Home » Library » Features » 250+ Killer Digital Libraries and Archives
250+ Killer Digital Libraries and Archives
Published on Wednesday 17th of October, 2007
Hundreds of libraries and archives exist online, from university-supported
sites to individual efforts. Each one has something to offer to researchers,
students, and teachers. This list contains over 250 libraries and archives
that focus mainly on localized, regional, and U.S. history, but it also
includes larger collections, eText and eBook repositories, and a short list of
directories to help you continue your research efforts.
The sites listed here are mainly open access, which means that the digital
formats are viewable and usable by the general public. So, such sites as the
Connecticut Digital Library
(iCONN)
are not listed, as they operate on the premise that the user has a Connecticut
library card in his or her possession.
Efforts were made to go to the root source for these collections. In other
words, if you're seeking the American Memory Project, which was created and
housed at the Library of Congress, then you'll find the link for the Library
of Congress rather than the link for American Memory (although we included
that link in the description of the Library of Congress listing). The root
sources, in most cases, will lead you to collections that are too numerous to
list here. In fact, it would be impossible to list all sources and we know we
may have missed some favorites.
As a warning, many states listed their collections as "archives" when, in
reality, the sources contained secondary sources such as books and
transcriptions rather than a digital image of the actual document. Still,
these resources can be invaluable for the person who seeks sources on family
histories or on regional histories. To that end, we offer links to
localized collections first, categorized by state. Please
note that the blog numbering is not meant to be a ranking, as each link list
is ranked by alphabetical order within the following topics:
Multi-State Resources |
Larger Collections | eTexts and eBooks
| Directories
Localized Collections
The sites listed below focus on a certain state's towns, cities, counties, or
regions within a given state. If a state is missing from this list (such as
Rhode Island), it's because that state hasn't begun to compile digital
archives online. This does not mean that you cannot find information about
Rhode Island on the Web. Try one of the multi-state collections following this
category for your search. Or, you can look for a state's physical archive Web
site or local historical society online for more resources.
RootsWeb and the
USGenWeb
archives also hold localized information, or you might try a directory
like Cyndi's List for more information.
Alabama
-
Alabama Department of
Archives and History: ADAH preserves records and artifacts of historical
value to promote a better understanding of Alabama history. Genealogists,
researchers, teachers and students can find databases, newspaper clippings,
and more at this site on a wide variety of topics pertaining to Alabama's
past.
-
Alabama Mosaic: AlabamaMosaic is a
repository of digital materials on Alabama's history, culture, places, and
people. They pull various resources from Auburn University, the Birmingham
Public Library and more to offer these images online.
-
Auburn University Digital Library:
Based in the Ralph Brown Draughon Library, AUDL draws on a variety of
collections archives and makes them available to educators and students in
Alabama and beyond. Some resources, like images and old postcards, are
available online. Gain access to other materials through interlibrary loan.
-
Birmingham
Public Library Digital Collections: These resources are focused on the
local history of Birmingham and the surrounding area. This repository holds
images and information about the famous
Gee's
Bend quilters from Wilcox County, Alabama.
-
University of Alabama
Digital Collections: Gain access to this institution's digital
collections including yearbooks, the Civil War diary of George S. Smith, and
more - all available online. While the list shown on this page is fairly
straightforward, you might want to visit the university's
special collections page
for more collections such as the
C.S.S.
Alabama collection. Not all information on this latter page is available
online, however.
Alaska
-
Alaska State
Library: This link will take you to the online historical collections
that focus on the Gold Rush as part of the Alaska Gold Rush centennial in
1999 by the Division of Libraries, Archives and Museums, Alaska Department
of Education and Early Development.
-
Alaska's Digital Archives: If
you're interested in Alaska history and culture, this site now includes over
10,000 items including images and text gathered from Alaska state museums,
the Sitka Tribe Historical Society, the University of Alaska and more.
Arizona
-
Arizona Archives
Online: This site contains archival materials and collections from The
Heard Museum Library and Archives, Arizona State Museum, Arizona State
University, University of Arizona, and Northern Arizona University.
-
Arizona Memory Project: The AMP is an
online effort to provide access to the wealth of primary sources in Arizona
libraries, archives, museums and other cultural institutions. The
collections include many digital images from state archives.
-
Arizona State Library Archives and Public
Records: View photographs through the "History and Archives" link, or
view information about Arizona history through the Collections and Programs
link.
-
Cline Library:
This library is sponsored by Northern Arizona University, and it contains
archival and published material that documents the history and development
of the Colorado Plateau in a variety of disciplines.
-
University of
Arizona: This site is 'obsolete,' but the resources listed here are
still active. If you follow the link on this page to the library site, the
only place to discover
digital
collections is in the special collections section. In all cases, you may
miss the Little
Cowpuncher, a rural school newspaper of Southern Arizona that is
reproduced in its entirety along with other special references to online
materials.
Arkansas
-
Arkansas Digital Library: The
ADL will eventually hold text, images, three-dimensional objects, and other
audio and video collections from various collections owned by state colleges
and universities. While their current collection is limited, you might want
to bookmark it for future reference.
-
Arkansas History Commission
Archives: This amazing little site contains many digitalized photographs
in their galleries along with descriptions. All images in this collection
may be used for educational, scholarly purposes and private study, or
purchased.
-
University of Arkansas Libraries
Digital Collection: This collection is limited, with the major topics
being the history of the Arkansas Razorbacks and archives for the Lee Wilson
& Co., an important contributor to the development of agriculture,
industry, and education in the Arkansas Delta.
California
-
California Digital Library: CDL provides
access to scholarly materials, databases of journal article abstracts and
citations, electronic journals, publishing tools, and reference databases
for the University of California community. Public access is allowed to many
of the resources listed at this link, including the
OAC (Online Archive of California),
Counting California - a "one-stop shop" for government data and statistics
about California - and more.
-
Oviatt Library Digital
Collections: This is a multimedia database filled with of historically
significant documents, manuscripts, photographs and related graphic
materials for several collections including the history of the San Fernando
Valley. This collection is sponsored by California State University.
-
The California Underground
Railroad: Browse by newspaper article, articles, reports and more at
this site that focuses on an important but too little known struggle in the
quest for freedom and equality.
-
USC Archival Research
Center: Collections are located in various repositories throughout the
University of Southern California, but they are increasingly being brought
together digitally and administratively under the auspices of ARC. The
research center has provided this Web site that will serve as a central
access point to hundreds of archives owned and housed at other libraries,
museums and institutions throughout the region. The site also includes a
comprehensive list of archival materials relating to Southern California
that are housed at USC.
-
USC Digital
Archive: University of South California Libraries select, collect,
preserve and make accessible high quality digital images of unique materials
with metadata to support research, and provide a "gateway" to resources on
Los Angeles and Southern California.
Colorado
-
Colorado State University
Digital Collections: You can search for specific documents or view
resources such as the International Poster Collection, Colorado's Waters
Digital Archive, and more. Unfortunately, some resources are limited to the
University of Colorado System and the Auraria Higher Education Campus and
off-campus access may differ depending on whether you're involved with an
affiliated institution.
-
Colorado State
Archives: Genealogists, social historians, and researchers will find
databases, photographs, maps and more at this site, including D-Day radio
broadcasts.
-
Colorado Virtual Library: A project of the
Colorado State Library and Colorado libraries, this site serves as a content
and services gateway for Colorado residents or for those interested in the
state.
-
Western History
and Genealogy: The Denver Public Library System offers over 120,000
images for viewing online. The works of many outstanding photographers are
represented and features images of North American Indians, pioneer life,
mining, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Denver, Colorado towns, railroads and
more.
Connecticut
-
Connecticut's Heritage
Gateway: The Connecticut Humanities Council provides a comprehensive
directory of the state’s history resources for teachers, students,
researchers and others who want to better understand the world around them
through the stories of this state's past. You'll find online exhibits
including a 'laptop' encyclopedia of Connecticut's history.
-
Connecticut
History Online: CHO currently contains about 14,000 images of
photographs, drawings and prints which may be searched or browsed in a
variety of ways, including by keyword, subject, creator, title and date.
-
Connecticut State Library Digital
Collections: Find aerial photos, Works Progress Administration (WPA)
Census of Old Buildings, and more in images and text.
