Library of Congress digitizing millions of books, manuscripts and photos

Library of Congress digitizing millions of books, manuscripts and photos

The Library of Congress in Washington is already working on their project of digitizing millions of books, manuscripts and photos. However, there is so much data to digitize that they expect the process to take decades to complete.

Beth Dulabahn, one of the advisors on this project had this to say: “It’s a philosophical shift for the library. The vast majority of what is digitized will be on the web.”

Interestingly, the project started around 12 years ago and did not interest many people involved in the project. Apparently, things are changing now.

They have already completed work on digitizing 11 million items so far and this is just the beginning. The library keeps on adding huge quantity of items and documents.

They began the digitizing work with the items published before 1923 as they fell in the public domain. This helped the library avoid any copyright hassles from any publisher.

Their digitized work is made available online at www.loc.gov. Jeremy Adamson, part of the team added this for viewers benefit: “A child can go to George Washington’s letters, can look how his handwriting looks like and download a picture of Mt. Vernon where he used to live.”