion of the complete texts of many books was decided on several grounds: to make available rare volumes to scholars, to tell the story of the early exploration and discovery of Siberia - a story that for the most part is documented in books - and to try to convey to young people, particularly on the American side, the importance of books and writing in 19^th century America. The gallery "Memoirs of the Western Union Telegraph Expedition," for example, presents six books written by young American engineers and technicians based upon their experiences as workers in Alaska and Siberia.

The most visually appealing items in Meeting of Frontiers are the maps and photographs. These are also items that are expected to be contributed in large numbers by Russian and other U.S. institutions. Meeting of Frontiers also includes a small number of multimedia items, namely one recorded song and four early movies. The full project will include many more sound and film items. For the pilot, however, it was thought that limited effort should be placed on these items, since download times in many U.S. schools and homes and even more so in Russian schools would limit access to these materials. Over the longer term, more films and recordings need to be added. Russian films and recordings that are unknown to American audiences would be especially welcome additions.

Theme - versus Collections-Based Approaches. In principle, American Memory tries to present the "raw material" of history, with a limited amount of editorial narrative. To the extent possible, the biases inherent in selection are mitigated by the processing of whole collections and large numbers of collections. As a practical matter, however, there has had to be a certain amount of editorializing and interpreting in American Memory, and some use of themes cutting across collections.

Meeting of Frontiers by definition deals with a theme, and a key aspect of the project was to convey this theme while at the same time adhering to a collections-based approach. In designing the project, the LC team needed to steer a middle course between two extremes. On the one hand, it did not want to produce a long narrative that would be illustrated by an ad hoc collection of maps, photographs, and other items that had little in common except having been chosen by the writer of the narrative. On the other hand, it was important to do more than simply process 5 or 6 big collections, which would not in themselves be able to tell a story.

To balance the requirements of theme and collections, Meeting of Frontiers uses a multilevel and modular approach. The site is designed to operate on three levels. First, it provides an overview of the historical experience of the frontier in Russia and America through six narrative sections: "Exploration," "Colonization," "Development," "Alaska," "Frontiers and National Identity,"and "Mutual Perceptions." Each of these sections includes images that illustrate major events and themes, a bibliography with suggestions for further reading, and links to other web sites with related content. Second, within each narrative section there are several modules that present in greater depth themes relevant to that section. Third, "Galleries" are then used to point to additional images. Thus within the section "Exploration," there are three modules: "The Russian Discovery of Siberia," "The Exploration of the American West," and "The Russian North." Within "The Russian Discovery of Siberia," there are three additional galleries: "Mapping of Siberia," "Russian Scientific Expeditions," and "Early Foreign Travelers."

It is possible to skip the narrative parts (sections, modules, and galleries) altogether, and use the browse lists associated with the collections. These lists provide access to many more items than can be referenced via the static HTML pages in the narrative parts of the site.

Balancing the thematic and collections-based aspects of the project promises to be a continuing challenge, particularly as digitized images are received from other cooperating institutions and as the Library completes the digitization of certain large collections currently in process. One challenge is to make users aware of the fact that the narrative sections and the in-line images contained in them represent little more than the "tip of the iceberg" and that literally thousands of additional digital items (photographs, maps, manuscript and book pages) are available via the browse lists and bibliographic item searches.

Mirroring. Another set of issues concerns where and how the digitized images produced by the Meeting of Frontiers project can and should be used by the project partners. For both technical and accessibility reasons, it will be important to establish a mirror site in Russia that will be identical to the Meeting of Frontiers site at the U.S. location, i.e., the Library of Congress. Discussions with a potential Russian host of such a site are underway, along with efforts to address some tricky technical and possibly intellectual property issues relating to the mirror.

In addition to the whole-site mirror, each of the participating institutions will be free to use the images it generates from its collections in developing its own digital library. The University of Alaska at Fairbanks, for example, will contribute its 200 maps and 30 books to the Meeting of Frontiers site in Washington (and its Russian mirror), but it will also use these images as part of its own Alaskan digital library. Similar approaches are expected from the Russian partners.

Integration of Materials from Partner Institutions. A final issue concerns how to integrate materials from partner institutions into the existing Meeting of Frontiers site. In the best of all possible worlds, the Library of Congress would have set up joint Russian-American committees of scholars and curators to plan the site, draft a narrative, and jointly develop lists of items for digitization – and then created the pilot. This was not feasible, however, given the need to show Congress and other audiences practical results early in the project. LC and its partner institutions thus will need to integrate new material into an existing site.

