ANN ARBOR—The University of Michigan Library has just put online its millionth digitized book. That’s 1 million out of the 7.5 million volumes in the library’s current holdings.

“Having over 1 million books in our collection digitized and online is a significant milestone,” said Paul Courant, University Librarian. “It’s a big number. No one else has reached it. It means that we are on track to digitize our entire collection of bound volumes by early in the next decade.

“Many of our library’s strengths derive from the size and the scope of the collections. With a million books online and almost a million more digitized, we can become fully engaged in determining how best to use this remarkable and unique resource.”

Michigan’s MBooks program makes these volumes available to readers around the world, increasing use of the U-M Library at home and abroad. An average 60,000 pages are viewed every month and MBooks has been accessed from 92 countries.

The Michigan Digitization Project is a partnership with Google that will digitize the entire

U-M collection providing full-text access to works that are in the public domain, creating new ways for users to search and access U-M Library content. As a leader in digital archival and preservation efforts among research libraries, the U-M Library has been digitizing material for many years, but the partnership with Google allows the University to accomplish the task faster and on a scale that would not have been achieved alone.

The Michigan Digitization Project can be found at: http://www.lib.umich.edu/mdp/.

Leading the list of those most frequently used digitized online books is “Tis Pity She’s a Whore and The Broken Heart” by John Ford, and “Football for Player and Spectator” by Fielding H.Yost.

One of the more unusual digitized offerings is “Goops and how to be them; a manual of manners for polite infants inculcating many juvenile virtues both by precept and example” with 90 drawings by Gelett Burgess.

However, the star of the digitization milestone is “Maria Mitchell, Life, Letters, and Journals”. It is the one millionth book to be digitized and put online from the University’s collection.

“The unlimited ‘shelf space’ that is afforded by digital files enables access to specialized, niche interests,” said Suzanne Chapman, the user interface specialist for digital library efforts.

More about Maria Mitchell:

The 19th century American woman known both for her scholarship and her political activism, Maria Mitchell was born into a Quaker community in Nantucket, Mass. in 1818. She learned astronomy from her father and in 1847 became the second woman ever to discover a comet, leading her to become the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In addition to her outstanding work as a scientist, Mitchell was also a dedicated abolitionist and suffragist. In 1873, she co-founded the American Association for the Advancement of Women with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and served as its president from 1874-1876. Mitchell was the first faculty member at Vassar College where she taught astronomy until her retirement in 1888. She died in Lynn, MA in 1889.

“Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals” was produced from digital images as part of the U-M Library’s preservation initiatives. The library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of its items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses.

The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the text that can both be accessed online and used to create new print copies.