-
University of Connecticut
Libraries Digital Gateway: Browse the digital collections to find
numerous resources for historical, biological, and directory projects
including invasive plants of New England, scanned maps of Connecticut from
1676-1930, and more.
Delaware
-
Digital
Archives : This portion of Delaware's official state site includes
digitized images of many primary sources related to this state's history.
Some remarkable items include "Joseph Barker's Negro Ledger Book,
1901-1811," slavery papers, unusual autopsies, audio histories and more.
-
University of Delaware Library Digital
Collections: This site provides free and open access to digital versions
of selected materials held by the University of Delaware Library.
Florida
-
Central Florida Memory: If you want to
learn about central Florida before theme parks and the space program, you'll
find what you need at this site. The archives include diaries and letters,
maps, photographs and postcards, voters' registration and funeral records.
-
FSU Digital Library: The
collections gathered at the Florida State University site include 47
nineteenth-century children's books, over 9,000 pages of materials and over
2,500 pages of photos digitized from collections in FSU Libraries Special
Collections.
-
PALMM: Publication of Archival, Library
& Museum Materials (PALMM) is a cooperative initiative of the public
universities of Florida to provide digital access to important source
materials for research and scholarship. Currently this site links to
twenty-nine online digital repositories that document various aspects of
Floridian history, geography, and more.
-
The Florida
Memory Project: Featuring over 137,000 digitized photographs from the
State Archives of Florida, the Florida Photographic Collection is the most
complete online portrait of Florida available.
-
USF Libraries
Digital Collections: This repository holds photographs, gravestone
collections, slave narratives and more, all gathered from a physical
collection owned by the University of South Florida Libraries, primarily
from the Tampa Library Special Collections Department.
Georgia
-
Digital Library of Georgia:
Based at the University of Georgia, the Digital Library of Georgia connects
users to 500,000 digital objects in 90 collections from 60 institutions and
100 government agencies. This resource is part of
GALILEO,
a resource for Georgia citizens.
-
Georgia's Virtual
Vault: View colonial wills, confederate pension applications, Georgia
Power Photograph Collection, and more. Historical context for many of the
records found in the Virtual Vault may be found in the articles of the
New Georgia
Encyclopedia.
-
The Virtual Library:
Sponsored by Emory University, this list of resources includes the
Lewis H. Beck Center among many
other online collections and initiatives.
Hawaii
-
Asia-Pacific Digital Library:
Kapi'olani Community College in Honolulu sponsors this site, and it offers
various collections on local weather, history, and tradition.
-
Hawaii Digital Library: This is a
collection of publications that have been printed in Hawaii by Hagadone
Printing Company, including business magazines, visitor guides, brochures on
Hawaii activities, restaurants, entertainment, and much more.
-
Hawai'i Digital
Library: There are two digital libraries on Ulukau. Ulukau itself was
the first established, and it contains many materials that were written in
Hawaiian, with the translation included if one is available. The second of
the digital libraries is the Hawai'i Digital Library (HDL). It contains
materials about Hawai'i that were written in English.
-
University of
Hawai'i Digital Library: These digital collections at Manoa Library
include historical and cultural material in digital form. Materials include
scanned material from Archives and Manuscript collections, the Asia
Collection, art works from the Jean Charlot Collection, resources related to
Hawai'i and Pacific culture and history and material from the Rare
collection.
Idaho
-
Digital Atlas of Idaho: From
Idaho's archaeology to its hydrology, this site covers it all in detail with
maps, charts, and text.
-
University of Idaho
Special Collections & Archives: Primary source materials in the
Department of Special Collections in the University of Idaho Library include
personal and organizational records and university archives, rare books,
manuscripts, and historical photographs; these and other materials support
research into nearly all facets of the history of Idaho and the Pacific
Northwest.
Illinois
-
Chicago Public Library
Digital Collections: Explore Chicago's sewer system or learn more about
the flowering of Afro-American culture at the beginning of the twentieth
century in this city. This collection has information on these topics and
more.
-
Digital Past: The North
Suburban Library System offers a treasure trove of photographs, postcards,
diaries, oral histories, documents, movies, interpretive exhibits, and other
historical materials from libraries, historical societies, museums, and
other cultural venues throughout Illinois.
-
Illinois Digital Archive: The
Illinois State Library provides access to the images in these collections
for educational and research purposes only. You'll discover a broad range of
primary sources for everything from Abraham Lincoln to the The McLean County
Museum of History's Native American collection.
-
Illinois Historical Digitization
Projects: Northern Illinois University Libraries' digitization projects
introduce various topics to the general public. Be aware that their "primary
sources" often contain transcribed documents, which are - in reality -
secondary sources.
-
Illinois
State Archives: ISA holds a digital collection of databases where
researchers can hunt for Illinois war veterans and view federal township
plats between 1804 and 1891, among other items that will interest
genealogists and social historians. Since this site is expanding, you can
also view selected
Lincoln
documents.
Indiana
-
Digital Media Repository: This digital
repository brings all of Ball State University Libraries' collections and
activities into a single, cohesive, and accessible Web-based environment
that also provides access to external digital resources.
-
Hoosier Heritage: This is a
collaborative effort among Indiana libraries to preserve these valuable
resources and provide users with documents and images that pertain to the
historical and cultural heritage of Indiana.
Iowa
-
Iowa Digital Library: The Iowa
Digital Library contains more than 75,000 digital objects—photographs, maps,
sound recordings and documents—from libraries and archives at University of
Iowa and their partnering institutions. New collections are being added
constantly.
-
Iowa Heritage Collection: This site is
an online repository of Iowa history and culture created by bringing
together in digital form documents, images, maps, finding aids, interpretive
and educational materials, and other media from collections held by a wide
range of organizations throughout Iowa.
Kansas
-
Digital Collections and
Projects: This is a project conducted by the University of Kansas (KU),
and it includes ten digital projects that range from scholarly works from KU
to historical documents and images that focus on Kansas history.
-
Kansas
State Historical Society: Several projects to make images or transcripts
of primary source documents available through the Internet are either
completed or are underway at this site. For now, you can peruse items such
as automobile and road pamphlets, railroad immigration pamphlets, and the
Western
Trails collection.
-
Territorial
Kansas: Hundreds of personal letters, diaries, photos, and maps bring to
life the settling of Kansas between 1854 and 1861.
Kentucky
-
Kentuckiana Digital Library: Visit these
rare and unique digitized collections housed in Kentucky archives and
offered online, including newspapers, maps, oral histories, images, and
more.
Louisiana
-
LOUISiana Digital Library:
The LOUISiana Digital Library (LDL) is an online library of over 84,000
digital materials about Louisiana's history, culture, places, and people.
These historical treasures from Louisiana's archives, libraries, museums,
and other repositories in the state are made electronically accessible to
the general public.
-
Louisiana
State Archives: Anyone can utilize these archives, which include film
and video materials produced in or about Louisiana and oral histories that
document personal interviews about this state's political and governmental
history.
Maine
-
Maine Memory Network: The Maine
Memory Network provides access to over 12,000 historical items from over 180
museums, historical societies, libraries, and other organizations from every
corner of Maine.
-
Maine State Archives:
These archives include projects such as a collection of trademarks, Civil
War "Yarns," and more.
-
Windows on Maine:
Windows on Maine is a pilot project to develop an online service offering
streaming video programs and clips, and other primary and secondary digital
resources, via broadband and wireless connections. This virtual library
contains includes Native American resources, the Gulf of Maine science
projects, and more.
Maryland
-
Archives of
Maryland Online: This site currently provides access to over 471,000
historical documents that form the constitutional, legal, legislative,
judicial, and administrative basis of Maryland's government.
-
Descriptions of
Maryland: This site contains collections from Bernard C. Steiner
(1867-1926), George Alfred Townsend (1841-1914), and Winston Churchill's
1899 novel, Richard Carvel. All texts contain descriptions of Maryland from
their writings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
-
Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage: The
MDCH Program provides free online access to primary source material housed
in a variety of Maryland's cultural heritage institutions, including public,
school, and academic libraries; historical societies; archives; museums; and
other cultural heritage institutions.
