High-Tech Information Lab Opens at Library of Congress.

The article reports on the opening of a new multimillion-dollar demonstration center for multimedia information and educational technologies by the Library of Congress (LC). The center occupies the 6,000 square foot atrium in the LC's James Madison Memorial Building. The National Demonstration Laboratory for Interactive Information Technologies (NDL) is expected to play a major role in fulfilling the LC's plans to make its collections more widely available and accessible. The center, a demonstration of public-private enterprise, is supported entirely by private funds. The NDL holds forth the promise of connecting the treasures of the collection of the LC to the country and indeed, the world, and making them available through interactive technology. The LC already has several projects in test stage. One is the American Memory Project, which was the Library's first significant move to use advanced optical-disk storage methods to put library collections in a form that could be transmitted rapidly across the country.