Housed in the Library of Congress's Rare Book and Special Collections Division, the books, pamphlets and other artifacts represented in this digital collection of 167 documents were selected from the nearly one thousand titles in the NAWSA library donated in 1938 by Carrie Chapman Catt. The printed matter and ephemera include some documents formerly owned by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Alice Stone Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Smith Miller and Mary A. Livermore.
Each document is reproduced as a set of facsimile page images with searchable text. Systems Integration Group (SIG) of Lanham, Maryland, digitized the documents. The image capture occurred at the Library and, in order to preserve the originals, bound works were scanned in their bindings. The text images are bitonal TIF file format, Group IV compression, and spatial resolution captured at 300 dpi with random-pattern dithering. Images with illustrations, i.e. line art, are in PCX file format.
After the documents were digitized, a subcontractor made their texts searchable by transcribing the texts from the document page images and then encoding them with SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). The texts have a transcription accuracy of 99.95 percent. The online presentation offers access to the SGML versions of the texts for users with appropriate viewing software. The SGML markup produced in 1994-95 used the then-current version of the American Memory document type definition (DTD). This DTD was modified in 1996. The online presentation of the texts also includes a version in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), which is easier for most users to access because no special software is required.