-
Museum
Online: Sponsored by the Maryland State Archives, this site contains a
list of all online projects such as the original official Maryland charter
language in English (actual document). The archives contain text, maps,
image files and more.
Massachusetts
-
Digital Library
Initiatives: Boston College Libraries offers Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill,
Jr. photographs, liturgy and life artifacts, and Boston Gas Company
photographs and more to the general public.
-
Digital Commonwealth:
The purpose of the Digital Commonwealth is to promote the creation of
digital resources by libraries and other cultural organizations in the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts and to provide public access to these
resources. This resource also contains links to smaller collections within
the state that are sponsored by local and regional efforts by individual and
collaborative libraries and museum projects.
-
Northeast Massachusetts
Digital Library: The NMDL is a project to enhance access to an
ever-growing digital collection of items located in or items related to
northeast Massachusetts, defined by 54 towns within the service area of the
Northeast Massachusetts Regional Library System (NMRLS).
Michigan
-
The Making of Modern Michigan:
MMM is a collaborative project involving more than 50 Michigan libraries. It
includes local history materials from communities around the state.
Michigan's unique heritage is represented through photographs, family
papers, oral histories, genealogical materials, and much more.
-
Michigan
Historical Museum: The projects on this site consist mainly of online
museum exhibit tours; however, if you click on various maps to museum
gallery locations, you'll discover a deeper insight into Michigan history
through topical pages that include text and images on various subjects in
Michigan's history.
Minnesota
-
Minnesota Digital Library: The MDLC
coalition consists of library and museum professionals who work with
cultural heritage organizations to digitize the state's resources and
collections. You'll find more than 4,000 images in their "Minnesota
Reflections" collection alone, including materials from the Hennepin County
Medical Center History Museum, the Minnesota Streetcar Museum, and the
Minnesota Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.
Mississippi
-
Mississippi Digital Library: Funded by
the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Mississippi
Digital Library Program is Mississippi's first effort to develop a lasting
cooperative digital library program for the state. The project focuses on
primary sources associated with the civil rights era, since the partner
repositories hold rich collections on that topic.
Missouri
-
Missouri
State Archives: Browse through this site to discover many online
resources such as their
online
exhibits, a
birth and death
records database and more.
-
University of Missouri Digital
Library: A repository of texts & images hosted by the University of
Missouri System. You'll find ver 20 text collections and 23 image
collections, including collections from 15 libraries around the state of
Missouri. Be sure to follow links on this page to other repositories such as
eBind,
where you'll find a handful of texts that will eventually be moved to other
sections of the online repository. Other links that may be difficult to find
are the
Missouri
Historical Newspapers Project and another list of collaborative
digital
collections.
-
Virtual Missouri: This project
is funded by the LSTA (Library Services & Technology Act) and
administered through the grant programs of the Missouri State Library. The
collections, gathered from numerous school, church, library, and historical
society resources, covers everything from biology to immigration and more.
Montana
-
Montana Historical
Society: Go to "Education and Outreach" to find visuals and text for
teachers, "Historic Preservation" to discover information about research
projects. The "Museum" tab contains information about current, online, and
past exhibits, including links for more information about these projects.
-
Montana State Library: Use the "Browse"
feature in the left column to gain access to projects such as maps, an
atlas, and Montana Memory. The latter project is a collection of digital
collections and items relating to Montana's cultural heritage. If you click
the top tab, "For the
Public," you'll find more historical resources in the left column,
including archives, historical newspapers, and research databases.
-
Vigilantes of Montana: This
site is dedicated to finding and disseminating the truth about the Montana
Gold Camp Vigilantes, who hanged 22 victims in January and February of 1864.
Nebraska
-
Nebraska State Historical
Society: This site contains online contents, information about state
museums, and more. The online content contains link to outside sources as
well as finding aids and transcribed materials.
-
Nebraska Western
Trails: From pioneer wagon trails to modern recreational trails, this
site covers them all through books, documents, maps, postcards, original
paintings, and photographs. These artifacts were collected into a searchable
database from the holdings of museums and libraries across Nebraska.
Nevada
-
Nevada State Library and
Archives: Discover Nevada's history through archival documents, mostly
transcribed, and images. The Department of Cultural Affairs within this site
maintains a
page that
carries information about a variety of Nebraska history topics.
-
University Digital
Conservancy: As of October 2007, The University of Nevada at Reno (UNR)
maintains 21 collections in their digital conservancy, 17 of which are
public. Most of these projects contain text and image collections pertaining
to Nevada history.
New Hampshire
-
University of New Hampshire
Digital Library: Browse these collections by history, music and dance,
maps, literature and poetry, and images. Materials for inclusion in the
Digital Collections Initiative are drawn from all state library collections,
especially government documents and special collections.
New Jersey
-
New Jersey
Imaged Collections: Over 3,000 images from the New Jersey Department of
State's photograph and manuscript collection are presented in this site and
in their Documentary
Treasures area. These images pertain to documents as well as to art and
photographs.
New Mexico
-
DSpaceUNM: This site is a
digital archive for The University of New Mexico's research and creative
works. It's an open access tool for collecting, disseminating, and
preserving the intellectual output of the UNM community.
-
New Mexico's Digital Collections:
University Libraries hosts Digital Collections from the University of New
Mexico and from other New Mexico cultural heritage institutions. These
collections contain documents, photographs, maps, posters, art and music,
and topics include New Mexico history, water and land issues and Latin
American art and politics.
-
New Mexico Digital History
Project: This site was constructed with the backing of the Office of the
State Historian to foster and facilitate an appreciation and understanding
of New Mexico history and culture through education, research, preservation,
and community outreach. View by HTML or by Flash.
-
Online Archive of New
Mexico: Although OANM is now incorporated into the Rocky Mountain Online
Archive (RMOA - see #), OANM maintains previous records at this site. The
new OANM site collections can be browsed
through the RMOA site, which is
also located in this state.
New York
-
Digital Metro New
York: A collaborative effort to support digitization projects involving
significant collections held by METRO member libraries in New York City and
Westchester County. Scroll down the page to find the list of collections,
which range from Brooklyn Democratic Party and WWII scrapbooks to fashion
design history databases and more.
-
Hamilton College Digital
Collections: This site provides access to thousands of pages of unique
and rare materials held by the Hamilton College Library. Choose from the
Civil War collection, the Shaker collection, or the illustrations gallery,
which displays a selection of images and illustrations found on documents in
the previous two collections.
-
Hudson River Valley Heritage: This site
contains collections from New York's state libraries, colleges, historical
societies and more. You'll discover images, texts, maps and other documents
that chronicle New York's Hudson River Valley's history.
-
New York State Documents:
For many recent State documents, the catalog record contains a link to an
electronic version of the document. Many of these online publications are
scanned documents, which
were created by the library and made available online as PDF (portable
document format) files.
-
Rediscovering
New York History and Culture: RNYH&C is a program of the New York
State Archives provides a single point of entry to a vast array of
resources. You can discover digital collections such as the "Franklin
Automobile Photograph Collection," and online exhibits such as the "Women
& Social Movements in the United States, 1830 - 1930."
-
State University
History Archives: The Department of History at the University at Albany
is one of the pioneers in wedding historical scholarship and teaching with
digital technologies. Current projects are listed in the left column, with
information about the collections shown on this page as you scroll down.
-
Syracuse University Digital Library: The
Syracuse University Library Digital Collections site provides digital
collections from Syracuse University Library (SUL), including the Special
Collections Research Center and others that have participated in
collaborative projects with SUL.
-
USMA Digital
Collections: At the United States Military Academy Library's Digital
Collections you can gain access to Alexander Hamilton's papers, to Civil War
maps, to class yearbooks, and more from this West Point academy.
North Carolina
-
Eastern North Carolina
Digital Library: Formerly known as the North Carolina History &
Fiction Digital Library, the new Eastern North Carolina Digital Library
contains 399 fiction and non-fiction volumes, 150+ museum artifacts, maps
and educational material pertaining to the history of the 41 counties in
Eastern North Carolina. This project brings together local history materials
and historical fiction related to these localities, in addition to museum
artifacts that highlight Eastern North Carolina's rich past.
-
Echo: This collaborative effort to share
North Carolina's heritage is statewide, and contains materials that range
from historical advertising to images and documents that pertain to both
World Wars.
