"It is exciting that the investment in the preservation microfilming of these extraordinary resources will now enable global availability and use.  Columbia values this partnership with the Internet Archive," James G. Neal, Vice President for Information Services and Columbia University Librarian said.

The digitization project will work gradually through microfilm in the subjects of Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance history and literature, and American and European economic and labor history.

"American tax-payers funded the making of these microfilms, so we are very pleased that the digital versions will be freely available to everyone on the Internet Archive's site," Janet Gertz, Director of the Preservation and Digital Conversion Division of the Libraries and administrator of the Libraries' side of the project, said.

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, founded in 1996 to build an Internet library that offers researchers, historians, and scholars permanent access to historical collections that exist in digital format.The Internet Archive includes text, audio, moving images, and software, as well as archived web pages, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities. More information is available at http://www.archive.org