What Happened on September 1st

The United States Library of Congress holds the first of several meetings to plan a project to convert its materials to digital form so they will be accessible via computer networks to students and researchers around the world. The "virtual library" project could also save rare materials that are degrading or have been vandalized, as well as saving space for the library, whose holdings, in 2014, filled up 838 miles of shelving. At the time of the initial meeting -- at which librarians and technical experts from several major computer companies discussed strategy and funding -- the library hoped to have its most vulnerable materials digitized by the year 2000.