-
North Carolina
State Archives: This link will take you to the online projects, which
include news and press releases, postal history, WWI documents and more.
North Dakota
-
Frontier Scout: The
first newspaper known to have been published in northern Dakota Territory
was the Frontier Scout issued at Fort Union on July 7, 1864, Robert
Winegar & Ira F.Goodwin, publishers, Company I, 30th Regiment, Wisconsin
Infantry, Proprietors. The North Dakota State Historical Society has scanned
all known issues and made them available online.
-
Institute for
Regional Studies and University Archives: The Institute for Regional
Studies and the North Dakota State University (NDSU) Archives support the
research needs of the undergraduate, graduate students, faculty and other
scholars at North Dakota State University and beyond. You'll discover
historical exhibits, manuscript collections, and a huge photography
collection among other resources.
Ohio
-
Cleveland Digital
Library: This site holds a digital collection of texts, maps, and
images, as well as access tools for digital and non-digital works, all
concerning the history of greater Cleveland and the Western Reserve region
of northeastern Ohio. Supported and maintained by special collections in the
Cleveland State University Library.
-
Cleveland Memory Project: This
is a separate project from the one listed previously, and it showcases the
special collections in the Cleveland State University Library.
-
Digital Shoebox Collections:
Search for images and texts that relate to the history of southeastern Ohio.
-
Greater Cincinnati Memory Project:
The Greater Cincinnati Memory Project is currently in the second phase of
development, now building on an archive already filled with over 5,884
images that detail the Greater Cincinnati area's past.
-
Ohio Historical Society:
This site includes Ohio Memory, which
is billed as the "online scrapbook of Ohio history." The memory site alone
carries over 26,000 primary sources collected from 300 archives, historical
societies, libraries, and museums. Other resources that you can tap through
this site include the Ohio Online
Death Index and more, all listed on the State Archives
resource page as
well as on the home page.
-
OhioPix: These images are
selections from the Ohio Historical Society's collection. The site currently
holds fifteen galleries on topics that range from street scenes to
historical fashion to famous Ohioans.
Oklahoma
-
Electronic Publishing
Center: Users will find a limited but useful collection at this Oklahoma
State University (OSU) library site. They seek to expand this collection,
which will remain faithful to collections focused on OSU or to the State of
Oklahoma.
-
Sooner
Stories: Sooner Stories has been discontinued, but the Oklahoma
Department of Libraries has maintained this site's resources. This site will
direct you to the current edition entitled,
Oklahoma Crossroads. This
latter site consists of selected digital collections of the Oklahoma
Department of Libraries spanning more than 100 years of rich, vibrant
history, including documents, photographs, newspapers, reports, pamphlets,
posters, maps, and an author database ranging in date from the late 1800s to
present.
Oregon
-
Oregon Historic Photograph
Collections: Photographs of Oregon, all digitized and searchable online,
with special focus on the City of Salem and other Willamette Valley
communities.
-
Oregon State
Archives: This archive offers exhibits that include information about
crafting the Oregon constitution, Oregon in the 1940s, and more.
Pennsylvania
-
Access Pennsylvania: This list
brings collections from all over the state of Pennsylvania to public access,
including State Library of Pennsylvania collections, Wissahickon Valley
Public Library collections and more.
-
DEILA: The Dickinson Electronic
Initiative in the Liberal Arts provides a "home" for existing and developing
digital scholarly projects at Dickinson College. Projects include the annals
of Dickinson College, the James Buchanan Resource Center, and the Patagonia
Mosaic. The Three Mile Island project has been disabled as of this writing.
-
Historic Pittsburgh:
This site contains a comprehensive collection of local resources that
supports personal and scholarly research of the western Pennsylvania area.
Browse collections categorized by images, text, maps, and more.
-
Pennsylvania
History Online: The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the Free Library of
Philadelphia, Penn State University Libraries, and the State Library of
Pennsylvania have combined efforts to bring historical texts and images
online to the general public.
-
Pennsylvania State
Archives: The Archives Records Information Access System (ARIAS) is
designed to facilitate citizen access to archival records created by all
branches and levels of Pennsylvania State Government. They carry digitized
images of veteran information for several wars, a Pennsylvania National
Guard Veteran’s Card File, and Militia Officers’ Index Cards for various
years.
South Carolina
-
South Carolina Digital
Collections: The South Carolina Department of Archives and History has
begun digitizing selected portions of its holdings for online access. You
can browse through "Collection Curiosities" or use the
search
page to find transcribed Confederate pension applications or insurance
file photographs of public schools.
-
South Carolina Digital Library: SCDL
provides tools for archivists, librarians, curators, teachers, and others
interested in digital library activities in South Carolina. The site is
still gathering materials, and it's a bit difficult to navigate to the
materials. Use "subject" in your search to type in a key word, and it's
easier to visualize their collections from this perspective. They will
eventually pull the following site into the fold...
-
South Carolina Memory: This site brings
together collections from various statewide institutions and provides both
introductions and links to these various sites. This site is still under
constructions, but they already have accumulated numerous resources in
topics that range from "people" to "religion."
South Dakota
-
South Dakota
Historical Society: The online exhibits include archives in the SDHS
museum and materials from state archives.
Tennessee
-
Volunteer Voices: Volunteer Voices
is a statewide digitization program that provides online access to sources
that document Tennessee’s rich history and culture. This program involves
the collaborative efforts of Tennessee archives, historical societies,
libraries, museums, and schools.
Texas
-
Portal to Texas
History: The Portal to Texas History offers students and lifelong
learners a digital gateway to the rich collections held in Texas libraries,
museums, archives, historical societies, and private collections. The site
embraces all geographic areas of Texas and covers prehistory through the
twentieth century, and includes digital reproductions of photographs, maps,
letters, documents, books, artifacts, and more.
-
Texas Heritage Online: Texas
Heritage Online provides unified online access to Texas' historical
documents and images for use by teachers, students, historians,
genealogists, and other researchers. This project is still under
development, with new materials being added constantly.
-
Texas State Library and
Archives Commission: This is a difficult site to navigate, as there are
several hidden treasures here. The best way to get around the site is to go
to "Areas of General
Interest" and click on the listings to learn more about what this site
offers. Two exhibits,
Texas Treasures
and The McArdle Notebooks
are worth a look for anyone interested in this state's history.
-
Texas Tides: Over an 11-month
period, five archives, libraries, and museums imaged over 10,000 items
documenting East Texas history from pre-history to 1900 and made them
available through the Texas Tides Website. More resources have been added,
including information about Spanish and Mexican occupation of Texas, the
addition of sound and video components to hold the interest of K-12
students, available lesson plans for expanded subjects and grade levels,
digital resources through the 20th century and more teacher enrichment
opportunities.
Utah
-
J. Willard Marriott
Library: The University of Utah offers high-resolution digital
facsimiles of selected collections that range from the arts to sports and
recreation. You'll also find more than 600,000 pages of digitized Utah
historical newspapers at this site.
-
University of Utah Digital
Collections: The Digital Technologies team leads the library's digital
efforts by creating high-resolution digital facsimiles of selected
collections and by making them available to the general public.
-
Utah Digital Newspapers:
The Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Library Services and
Technology Act fund this archive, and it's constantly being updated with new
papers and with expanded time periods.
-
Utah State
Archives Digital Collections: You can search through time capsule
records for 2000-2001, news clippings from 1993-2003, and more at this site.
For state historians, you might find the images and text for the
online
exhibits interesting.
Vermont
-
Landscape Change Program: The
Landscape Change Program at the University of Vermont is a virtual
collection of hundreds of images that document 200 years of Vermont’s
changing face. All images are online and free to the public.
-
Middlebury College Digital
Collections: Browse or read about the digital collections at this
Vermont college, which include a growing collection of digitized rare books
and manuscripts, images, video and audio of lectures, and more than 200
historic images.
-
Vermont
Historical Society: This link will take you to five online exhibits that
chronicle various topics in Vermont's history.
-
Vermont in the Civil
War: This independent Web site is a great resource, as it includes a
transcription of George G. Benedict's book, "Vermont in the Civil War" as
well as genealogical resources.
-
Vermont State Archives: Gain access
to historical photographs and databases at this official site.
