Our 10,000th Digital Book!

The JCB’s motto for more than a century has been “Speak to the Past, and It Shall Teach Thee,” but we at the JCB look to the future as well. As it happens, just this past week we passed a landmark – our 10,000th digitized book – which is an important milestone on the way to digitizing our entire collection. The book turned out to be – by pure serendipity – Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s L’an 2440: Rêve s’il en fut jamais, a utopian novel written in the late-eighteenth century that announces an “avenger of the New World” from the bloodline of Moctezuma in the form of a Black Spartacus, looking forward to a time when all citizens in the Americas would be free from oppression and servitude. This message of future liberation speaks to the Library’s hopes for its digital data as well, as we redouble our efforts to increase the pace of digitization and expand access to our collections.