In this project a working group of stakeholders are meeting several times over a twelve-month period to plan a scalable digitization and digital library project aimed at "capturing" the intellectual capital of "Twenty Centuries of Mathematics". The Cornell University Library is serving as the coordinator of this group. Participants in this activity are considering the key issues and challenges and recommending strategies to inform a coordinated effort to perform a retrospective digitization of the literature of mathematical sciences. The resulting digital collection is to serve as an international resource for researchers, scientists, faculty, and students, providing access to a large body of historical materials that originally appeared in print form. This project facilitates cooperation and coordination among a number of currently uncorrelated digitization projects in mathematics that have emerged at separate institutions and organizations in the U.S. and several other countries. Coordination of these different efforts promises to promote a systematic approach to digital preservation of mathematical sciences materials, and provide users with an integrated means of accessing them. Given the deep connection of this project to the needs of the research community of mathematical scientists, the NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences is providing co-funding for this project.
