Images: Historic U.S. trove goes digital

One of the components of the Library of Congress' new exhibit (digital rendering shown here) allows users to page through select books from shelves in Thomas Jefferson's library at three touch-screen kiosks and learn about why he chose them for his collection.

Meanwhile, the spiral-shaped bookcase on view is enclosed by glass and contains 6,487 books, about one third of which are survivors from Jefferson's original collection. Most of the original books were lost in an 1851 fire, but the library has since replaced many of them with identical editions--some of which have been scrounged over the years from antiquarians and dug out of basements at rare book dealers in Europe, said Mark Dimunation, chief curator of the library's rare-books unit.

Caption by Anne Broache