“Great Deeds”: Frontiers and Other Adventures at the Library of Congress, 1996-2019

In the late 1990s, the Library of Congress under the leadership of Librarian of Congress James H. Billington launched an innovative digital library project, Meeting of Frontiers, built around the theme of the parallel experiences of the American West and the Russian Far East and Siberia and the meeting of the frontiers in Alaska. The project flourished until 2005, and digitized rare collections at more than thirty libraries and archives in Russia and the United States. The project was left unfinished, however, as funding ran out and the Library shifted to new priorities, including the development of a World Digital Library (WDL). In 2016–2018, a small group of Library staff members, faced with the likelihood that both WDL and Frontiers would be shut down in the post-Billington era, mounted a successful effort to save the remarkable Frontiers content for permanent use by researchers and general users.