Library of Congress to Digitize Brittle Books

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The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded the Library of Congress a $2 million grant to digitize thousands of public-domain works, focusing on at-risk "brittle books" and U.S. history volumes.

The project, "Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress," will include not only scanning the volumes, but also developing suitable page-turner display technology, the capability to scan and display foldouts, and a pilot program to capture high-level metadata, such as tables of contents, chapters/ sections, and indexes.

Past digitization projects have avoided brittle books because of their fragile condition, but the "Digitizing American Imprints" project aims to …