Accessing the American Memory collection: Multimedia formats and offline-use tips
The American Memory collection contains a wide variety of formats including motion pictures, sound recordings, sheet music, maps, and photos. First, learn how to find them, then explore options for use in your classroom.
(Drawn and published by C. Drie. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C. G3904.R2A3 1872 .D7. More about the map)
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- American Memory: North Carolina educator's guide
- Each article in this series features an in-depth look at one aspect of the Library of Congress' American Memory with a special focus on North Carolina materials.
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Related pages
- Using the multimedia library: Guidelines and instructions on finding and using images, audio, and video in the LEARN NC multimedia library.
- Collection Connections: In this installment of the American Memory Guide, learn to find teaching resources associated with the Library of Congress's primary source collections.
- The Learning Page: Activities and features: In this installment of the American Memory Guide, learn to easily locate activities and features specially designed for students and your classroom.
Related topics
- Learn more about American Memory, Library of Congress, audio, images, maps, multimedia, and primary sources.
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Locating multimedia files
The American Memory collection contains a wide variety of formats including motion pictures, sound recordings, sheet music, maps, and photos. Browsing collections by format is one of the options on the Browse Collections page. Simply select the type of media you are looking for under the heading Browse Collections Containing and you will get a search page limited to collections that contain that type of media. So, if you are looking for an image from Carteret County, select Photos, Prints and search with the term “Carteret.” This search returns images of buildings from the Built in America collection as well an image demonstrating the effects of wind on dunes and vegetation from American Environmental Photographs, 1891–1936.
Search the Sound Recordings for “North Carolina” and find many interesting items including “Man-on-the-Street,” Burlington, North Carolina, December 8, 1941, an interview that provides local perspective on the possibility of America’s involvement in the war immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Choose from streaming audio formats (.mp3 or .wav files), downloading or playing the audio (RealAudio .ram file), or reading the print transcript. This is just one of a series of World War II home-front interviews from Fletcher Collins, a professor of English at Elon College in North Carolina from 1936–42.
The Books, Other Printed Text selection includes a variety of visually appealing formats including pamphlets, broadsides, advertisements, and cartoons. When contrasting the roles and perceptions of men and women in nineteenth century North Carolina, an 1869 advertisement appealing to families to send their daughters to Mont-Amoena Female Seminary, a Lutheran school for girls in Cabarrus County, can be compared with the text of the ad for North Carolina College, an all boys school. Less than a decade later, then Governor Vance issued an announcement inviting potential teachers, both male and female, to attend the newly-founded University Normal School. Most of these printed materials are presented as images. Keep in mind that if a transcript is available it may be machine-read, uncorrected, and contain errors.
Access and technical considerations
Sound recordings, documents, maps, images, and video each present unique challenges. No matter how up-to-date your computer or what your browser preferences are, you are bound to run into some obstacles as you begin to locate and use media files from the American Memory collection. If you find a video that you can’t view, or you are unhappy with the features of your audio player, there may be an easy solution. The American Memory help site has a clear and useful chart for determining how to view each format. The How to View page is broken down by media type and format; once you locate the format that matches the item you want to view you can select an appropriate viewer. Difficulties using various media formats should be resolved when you select new viewers or players to install or simply update to the latest version.
Consider all the different ways to use the materials in the classroom before planning a lesson featuring a specific media item from the American Memory collections. Depending upon the type of media, you may have the option of saving it for later use or even offline use—an option that is very appealing if you have limited access to online resources in your classroom or you don’t want to risk the possibility of technical difficulties during a presentation.
Added viewing or playback options
It’s not just about making sure you can get to the resource online when you need it; sometimes there are other considerations for using an item offline. In some cases, downloading the media for offline viewing offers superior viewing options. For example, the Bird’s eye view of the city of Raleigh, North Carolina 1872 is a hand-drawn color panoramic map featuring the streets and buildings of the city with references to landmarks, churches, schools, and businesses. The online options for viewing do not allow the reader to zoom in enough to even read the key but if you download the high resolution MrSID-viewable file, you can zoom in on any part of the map. There is even a microscope view window to further magnify the section you want to see in detail. The MrSID file also provides the option of exporting the image or a selected portion of the image as a TIFF file, a common high-resolution file format. JPEG2000, another high-resolution file format, is also used in the collections and provides similar viewing options.
Printing and saving
Often the easiest way to ensure you have what you need is to save the file to your computer for later viewing, listening, or printing. The Learning Page’s How to Print and Save provides excellent directions for saving Web content including images, audio, video, and even entire web pages.
Purchasing reproductions
Ordering reproductions of materials is another option for offline use. There are, however, costs associated with ordering items. Costs for copies of materials vary based upon the formats available of the original and the format requested for the copy. More significant, however, is the cost of time—you must plan well in advance to ensure you get the copy of the item in time for your lesson. If ordering a reproduction is the best option for your situation, the How to Use Offline page includes information about available services.
Bookmarking or referencing the item’s online location
Even if you are willing to brave the potential pitfalls of online access, simply re-locating the item in the collection may present a challenge. When you search for items in the collection the resulting pages have a temporary
Classroom resources
While subject-specific lessons or activities matched to particular items or collections are available on American Memory, you may also wish to use the more flexible worksheets from the United States National Archives and Records Administration, which are format-specific and may be used in any lesson that incorporates multimedia into the content.
