Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, February 01, 2007

New digitization and OA project at the Library of Congress

The Sloan Foundation has given the Library of Congress $2 million to digitize thousands of rare and brittle public domain books for OA.  (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)  From yesterday's press release:

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today announced that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded the Library of Congress a $2 million grant for a program to digitize thousands of public-domain works, with a major focus on at-risk "brittle books" and U.S. history volumes....

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....

"We are delighted to partner with the Library of Congress, the world's largest library, in this important digitization effort," said Doron Weber, program director at the Sloan Foundation. "A significant number of books from the Library's great collection will now be available to anyone in the world in an open, non-exclusive and non-profit setting, thus bringing the ideal of a universal digital library closer to reality." ...

Digitizing American Imprints will utilize the "Scribe" scanning technology of the Open Content Alliance....