Good News for LOC Brittle Books

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said yesterday that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded a $2 million grant to the world’s largest library for a program to digitize thousands of works with a major focus on “brittle books.”

The project supplements other efforts at the Library of Congress along with private companies such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Those massive book digitization projects, however, have typically shied away from materials in vulnerable condition. USA Today has the story.