The Visual Resources Collections of the Design School's Frances Loeb Library this week received a grant from the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library (NDL) to digitize 2,500 images of American architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design dating from 1850 to 1920.

Thanks to the $33,214 award, these lantern-slide images will become part of "American Memory," the Library of Congress online collection of primary resource materials in U.S. history and culture, which already contains more than 400,000 items (Internet address: http://www.loc.gov./).

Visual Resources Librarian Ann Baird Whiteside wrote Harvard's winning proposal. Elsewhere, NDL projects will preserve materials as varied as 19th-century sheet music, photographs of newcomers to the Great Plains, and first-person narratives of 19th-century Southern life.

Almost 80 libraries from 31 states entered the NDL Competition. In all, 10 libraries shared $600,000 in this first round of a three-year, $2 million effort funded by Ameritech to digitize historically important U.S. collections and put them on the Internet for the first time.

"These beautiful lantern-slide images [at the Frances Loeb Library] are important because so many of them are unique and document the development of the built environment and landscape in ways that have not been well documented otherwise," says Hinda Sklar, Associate Dean for Information Services and Librarian of the Frances Loeb Library.

"For example, the collection contains images of private estates all over the United States that illustrate the development of private estate gardens over a significant period of time. The collection also serves to illustrate the development of landscape beautification for public use and recreation, with its images of Franklin Park [Boston], the National Mall [Washington, D.C.], and Central Park [New York]."

The images provide a rich field of exploration for urban-history scholars, landscape architects, and architects who are looking for "visual resources to illuminate and elucidate their ideas."

Library collections at the Design School date back to 1900, when the first collection of books, photographs, and lantern slides was assembled to meet the needs of classes in architecture. Today, the collections of the Frances Loeb Library (including more than 260,000 volumes and over 150,000 slides and photographs) enjoy international recognition for their often-unique scholarly resources in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design.

The National Digital Library project is only the latest development in the Design School's 15-year history as a leader in forging creative links between computers and the field of design. The Loeb Library's Visual Resources staff are now collaborating with counterparts in the Fine Arts Library and developing a slide database. Other efforts are digitizing materials for specific courses and making visual collections accessible on the Design School network.

Established in 1800 to serve the reference needs of Congress, the Library of Congress is the world's largest library, housing more than 111 million items. By collaborating with institutions nationwide, the LOC/Ameritech National Digital Library seeks to make millions of items freely available on the Internet by the year 2000.

Ameritech, one of the world's 100 hundred largest companies, serves the communications needs of millions of customers in 50 states and 40 countries. As the world's principal supplier of library-automation software, Ameritech Library Services develops and distributes library-management systems and information-access products to 3,500 libraries in 34 countries.