These photographs were taken by the staff of Smithsonian's Office of Imaging, Printing & Photographic Services (OIPP) using conventional cameras and film. However, once the film was processed, new electronic imaging technologies were used for the first time to make the resulting images immediately available to the public.
Photographs were edited and scanned directly onto the then newly released Kodak Photo CD format. The Photo CD's were themselves further edited and the "best of" electronically transferred to another Photo CD which was placed on display in the "Information Age" exhibit in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Never before had visitors to the museum been able to see events from the previous day in this electronic form.
In addition this selection of 27 photographs was converted into GIF format and uploaded the same day to CompuServe, as well as the OIPP Internet FTP server.
As a result, the Office of Imaging, Printing & Photographic Services was presented "The Edge" award at the 1993 White House News Photographers Association annual awards dinner.
The following year, the images were placed into a page for the newly emerging World Wide Web by a graduate student at Metalab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Later that year, when the White House launched their own web site, that page was also used there.