This should not present major problems. In some cases, contributing institutions will create their own modules, complete with text and selected images. The University of Alaska, for example, is creating modules on "Native Peoples in Alaska," "Exploration and Scientific Discovery," "The Alaska Fur Trade," and "Women Pioneers" (all of which will be subsumed under the "Alaska" section.) The Russian State Library has proposed a module on the Amur River. In other cases, partners may not supply theme-based modules. Access to these items will be through browse lists within the "Collections" and "Partners" sections of Meeting of Frontiers. Individual images or groups of images may also be used (with proper attribution) to beef up modules and sections of the existing narrative that are still quite thin.

Integration of materials from partners institutions is only just beginning, and the LC project team will need to work with the partners on this matter in the coming months to develop patterns of cooperation that are satisfactory to all partners and ensure the best possible access to the materials.

Conclusions

The Meeting of Frontiers project is a pioneering effort that no doubt can offer lessons to other digital library projects, especially those involving international cooperation. The project is still underway, however, and it is too early to determine which aspects of it were most successful and worthy of emulation, and which need to be improved. Also lacking is complete information on how Meeting of Frontiers is or will be used - in schools, libraries, and by the general public. Perhaps the greatest unknown is how successful the project will be in meeting its broadest and most ambitious goals of promoting international understanding between the United States and Russia and in encouraging students in both countries to take an interest in each other. Initial indications are that the project has been well-received in both countries, but it will take time before it is disseminated widely and used extensively in classrooms and other settings.

Feedback on these questions from the U.S. and international community is welcome and is certain to influence how the Library of Congress and other cultural institutions approach the future of digital libraries.

References

1. This paper draws upon the work of members of the Meeting of Frontiers project team at the Library of Congress, which includes Deborah Thomas (NDL project coordinator), Dominique Pickett (NDL, designer), Kate Foster (NDL), Michael Neubert, Ronald Bachman, Harold Leich, Hope Nelsen and Ihor Gawdiak from the European Division, and consultants and contractors Thomas Barrett, Aleksey Gibson, Douglas Edwards, Andrei Pliguzov, Galina Vasilenko, Vera Siegel, and Bela Tarusalo. Their help is greatly acknowledged, as is the support of Mikhail Levner, LC representative in Moscow. Additional thanks go to Laura Campbell, director of NDL, Nancy Eickhacker, NDL, Winston Tabb, Assistant Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress, and to our colleagues and partners at the University of Alaska, the Russian State Library, the National Library of Russia, and the Open Society Institute.
2. Written statement by Dr. James H. Billington to the House Subcommittee on Legislative Appropriations, January 27, 2000; and Gail Fineberg, "FY 2001 Budget Request Includes Digital Initiative", Library of Congress Gazette, February 4, 2000.
3. The National Online Library: A Five-Year Plan for the Digital Future at the Library of Congress, p. 16.
4. For example, John Ledyard, an acquaintance of Thomas Jefferson who attempted to walk across Siberia, Perry McDonough Collins, a lawyer and businessman who became the American Commercial Agent to the Amur River in 1856 and who developed a plan, partially carried out, to build a telegraph link from America to Europe via the Bering Straits and Siberia, and the explorer George F. Kennan.
5. "Library of Congress and National Library of Spain Sign Agreement to Collaborate on Internet Project," LC Press Release 00-020, February 24, 2000; Gail Fineberg, "LC Makes Digital Plans with Spain", Library of Congress Gazette, March 3, 2000.
6. http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/frontiers
7. This is the subject of Francis Parkman's 3,100-page France and England in North America with its seven separate books: Pioneers of France in the New World; The Jesuits in North America; Lasalle and the Discovery of the Great West; The Old Regime in Canada; Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV; A Half-Century of Conflict; and Montcalm and Wolfe. (2 vols., New York: The Library of America, 1994).
8. See http://www.konbib.nl/gabriel/bibliotheca-universalis/index.htm
9. "Meeting of Frontiers Web Site Chronicles Parallel History of America's West and Russia's East", Library of Congress Press Release PR 99-185, December 21, 1999.

About the author

John Van Oudenaren is Chief of the European Division at the Library of Congress and and adjunct professor at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. Prior to joining the Library, he was a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation. In 1991-1995 he served as the director of RAND's European office in Delft, the Netherlands.

He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his A.B. in Germanic Languages and Literature from Princeton University. He manages the Library of Congress's Meeting of Frontiers project http://frontiers.loc.gov, which aims to create a U.S.-Russian digital library dealing with the themes of the American exploration, settlement, and development of the West, the parallel process of exploration, settlement and development by the Russians in Siberia, and the meeting of the frontiers in Alaska. He is also active in the Transatlantic Information Exchange Service (TIES) U.S.-EU digital project (http://www.tiesweb.org).