Learning from American Memory: opportunities and challenges ahead

For the last five years, the Library of Congress has been building American Memory, providing free public access to historical materials converted to digital form. American Memory is not only an operational service, but also an ongoing experiment. Important lessons have been learned and can now be applied to plans for dealing with content originating in digital form. Challenges that remain also apply to access and preservation for born-digital content. One particular challenge is the representation of complex objects and associated metadata necessary to facilitate continuing access in the face of changing technology. Other challenges include developing a technical infrastructure that supports access management and persistent identification for information resources, and adapting to changes in underlying economic factors and growing expectations of users.