The 238 volumes in An American Ballroom Companion are reproduced as complete sets of page images and most volumes also were text-converted.
The books were digitized in 1997-98 by Systems Integration Group of Lanham, Maryland. Facsimile images were made first, followed by the transcription and SGML encoding of most of the texts. In order to preserve the original volumes, bound works were scanned face-up in their bindings, one page at a time. The master, or archival version of the textual pages (containing typography and line art), is a 300-dots-per-inch (dpi) bitonal image in the TIFF format, with ITU Group IV compression.
The Library's transcription requirement for text is 99.95 percent accuracy compared to the original. The converted texts are marked up with Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; ISO 8879), using the Library's American Memory document type definition (DTD) for historical documents. American Memory DTD conforms to the international guidelines for humanities texts developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The SGML-encoded version of the text serves as an archival file and is also available online. In addition, online access is provided to HTML texts derived from the SGML archival files.