National Endowment for the Humanities Gives $1M for U.S. Digital Library

A nonprofit effort to digitize the nation’s libraries and create a Digital Public Library of America won a $1 million federal grant Thursday from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The grant will help form a new nonprofit organization and create the technical platform to share digital content across the nation’s many public libraries and archives. Digitizing books and building a system for libraries to contribute will take years, though, and millions more dollars from private partners, said endowment chairman Jim Leach.