Digitizing American history

The Library of Congress has been awarded a $2 million grant to digitize thousands of works in the public domain, in a project focusing on at-risk “brittle books” and U.S. history volumes, the library announced Wednesday.

Awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the grant will enable the world’s largest library to scan and display volumes, including foldouts; develop a page-turner display technology; and begin a pilot program to record metadata such as tables of contents, chapters, sections and indexes.

The project, titled “Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress,” will begin scanning books within a few months.

“Past digitization projects have shied away from brittle books because of the condition of the materials, but ‘Digitizing American Imprints’ intends to serve as a demonstration project of best practices for the handling and scanning of such vulnerable works,” the Library of Congress stated in a press release.

The Library of Congress has more than 134 million items in various languages, including books, photographs, prints, drawings, manuscripts, maps, sound recordings and motion pictures. More than 7.5 million of these items have been converted into digital form.

The digitization program announced today will include American history volumes, including county, state and regional histories, as well as U.S. genealogy and regimental histories, including memoirs, diaries and other collections from the Civil War.

The project will include the Benjamin Franklin Collection, selections from the Confederate States of America Collection, and first editions from the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Photography works also will be scanned.

The project will take advantage of  Scribe scanning technology from the Open Content Alliance.

“It is inspiring to think that one of these books, many of which are in physical jeopardy, might spark the creativity of a future scholar or ordinary citizen who otherwise might not have had access to this wealth of human understanding,” said James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, in a statement.