Online posting of Lincoln papers completed

The Library of Congress this month put the final pieces of the Abraham Lincoln Papers online.The project, conducted by the library’s National Digital Library Program and Manuscript Division, makes 20,000 documents comprising 61,000 digital images and annotated transcriptions of about 11,000 documents available at .The collection includes items dating from 1833 to 1916, such as Lincoln’s draft of the Emancipation Proclamation and his draft of his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865.The documents were microfilmed and indexed in 1947, when they were opened to the public for the first time. Online Computer Library Center Inc. of Dublin, Ohio, digitized the papers using a raster scanner on negative images of the microfilm. The digital images were produced in JPEG File Interchange Format, and Grayscale GIF images were then created for preview access online. The files are stored on magneto-optical disks in the NDLP digital file repository. The complete collection of digital files occupies approximately 100 G of server space. Editors at the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., transcribed approximately 10,000 documents. They were delivered to the NDLP as Rich Text Format files, which were then converted to Standard Generalized Markup Language using OmniMark 5.0 software. NDLP workers then used free OmniMark software to translate the transcriptions from SGML to HTML 3.2 for indexing and viewing with Web browsers.