UT’s Prized Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection Digitized

By alcalde in Blog on February 10, 2010 at 3:58 pm | No Comments

The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, a crown jewel of the University of Texas’ library holdings, has been completely digitized.

Google Books announced Wednesday that it had finished scanning and digitizing the more than 500,000 individual book volumes in the collection three years after it started in 2007.

(The description of the entire collection on UT’s library website lists the number of books, periodicals, pamphlets, and microforms at 970,000. See all that’s in the collection, besides books, here.)

The eclectic collection features books in more than 50 languages, from the 18th century to today, all pertaining in some way, shape, or form to Latin America and Latinos. Now they’re all scannable, searchable, and readable online.

“We’ve long wanted to share these treasures of Latin America with the world, and Google has helped us to do just that,” said Dennis Dillon, associate director of the UT Libraries.

Ramsey Allington and Jodi Healy Pritchett, the Google folks in charge of the project, flagged a few treasures from the collection: the memoir of an American veteran of the Mexican-American War (1846-48); an 1897 bulletin detailing some pottery found by a University of Chicago anthropologist in Lake Chapala, Mexico; and the political journal mentioned in Jorge Luis Borges’ Funes el memorioso (Funes the Memorious).

Interesting tid-bits: UT has the fifth-largest academic library collection in the United States, a tenth of which are the books in the Benson Collection.