CNRI worked with the Library of Congress to design and implement an open distributed system allowing networked access to digitized material from the Library of Congress' collections, as part of the National Digital Library Program at the Library of Congress.

Among the components of this system were the CNRI Handle System, which provides long term persistent identifiers for items in the digitized material, and the CNRI Repository, a means of storing digital objects that allows network access via an open protocol.

More details of the prototype work appear in "An Architecture for Information in Digital Libraries" in the Februrary 1997 issue of D-Lib Magazine. [ doi:10.1045/february97-arms ]