Library of Congress to digitize brittle books.

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 set the standard for handling and scanning such vulnerable works.

"Digitizing American Imprints" will use the Open Content Alliance's "Scribe" scanning technology. Scanning is expected to begin within a few months after an initial startup period to establish logistics, staffing, and resources.

The project also includes digitization of works in these other categories:

* U.S. genealogy and regimental histories, including many county, state, and regional histories, as well as histories, memoirs, diaries, and from the Civil War period

* Six collections of rare books, including the Benjamin Franklin Collection, selections from the Katherine Golden Bitting, the Elizabeth Robins Pennell Collections of Gastronomy, first editions from the library's Rare Book and Special Collections Division, selections from the Confederate States of America Collection, the Henry Harrisse Collection of Columbiana, and selections from the lean Hersholt Collection of Hans Christian Andersen

* Works of photography focusing on the technical aspects of photography and the artistic publications and biographies of photographers

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The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, founded in 1934, makes grants in science, technology, and the quality of American life. Sloan's program in Universal Access to Recorded Knowledge aims to increase access to recorded human knowledge by encouraging digitization of material in the public domain, assuring that it is archived, preserved, and openly accessible, fostering its availability to people everywhere.

Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation's oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, with more than 134 million items in various languages, disciplines, and formats available to the U.S. Congress and the nation in its 21 reading rooms on Capitol Hill.