From: Mary Lacy <mlac@LOC.GOV>
The Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress is
pleased to announce the expansion of its menu on LC MARVEL, the
Library's gopher. This menu now provides selected finding aids
which are searchable using WAIS, information on Reading Room
policies and procedures, instructions for searching manuscript
catalog records in the Library's online catalog, and the
Division's annual acquisitions reports. To date, only a small
percentage of the division's finding aids are available in
electronic format: twenty finding aids are currently online, with
ten more to follow shortly. This number will increase as finding
aids are converted on an ongoing basis.
>From the main menu of LC MARVEL (at marvel.loc.gov), go to:
--> Research and Reference
--> Reading Rooms of the Library
--> Manuscript
For direct access from the World Wide Web, use the URL:
gopher://marvel.loc.gov/11/research/reading.rooms/manuscripts.
Copies of the finding aids and acquisitions reports found
on LC MARVEL are also available for anonymous file transfer with
original formatting as WordPerfect 5.1 documents, as well as in
ASCII format. After connecting to FTP.LOC.GOV, look under
/pub/mss/msspub for subdirectories containing finding aids,
acquisitions reports, and general information.
LC MARVEL can be accessed through LC WEB (URL:
http://www.loc.gov), where readers may view documents from the
Manuscript Division's holdings in online exhibits such as the
Gettysburg address and digitized historical collections such as
recovered Walt Whitman notebooks. A Web page for the Manuscript
Division is in the process of development.
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