The Cornell Historic Monograph 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.
Of the 456 General Monographs that make up the Historic Monograph Collection, 441 that are not covered by copyright protection are being made available for online viewing.