Virginia
-
The Library of
Virginia Digital Library: This library is slowing expanding its digital
collections, and their land records and WPA artifacts represent superb
resources for historians and genealogists. Don't miss the
exhibitions,
which include topics about the coal mine, women in Virginia, and maps,
images, and textual materials.
-
The Virginia Center
for Digital History: The University of Virginia provides several online
projects through this site, including
Virtual Jamestown, the
Dolly Madison
Project, and The Valley of the Shadow (see #179 under Multi-State
Resources).
-
VCU Online Exhibits: The
online exhibits at this Virginia Commonwealth University site focus mainly
on Virginia history and architecture.
Washington
-
King
County Snapshots: This collaborative effort offers 12,000 historical
images carefully chosen from thirteen organizations' collections. These
cataloged 19th and 20th century images portray people, places, and events in
the county's urban, suburban, and rural communities that surround Seattle.
-
Washington State
Digital Archives: The home page offers a search box, but the collections
link will reveal the projects undertaken by this state's digitization
program. You can search through materials such as birth records,
photographs, physicians' records and more, and many of these records contain
individual images which can be viewed on this website.
-
Washington State Digital
Collections: This is another collaborative collection that gathers
archival materials from statewide public libraries, university holdings, and
museums that chronicle this state's history.
West Virginia
-
West
Virginia History Online: The digital collections in this archive are
primary sources that have been digitized and organized by collection and
database. The photographs contains the most comprehensive collection of
historic images pertaining to West Virginia in existence, and the Child
Ballads of West Virginia are performed on audio files by Patrick Ward Gainer
(1904-1981). This latter collection is a selection of British folksongs
cataloged in Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads
as discovered in Appalachia.
-
West Virginia
Memory Project: This collection includes searchable databases,
photographs, and documents. Some of the topics don't contain explanatory
notes, so searching the databases might prove frustrating unless you know
exactly what you need. This project is part of the West Virginia
Division of
Culture and History site, where you can find more online materials.
Wisconsin
-
The State of Wisconsin
Collection: The State of Wisconsin Collection brings together, in
digital form, two categories of primary and secondary materials: writings
about the State of Wisconsin and unique or valuable materials that relate to
its history and ongoing development. Books, manuscripts, sound recordings,
photographs, maps and other resources deemed important to the study and
teaching of the State of Wisconsin.
-
Wisconsin
Electronic Reader: This site offers transcribed stories, essays, letters
and poems that are illustrated and that focus on Wisconsin history from 1835
to 1949.
-
Wisconsin Heritage Online: WHO is
an expanding digital collection, featuring documentary sources and material
culture from Wisconsin libraries, archives, and museums.
-
University of Wisconsin
Digital Collections: Resources within the UWDCC collections are free and
publicly accessible online. They are loosely organized into collections that
span a range of subjects including art, ecology, literature, history, music,
natural resources, science, social sciences, the State of Wisconsin, and the
University of Wisconsin. Digital resources include text-based materials such
as books, journal series, and manuscript collections; photographic images;
slides; maps; prints; posters; audio; and video.
-
Wisconsin Historical Society:
The online exhibits at this site include items as "Pottery by Frackelton,"
"Advertising posters from the McCormick- International Harvester
Collection," and more. This information-rich site also contains genealogical
materials, information about historic buildings, and historical images.
Wyoming
-
Akron-Summit
County Public Library’s Digital Library: This digital offering includes
found in the library's history collection held by the Special Collections
Division and an exhibit that showcases a selection of materials from the
Frank E. Lawrence Collection housed at the Tallmadge Branch Library. The
latter collection consists of historical materials about the community of
Tallmadge, from its beginnings as an early town of the Connecticut Western
Reserve to current information.
-
University of Wyoming Digital
Initiative: This Web site showcases the online multimedia collections
built by the University of Wyoming's digital initiative. Browse through
general collections and wildlife, geography, and living sections.
-
Wyoming Memory: This is a digital
archive of Wyoming's history, filled through collections of manuscripts,
books, photographs, government documents, newspapers, maps, audio, video,
and other resources. Topics range from the arts to science and nature, with
audio-visual collections and resources for teachers.
-
Wyoming State Archives:
Wyoming research had been made easy through this site, as it offers online
collections of historical documents, historical trails, and genealogical
materials. Some collections are merely described or inventoried and not
offered online.
Back to index
Multi-State Resources
The following resources are projects that range from the efforts between two
states to larger collections that focus on the development of the entire U.S.
-
American Centuries: This site
features a digital collection of approximately 2000 objects and transcribed
document pages from Memorial Hall Museum and Library. The focus is a view
from New England on the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
-
American Journeys: This site
contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American
exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of
mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later.
-
American South: AmericanSouth.Org
is an ongoing project undertaken by Emory University in collaboration with a
large number of Southern research libraries that seek to improve access to
digital resources. This site currently holds 56,310 records from 49 archives
indexed from states such as Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and more.
-
Boston
Library Consortium: The list found through this link contains
universities and institutions located in the New England area, and each link
leads to digitization projects that are currently underway. Some of those
projects are listed in this article, but you'll find many more sites at this
resource.
-
Collaborative Digitization Project:
The CDP endeavors to provide meaningful content on human culture, science,
and art to everyone connected online. The photographs, maps, documents,
sound recordings, and objects held by this Colorado site's partner museums,
libraries, and archives offer a rich and insightful glimpse into human
culture. The
Western
Trails site has migrated to this site, and it covers many of the
neighboring states to Colorado.
-
Columbia River Basin Ethnic
History Archive: CRBEHA is a project of Washington State University
Vancouver, the Idaho State Historical Society, Oregon Historical Society,
Washington State Historical Society, and Washington State University
Pullman. This site brings together selected highlights of the ethnic
collections from leading repositories in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.
-
Combined
Arms Research Library: These electronic collections are largely composed
of digital versions of paper documents from the Combined Arms Research
Library collections
(CARL). The
researcher can discover texts that reach from obsolete military manuals to
WWII operational documents.
-
Digital
Archive of American Architecture: This archive is maintained by the Fine
Arts Department at Boston College, and examples and accompanying text range
from the seventeenth century to current urban projects.
-
Digital Library of Appalachia: The DLA
provides online access to archival and historical materials related to the
culture of the southern and central Appalachian region. The contents of the
DLA are drawn from special collections of Appalachian College Association
member libraries located in states such as Tennessee, West Virginia,
Virginia, and Kentucky.
-
Documenting the American South:
DocSouth is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to
texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and
culture. Currently DocSouth includes ten thematic collections of books,
diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
supports this site. Although some collections focus entirely on North
Carolina, other resources, such as "Southern Homefront: 1861-1865" provide
materials from across the south.
-
Early Americas Digital Archive:
EADA is a collection of electronic texts originally written in or about the
Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. Open to the public for research
and teaching purposes, EADA is published and supported by the Maryland
Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of
Maryland.
-
Fish and Wildlife Digital Library System:
Use the search engine or browse list of hyperlinked keywords to find recent
images of Alaska, the northeast U.S. and in other regional categories, and
historic images as well. Most, if not all, the images are 5" x 7", suitable
for printing, and free for public use.
-
Historical New York Times Project: The
digitization process is ongoing at this site, but they invite you to peruse
the newspaper issues that they have put on line including the Civil War and
the Turn of the Century 1900-1907. They also include a section on antique
books that they are in process of digitizing.
-
Library of Congress: Although this
site is widely known for its popular
American Memory project,
there's more to this site and it's worth the time to explore their digital
collections. Their
"Chronicling America"
project, for example, allows you to search and read newspaper pages from
1900-1910 and find information about American newspapers published between
1690-present.
-
Making of America: This link
will take you to Cornell University's collection, which contains almost
1,000 volumes of 22 journals from the 19th century. This is a collaborative
effort with the University of Michigan (see #243).
-
Matrix: With the support of MSU
faculty, the College of Arts and Letters, and the
H-Net Council, a Center was
established to host all of H-Net's computing and administrative facilities
at Michigan State and to pursue a broad research program in humanities
computing. Currently, the project extends beyond this collaboration to bring
audio, video, text, and image files to the general public on subjects such
as the African e-Journals Project, American Voices, and more.
