About the Project

The Cornell University Library New York State Historical Literature Collection consists of digital surrogates for materials that were part of a joint study involving Digital Preservation between Cornell University and the Xerox Corporation.

Begun in 1990, a process was developed where brittle and decaying books were digitally scanned, using prototype equipment co-developed by Cornell and the Xerox Corporation (the CLASS scanner) and stored as 600dpi, bitonal TIFF images, compressed with ITU Group 4 compression, on digital platters on an EPOCH "jukebox" digital server.

Facsimiles of these books were generated and the books were returned to the shelves. The images were available online using specially-developed clients in Unix, MAC and PC platforms. These clients were developed at Library Technology at Cornell University by William Turner III, David Fielding and Chris Stuart.

This collection consists of:

• 456 General monographs (see Cornell University Library Historical Monographs)
• 42 Cornell Dissertations (not available for viewing due to copyright restrictions)
• 576 Math books (512 titles, 576 volumes, see Cornell University Library Historic Math Monographs)
• 691 New York State Historical pamphlets and monographs