One of the United States' most renowned universities, Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is planning to digitise a collection of 51,500 rare Chinese books.

The Harvard-Yenching Library is the largest university library for East Asian research in the Western world. Some of the books in its collection are more than 1,000 years old.

Technicians will begin the six-year project in January. Librarian James Chiang says that scholars from all over the world currently travel to Harvard because many of the texts are not available anywhere else. He says that digitising the books will make them more available to a much broader audience.

Harvard-Yenching Institute
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