-
Mountain West Digital Library: This
site contains an aggregation of digital collections from universities,
colleges, public libraries, museums, and historical societies in Utah,
Nevada, and Idaho. The Mountain West defines the region of contributors, but
the content extends far beyond the Mountain West and into different fields.
-
National Archives:
This link will take you to this site's online exhibits, but you can find
more resources throughout this site that lean toward
genealogical and social
history research.
-
National Park Service: This government
organization provides a growing collection of thousands of images,
documents, drawings and maps about the cultural and natural resources
maintained by the National Park Service across the U.S. and its territories.
-
Oyez: This project provides access to more
than 2000 hours of Supreme Court audio. All audio in the Court recorded
since 1995 is included here. Before 1995, the audio collection is selective.
-
Rocky Mountain Online Archive:
RMOA is serving as a repository for archival collections in Colorado, New
Mexico and Wyoming.
-
Northwest Digital
Archives: The Northwest Digital Archives (NWDA) provides enhanced access
to archival and manuscript collections in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Alaska,
and Washington through a union database of Encoded Archival Description
(EAD) finding aids. These materials include correspondence, diaries, or
photographs, and digital reproductions of primary sources are available in
some cases.
-
The Southern
Digital Archives Conspectus: This website documents the library- and
museum-produced, open access digital collections currently available on the
topics of history, literature, and culture in the U.S. South from the
Colonial Period (beginning 1605) to the present. This site is a conspectus
of digital collections concerning Southern cultures and histories, created
as part of the MetaScholar Initiative at Emory University and the DLF
Aquifer project.
-
United States Digital Map
Archive: The United States Digital Map Library is a USGenWeb Archives
project, developed in April of 1999. This project and its all-volunteer
staff are dedicated to free, online access for the general public. The maps
usually are large, and they offer images for every state and often for many
counties within these states.
-
Upper Mississippi Valley Digital
Archive: This collection features a digital image archive that showcases
the Mississippi River region along the Illinois/Iowa border. The late
nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs were gathered from the
collections of Davenport Public Library, Augustana College, and Musser
Public Library in Muscatine.
-
USC Digital Library: The
University of South Carolina provides resources for the general public,
including broadsides from the Colonial Era to the present, the travel
journal and album of collected papers of William Tennent III, 1740 - 1777,
and more.
-
Valley of the Shadow: This is a
project produced by the University of Virginia, and it details life in
Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania during the Civil
War.
-
Western Waters
Digital Library: WWDL contains government reports, classic water
literature, legal transcripts, water project records, personal papers,
photographic collections, and video materials about the Columbia, Colorado,
Platte, and Rio Grande river basins. This site is a collaborative regional
project created by twelve university libraries in eight western states.
-
WSU Manuscripts,
Archives, and Special Collections: Washington State University offers
textual, image, and photographic collections online and to the general
public. Some materials are merely described rather than offered online, such
the audio collections (although you can find abstracts on some of these
materials).
Back to index
Larger Collections
These selections are gathered mainly from U.S. university resources, but other
projects - including government and overseas efforts - are included.
Maps
-
Alexandria Digital
Library: ADL is a distributed digital library with collections of
georeferenced materials such as maps, aerial photographs and remote sensing
(satellite) data. The site is supported by University of California, Santa
Barbara.
-
The Ryhiner Map
Collection: This collection consists of more than 16,000 maps, charts,
plans and views from the 16th to the 18th century, covering the whole globe.
Together with the 20,000 manuscript maps of the State Archives, the Canton
of Berne owns not only a local, but a worldwide geographical memory.
Medical
-
Clinical Digital Libraries
Project: This site is co-directed by the School of Library and
Information Studies at the University of Alabama and the University of North
Texas. Both universities have compiled an extensive list of medical and
pathological resources throughout both universities and for many other
states including Arkansas, Florida, and more.
-
National Library of Medicine: NLM, which
is located on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda,
Maryland, is the world's largest medical library. The Library collects
materials and provides information and research services in all areas of
biomedicine and health care.
Sciences
-
American Museum of Natural
History: The digital library project on this site was launched in 1999
to develop an integrated database of library resources and natural history
collections. The first major project of the Digital Library focuses on the
Museum's Congo Expedition, 1909-1915.
-
DANA-WH: This site is dedicated to the
access, presentation, and preservation of material objects that represent
human cultural and biological heritage worldwide. This anthropological
network is a joint effort among several universities, including North Dakota
State University Archaeology Technologies Laboratory (NDSU ATL), which
handles the lead technical development of this site. In addition to textual
descriptions and metric and non-metric attribute information about each
object, the system displays two-dimensional (2D) images of artifacts and
fossils, as well as accurate, three-dimensional (3D) models of scanned
artifacts.
-
Ethnomathematics Digital
Library: The Ethnomathematics Digital Library (EDL) is a resource
network and interactive learning community for ethnomathematics, with
emphasis on the indigenous mathematics of the Pacific region. The National
Science Foundation (NSF) is extensively involved in science, mathematics,
engineering, and technology education (SMETE), and has funded the EDL as a
collections project of the National SMETE Digital Library (NSDL).
-
Ewell Sale
Stewart Library: Digital collections from this library focus on natural
sciences, including "Fairy Tale World of Henry McCook: Illustrations of
Anthropomorphic Arthropods in the 19th Century," which will be added on an
ongoing basis. This site is part of the Academy of Natural Sciences, located
in Philadelphia.
-
Exploratorium Digital
Library: The different collections in this K-12 library include digital
media and digitized museum materials related to interactive exhibits and
scientific phenomena, including images, educational activities in PDF and
html formats, QuickTime movies, streaming media, and audio files.
-
National Science Digital Library: NSDL
is the Nation's online library for education and research in science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics. Access to most of the resources
discovered through NSDL is free; however, some content providers may require
a login, or a nominal fee or subscription to retrieve their specific
resources
-
National Sea Grant Library: NSGL is the
official NOAA Sea Grant archive and home to
a comprehensive collection of Sea Grant–funded documents from over 30
programs and projects across the U.S. Topics include oceanography, marine
education, aquaculture, fisheries, aquatic nuisance species, coastal
hazards, seafood safety, limnology, coastal zone management, marine
recreation, and law.
Other
-
Arts and Humanities Data Service: AHDS is a
UK national service aiding the discovery, creation and preservation of
digital resources in and for research, teaching and learning in the arts and
humanities. Currently, they cover five subject areas: archaeology, history,
visual arts, performing arts, and literature, languages and linguistics.
-
Berkeley SunSITE: The Berkeley
Digital Library SunSITE builds digital collections and services while
providing information and support to digital library developers worldwide.
If this doesn't satisfy you, visit the
list
of Berkeley's libraries to search for more digital collections such as
the Bancroft Library - this site
holds public access documents for topics such as JARDA (Japanese-American
Relocation Digital Archives) and links to OAC-specific projects (see below).
-
CARLI Digital
Collections: This collection includes various images and texts from
repositories such as the Newberry Library, Illinois Wesleyan University, the
University of Saint Francis, and more.
-
Center for Digital Initiatives: Brown
University's digital collections are derived from their signature
collections, including African-American sheet music from 1820-1920 (includes
complete sheets with music), Lincoln broadsides, Napoleonic satirical prints
produced between 1792 and 1829, and more. The materials are all open access.
-
CHNM: George Mason's Center for History and
New Media contains an amazing amount of images and text that cover a broad
range of topics. Visit the "projects" section to view the online materials.
-
Claremont Colleges Digital
Library: Collections of images, video and text that range from fine arts
to social sciences.
-
Columbia
University Digital Collections: From information about the "Advanced
Papyrological Information System" to notable New Yorkers, this site from
Columbia University Libraries is free and open to the public.
-
Cornell University
Library: Visit digital collections, exhibits, and partnership projects
from this link. You can also gain access to more information through this
university's Windows on the Past
site. Only one collection, the International Women's Periodicals, is Cornell
University access only.
-
Digital
Activities and Collections: The University of Chicago Library creates a
variety of online finding aids and retrospectively digitized collections and
also supports related initiatives on campus by providing systems
administration and programming support to faculty-driven projects and
collections. Some resources point to other sources such as the Library of
Congress.
