Foundation Gives $2 million to LC to Digitize Rare Books

The Library of Congress, which already has several million digital items that are accessible—mostly through the American Memory web site—to users around the world, received a grant of $2 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support a program to digitize thousands of public-domain works, with a major focus on fragile books and U.S. history volumes.

The project, “Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress,” will include not only the scanning of volumes, but also the development of suitable scanning and display technologies.