New Article Reports on the Digitization of a Rare Book Collection at University of Illinois (UIUC)

From The Daily Illini:

In the third floor of the University Main Library, staff members from the Rare Book & Manuscript Library are working to catalog and digitize a collection of around 20,000 books and manuscripts. Official cataloging began after receiving funding this past winter.
The collection has been housed at the University of Illinois since 1921. Although the books are centuries old, they have been preserved in a vault in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at a controlled temperature and humidity level.
Chloe Ottenhoff, the lead cataloger of the project, said that before the University obtained the books, they belonged to a private collector from Alessandria, Italy, named Count Antonio Cavagna Sangiuliani di Gualdana.
Ottenhoff said the project is possible thanks to the Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources, which was created to catalog books that have been inaccessible in library systems because of lack of funding or resources.

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The U. of Illinois Library was awarded $498,942 on December 3, 2014 to fund this project. It was one of 19 projects awarded funding in 2014 from CLIR’s Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards program. Review a list of the 19 projects here.
Learn More: Cataloging Cavagna! The man behind the collection (via The Non Solus Blog, U. of Illinois Library)
See Also: New CLIR Program to Digitize Hidden Special Collections Receives $4 Million in Funding From Mellon Foundation (December 9, 2014)

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Awards, Digital Preservation, Funding, Libraries, Reports, Resources