-
Digital Asset
Library: DIAL is part of the University of Colorado's collections, and
they offer online access to aerial photographs, maps, art, and more through
this link.
-
Digital Library: The
University of Colorado Digital Library is a collaborative project between
the University of Colorado System and institutions of the Auraria Higher
Education Campus. Collections include images, audio, and video files. Many
of these resources are available to the general public, although some may
carry copyright restrictions.
-
Digital Library
Collections: Northwestern University Library, Illinois, provides various
tools for the online researcher, including audio speeches by Dr. Martin
Luther King and more.
-
Digital Library of Information Science
and Technology: dLIST is an open access archive for the Information
Sciences, and is supported by the School of Information Resources and
Library Science and Learning Technologies Center, University of Arizona.
This site has absorbed the
Digital Library
Initiatives Group, but you still can find online resources at this
latter link.
-
George
Mason Digitized Collections: Special Collections & Archives
(SC&A) creates and maintains representative digital collections for an
increasing amount of its holdings. You'll discover information gathered from
Virginia Civil War archive, 1893 Southwest photographs and more at this
site.
-
GPB Digital Library:
This site, supported by Georgia Public Broadcasting, offers an archive of
many programs including their "Cover to Cover" series on books and other
topics on sports, arts, and more.
-
Harold B. Lee Library: The
digital collections on the Brigham Young University site include art
collections, dissertations, text, and multimedia. You can also conduct
searches at the Scholarly
Periodicals Center.
-
IATH: The Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities is a research unit of the University
of Virginia. The research projects, essays, and documentation presented here
are the products of a unique collaboration between humanities and computer
science research faculty, computer professionals, student assistants and
project managers, and library faculty and staff. If you need to find other
digital resources at UVa, you might use their
resources
page.
-
Indiana University Digital Library
Program : DLP is dedicated to the production, maintenance, delivery, and
preservation of a wide range of high-quality networked information resources
for scholars and students at Indiana University and elsewhere. Some
collections are contained within the site, and others link to other online
libraries and repositories.
-
Internet Archive: IA, founded
by Brewster Kahle in 1996, is a non-profit organization dedicated to
maintaining an on-line library and archive of Web and multimedia resources.
Located at the Presidio in San Francisco, California, this site is a member
of the American Library Association and is officially recognized by the
State of California as a library. IA is mirrored at
Bibliotheca
Alexandrina in Egypt to ensure the stability and endurance of the
archives.
-
Internet Public Library: The Internet Public
Library is hosted by The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science
and Technology, with major support from the College of Information at
Florida State University and its founder, the University of Michigan School
of Information. This collection provides a learning/teaching environment
with subject collections, special collections, and other tools that you
would find in any bricks and mortar library.
-
Michigan State University Libraries:
The Digital & Multimedia Center of the Michigan State University
Libraries serves both the MSU community and the worldwide academic community
through digitization projects that preserve scholarly resources and make
them more widely available. Categories in the digital collections range from
Africana to veterinary medicine.
-
NYPL Digital: The New York Public
Library Digital is your gateway to The Library's rare and unique collections
in digitized form. Find over 550,000 images from primary sources and printed
rarities including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage
posters, rare prints, photographs, illustrated books, and "printed
ephemera."
-
Office of Digital Collections and
Research: The Office of Digital Collections and Research (DCR) of the
University of Maryland Libraries provide extensive projects for online
research. Some projects include
Jim Henson Works and a
Treasury of World's
Fairs Art and Architecture.
-
Open Collections Program: Sponsored
by Harvard University, this site offers information about projects such as
'Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930,' and 'Women Working,
1800-1930.' This site also provides a link to Harvard's selection of
Web-accessible
collections.
-
Research in Computing for Humanities:
RCH was founded at the University of Kentucky in 2001, and they work closely
with the Special Collections and Digital Programs Division of the University
of Kentucky Libraries and the Center for Visualization & Virtual
Environments and UK's Center for Computational Sciences to develop their
projects. The site isn't easy to navigate, as projects are listed on various
pages throughout this site. But you'll discover their
Electronic
Beowulf and other projects under construction at the bottom of the page.
-
SCC -
Digital Projects: The SCC (Scholarly Communications Center) promotes the
communication of scholarly material by developing digital projects across a
broad range of academic topics, in collaboration with librarians, teaching
and research faculty, and the State of New Jersey. Hosted by Rutgers
University Libraries, this list contains topics ranging from an alcohol
history database to WILD (Women In Leadership Database), a portal to unique
scholarly resources about women's leadership found in selective archival and
manuscript collections at Rutgers University. You may also find additional
projects at the library's
Project
Page.
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Smithsonian Digital
Library: From annual reports to trade literature, the Smithsonian offers
readers, students, and teachers the materials they might need to supplement
specific projects.
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The European
Library: This digital collection offers access to the resources of the
47 national libraries of Europe. The resources include books, magazines,
journals, audio recordings and other materials.
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Tufts Digital Library: TDL provides a
general means of interacting with digital content created at Tufts
University or created for use in teaching and research by Tufts faculty,
staff and students. However, most of the projects - such as the oral
interviews that have audio files and transcriptions of the files - are open
access.
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UBdigit: The University of Buffalo
(NY) includes primarily collections of still images, but anticipates future
inclusion of a variety of digital media formats, including audio, video,
kinetic images, animation, virtual reality, interactive sequences and
multi-media constructs. At present, they carry projects that range from
American literature to psychology.
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UFDC Digital Collections: The
University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) is a research tool that
enables a user to find unique and rare digitized materials held at the
University of Florida (UF) and partner institutions. The repository holds a
wide assortment of materials from arts, humanities, and social sciences to
world projects such as the
Africana Collection.
Some resources are limited to university use only.
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UCLA Library
Digital Collections: This library offers broad public access to their
digital collections, which include images, project papers, and photographs.
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University of Minnesota
Digital Collections Unit: The Visual History Archive alone contains
nearly 52,000 video testimonies, and this is just one project among many
available at this digital library. Search images to find items in topics
that range from African-American Literature Cover Art to World War I &
II Posters.
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University of Oregon Libraries
Digital Collections: This collection includes art images, a historical
photography collection, a print collection and more. A number of collections
are in the planning or development stages, including a "Medieval
Manuscripts" collection and aerial photographs.
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University
of Tennessee Digital Collections: This site carries several projects
that range from historical photograph collections to current collections
gathered by this university's Herbarium. Other projects include early images
of Egypt and electronic theses and dissertations.
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University of
Washington Digital Collections: This site features materials from the
University of Washington Libraries, University of Washington Faculty and
Departments, and organizations that have participated in partner projects
with the UW. The huge amount of material offered ranges from art and
architecture to international and ethnic collections.
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WRLC Libraries Digital and Special
Collections: The Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC) provides
staff and systems to manage digitizing projects, scan materials, and enter
descriptive information developed in conjunction with library staff. Their
members include institutions such as the Catholic University of America,
American University, George Mason University and more.
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Yale Digital
Collections: A short list of the resources available online from Yale
University Libraries is available here. Access to some collections is
restricted to on-campus use only.
Back to index
eTexts and eBooks
The following resources hold texts and digitized images of documents with very
few other resources such as photographs, audio, etc.
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Alex Catalogue of Electronic
Texts: "The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of about
14,000 “classic” public domain documents from American and English
literature as well as Western philosophy."
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American Verse Project:
This project is a collaborative project between the University of Michigan
Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The
project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry
prior to 1920. The full text of each volume of poetry is being converted
into digital form.
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Bartleby: Brought to readers from
Columbia University, this site reproduces classic literature in hypertext
and maintains a strong emphasis on the quality and integrity of the text.
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BiblioVault: University
of Chicago Press, with financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, developed this resource that serves more than 50 university
presses and contains digital files for more than 12,500 books.
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Carrie: Lynn H. Nelson, creator of
CARRIE, is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Kansas. The
site is now part of the WWW-VL History Central Catalogue at the
European University Institute, Florence,
Italy. It contains archival materials from WWI, the López Martín Collection,
and other documents.
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CELT: The Corpus of Electronic Texts
brings the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture to the Internet,
for the use and benefit of everyone worldwide. It has a searchable online
textbase consisting of 935 contemporary and historical documents from many
areas, including literature and the other arts.
