Grant will pay to store Lincoln document images

SPRINGFIELD — The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is getting a grant to help pay for the storage of tens of thousands of images of documents related to the 16th president.

Officials announced Tuesday that Amazon Web Services awarded the Papers of Abraham Lincoln $24,000 worth of storage services.

That’s enough for the project to securely store 35 terabytes of master image files — the equivalent of a digital music file that would play non-stop for 68 years.

The Papers of Abraham Lincoln has scanned more than 90,000 documents written by, or to, Lincoln.

The retirement of a mass storage system at the University of Illinois forced the project to look for new space.

Officials credited U.S. Rep. Randy Hultgren, a Winfield Republican, with alerting them to the Amazon grant.