Skip to Content

Rare Book Digitization Project

Posted On June 17, 2015 | 15:10 pm | by meredithb | Permalink

In 2015, sixteen titles, in twenty-three volumes, were sent to Harvard’s Imaging Services as part of a continuing project to digitize unique or very rare items from the library’s collections. After enhancing the catalog record and creating metadata for each item, librarians shipped the books to Harvard with customized instructions. This process, highlighted last month in the “Behind the Scenes” series, produces a digital facsimile of each title, available through the Harvard Page Delivery Service.

The extensive effort on the part of librarians at Dumbarton Oaks and the team at Harvard has begun to show results, as scholars within the institution and around the world access the digital facsimiles and request images of plates and text from the digital repository.

A searchable list of the forty-three titles currently available as digital facsimiles enables researchers to perform a general search of the records of the works, or refine by area of study and year of digitization. Links to the digital facsimile and to the full HOLLIS catalog record are available in the description of each work. The list will be updated as new titles are digitized in future years.