The Library of Congress will soon digitize thousands of public-domain works, with a special emphasis on "brittle books" and important titles on American history, through a $2-million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The grant, announced today by James H. Billington, librarian of Congress, will help the library do some unusual work with some of its most fragile holdings. Many digitization projects have steered clear of sensitive volumes, but the Library of Congress intends to create a best-practices report that details how such items should be handled and scanned.
(Observers of digitization projects may also want to look through Jeffrey Toobin's recent piece in The New Yorker, which chronicles Google's ambitious library-scanning endeavor.) –Brock Read
