It will be interesting to see if these titles become available through other sources like the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft Live Books, and Google Books. Recently, the Sloan Foundation awarded a $1 million grant to The Open Content Alliance. The program is named “Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress.”

In addition to the digitization, some of the money will be used to:

+ Develop “page-turning” technology. We would imagine it might be in the same arena as the Turning the Pages 2.0 technology from The British Library.

+ Launch a pilot program to capture metadata (table-of contents, chapters/sections, index, etc.).

From the announcement:
The project, “Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress,” will include not only the scanning of volumes, but also the development of suitable page-turner display technology, capability to scan and display foldouts, and a pilot program to capture high-level metadata, such as table of contents, chapters/sections and index. 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.

Direct to Full Text of News Release

Source: The Library of Congress

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 and is filed under Digital Repositories, Digitization Projects, Info Management and Retrieval, Libraries and Librarianship, Preservation/Conservation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.