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Digital Library of the Commons: DLC
is a gateway to the international literature on the commons. This site
contains an author-submission portal; an archive of full-text articles,
papers, and dissertations; the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons; a
Keyword Thesaurus, and links to relevant reference sources on the study of
the commons. You'll also find a new online photo collection from this link.
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DRUM: The Digital
Repository at the University of Maryland provides links to various
faculty-contributed research and publications, UM theses and dissertations
from December 2003 forward, and collections of technical reports. The site
is slightly confusing, but when you search for a document, you need to
scroll down the page to gain access to the file. These files are all open
access.
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Electronic Text
Center: This digital collection, sponsored by the University of
Virginia, is an on-line archive of standards-based texts and images in the
humanities, The collection is offered in fifteen different languages.
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Electronic Text Research Center: The
University of Minnesota's Electronic Text Research Center (ETRC) has been
closed, but the files and projects of the ETRC are maintained here for
ongoing access. Some of these projects include "Early Modern French Women
Writers," "Spanish American Texts," and "Wright American Fiction" - the
latter project now being hosted by Indiana University.
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ePage@Tech: This is Georgia Tech's
resource page for electronic texts, including theses and dissertations. Most
of this collection is open access.
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Google Book Search: This database
continues to grow, with more than a hundred thousand titles added by
publishers and authors and some 10,000 works in the public domain now
indexed and included in search results. Google Book Search allows
public-domain works and other out-of-copyright material to be downloaded in
PDF format.
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Humanities Text Initiative: The
Humanities Text Initiative, a unit of the University of Michigan's Digital
Library Production Service, has provided online access to full text
resources since 1994. You'll gain open access to text collections including
the Making of America site,
which holds over 12,639 volumes containing 3,792,847 pages of e-text. This
is a collaborative effort with Cornell University (see #167 ).
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Hypertexts:
The University of Virginia comes through again with electronic texts that
focus on American studies. The
Yellow Pages on
this site lists the online texts by topics that range from ethnicity to
science and technology.
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Internet Library of Early
Journals: This is a joint project offered the Universities of
Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford (UK) that aims to digitize
substantial runs of 18th and 19th century British journals. They make these
images available on the Internet, along with associated bibliographic data.
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Internet Sacred Text
Archive: John B. Hare has an academic background in linguistics,
anthropology and computer science, and he worked in the high technology
field as a computer programmer and entrepreneur for twenty five years prior
to starting this site, which is a freely available archive of electronic
texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and
esoteric topics.
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National Academies Press: Viewers can gain
access to more than 3,700 books online free, and purchase from more than
1,900 PDFs listed on the site. When you click on a book, you may need to
scroll down the page to find the full free text listed on the left.
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Networked Digital Library of Theses and
Dissertations: NDLTD is an international organization dedicated to
promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of
electronic analogues to the traditional paper-based theses and
dissertations.
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Online Books Page: the
University of Pennsylvania lists over 25,000 free books on the Web. Some
books are hosted at the site, other listings point to other Web sites that
carry full text transcriptions or page images.
-
Oxford Text Archive: The Oxford Text
Archive is generally considered to be the oldest digital archive of academic
primary source materials. OTA holds several thousand electronic texts and
linguistic corpora, in a variety of languages. Its holdings include
electronic editions of works by individual authors, standard reference works
such as the Bible and mono-/bilingual dictionaries, and a range of language
corpora.
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Penn Libraries:
Scroll down to "Locally developed digital collections," and you'll discover
open access projects such as SCETI (Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text
and Image, the Furness Collection Images (Shakespeare and English
Renaissance), and more. Some projects are Penn access only.
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Perseus: The Department of
Classics at Tufts
University, Boston, offers this digital library project that includes
collections of humanities resources. If you experience difficulties with the
site you can try to access the mirror sites in
Berlin or in
Chicago.
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Project Gutenberg:
Michael Hart founded this collection in 1971, and it's now known as the
oldest digital library. Most of the over 22,000 items in this collection
consist of full texts of books in the public domain. Many independent
organizations that share Project Gutenberg's ideals have been given
permission to use the Project Gutenberg trademark.
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Royal
National Institute for the Blind: The RNIB digital collection contains a
talking
book service, where users can gain access to 14,000 mostly unabridged
titles in popular fiction, classic titles and non-fiction for people of all
ages. The books can be 'read' on special
DAISY (Digital Accessible Information
System) players.
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Rutgers' Center for Electronic
Texts: CETH projects are available to Rutgers students, but some
materials are available for open access. The Spectator project, contained
within this site, has moved to
another location. This
latter project is an open access interactive hypermedia environment for the
study of The Tatler (1709-1711), The Spectator (1711-14), and the
eighteenth-century periodical in general.
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The Internet Classics Archive: Select
from a list of 441 works of classical literature by 59 different authors,
including user-driven commentary and "reader's choice" Web sites. You'll
discover mainly Greco-Roman works (some Chinese and Persian), all in English
translation. The site is housed at MIT (Massachesetts Institute of
Technology).
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Tribal
Writers Digital Library: The Sequoyah Research Center, located in Little
Rock, Arkansas, supports the activities of the American Native Press
Archives (ANPA). The ANPA digital text project brings out-of-print literary
efforts of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and First Nations people of
Canada to readers world wide. Viewers can copy these resources freely for
personal use, research, and teaching (including distribution to classes) as
long as a statement of reference is included.
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UMDL Texts: UMDL
Texts is the central access point for electronic books and journals provided
by the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. Browse
through collections that focus on historical and current texts on dentistry,
poetry, and more.
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University of Georgia Digital
Books: Download the DjVu plugin to view digitally enhanced works
(deWorks), in addition to searchable book facsimiles, broadsides, posters,
photographs, maps, manuscripts, transcripts, newspapers, and periodicals.
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Windows Live
Search: This is a beta search option, where the user can type phrases,
titles, or author names into the search box to find the repository that
might hold that book or the option to download an entire book.
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Wright American Fiction
Project: This site is part of the LETRS project at Indiana University.
The books, which were written from 1851 - 1875, include full texts online
that are searchable by author, title, and phrases.
Back to index
Directories
The links listed below will provide you with much more information on various
research topics, and they'll direct you to finding those resources online in
most cases.
-
AmericanSouth: Emory University in
collaboration with a large number of Southern research libraries harvests
metadata, or information about information, from an amalgam of library and
museum archives, pulling this metadata into a central location for
aggregation, indexing, search, and discovery.
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Digital Librarian: Margaret
Vail Anderson, a librarian in Cortland, New York, manages this list of
categorized Web sites that's very similar to the Yahoo! Directory.
-
Digital
Library Federation Collections Registry: You'll find a web-searchable
database of nearly 300 public domain online digital collections. The Digital
Library Federation (DLF) is a consortium of libraries and related agencies
that are pioneering in the use of electronic-information technologies to
extend their collections and services.
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Digital Library for International
Research: The Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) and
the American Institute for Yemeni Studies (AIYS) sponsor DLIR. They provide
on-line public access catalog containing the records of all the holdings in
all participating libraries. They also deliver important bibliographic and
full-text primary and secondary source information from all CAORC member
centers, covering both print collections and research collections in other
media.
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ibiblio: ibiblio.org is a "collection of
collections," including links to sites that contain software, music,
literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies.
ibiblio.org is a collaboration between the Center for the Public Domain and
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Library Without Walls: Library
Without Walls customers use the Los Alamos National Laboratory's digital
library technology to access a wealth of scientific and technical resources
worldwide from the desktop, any time, anywhere.
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National Transportation Library: The
National Transportation Library works to bring together transportation
libraries, information centers and information resource professionals to
improve access to transportation resources and develop transportation
knowledge networks. Your searches will take you to Web sites that focus on
trains, automobiles, etc.
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OAIster: OAIster is a union catalog of
digital resources. They provide access to these digital resources by
"harvesting" their descriptive metadata (records) using OAI-PMH (the Open
Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), so you can use phrase
to find documents rather than remember titles and authors.
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The British Columbia Digital Library: This
is a comprehensive guide to digital library collections, primarily
text-based ones, and digital library construction technology in BC and
around the world. Some databases are out of date, but you can still use
these collections for direction.
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