The Cornell Library Historical Monographs contains digital surrogates of materials whose future was put into jeopardy due to their brittle or decaying physical nature. The project was begun in 1990 as a joint venture by Cornell University and the Xerox Corporation.

Selection

As the project was intended as a preservation measure the materials found in the digital collection were chosen due to their poor condition. Of the 456 manuscripts in the collection, the 441 that can be found on the website are those that are no longer bound by copyright restrictions. The others I assume were scanned and will remain offline til the copyright runs out.

Metadata

The website states clearly that the books were scanned by a prototype co-developed by Cornell and Xerox and stored as 600dpi bitonal TIFF files and compressed with ITU Group 4 Compression.

Object Characteristics

The website itself allows for multiple entry points, such as browsing through the selections, as well as searching by author, title, as well as keywords within the texts. The scans are all adequate, however one is not able to zoom in very far, and so if one were looking for any sort of detail with regard to the physicality of the pages, this site would not be for you.

Intended Audience

I assume that the audience of this collection would be anyone interested in reading these monographs who does not need to physically see them, or interested in perusing what Cornell has in their collection from a remote location.