The University of Connecticut is digitizing thousands of historical Puerto Rican documents to help make them available to researchers, The Associated Press reports.
Library officials said Tuesday the 5,000 fragile documents they are scanning date as far back as 1844 and detail court disputes over slaves, land and livestock.
The documents were acquired by the university’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center in 2000.
The scanning began in June with a $15,000 grant from the Chicago-based nonprofit Center for Research Libraries.
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Library officials say they hope to have all the documents available online by May 2012.
