New York Public Library launches digitization project.

• Position: DIGITAL LIBRARY - Brief article

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Soon the world will be able to view material handwritten by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as well as an original pencil map of Walden Pond by Thoreau and numerous poems and letters from Walt Whitman and Civil War Union soldiers.

These are some of the materials The New York Public Library (NYPL) will digitize in its $1 million digitization project over the next couple of years. The project will add an estimated 11,000 manuscripts and 35,000 pages to NYPL's digital library, which already provides access to 800,000 images of digitized content.

"Digitizing collections featuring hand-written documents from Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Mark Twain, among others, provides remarkable new opportunities for scholarly research, and creates new teaching applications for an international...