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Tag Archives: digital collections
Freedom Summer online archive now available
Great news: now there's a digital archive to access the historically important "[w:Freedom Summer]", a seminal moment in the US civil rights movement. The Wisconsin Historical Society has just released the 1964 Freedom Summer Project. Not only are there 25,000 manuscripts and key documents, but there are finding aids to help users access the information and instructional materials for teachers.
Dear colleagues, We've just released an online collection of 25,000 manuscripts related to the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project. It's free and open to anyone for non-profit educational purposes at www.wisconsinhistory.org/freedomsummer Besides thousands of archival documents from COFO, CORE and SNCC and papers from dozens of individual activists, the site includes a downloadable Powerpoint about Freedom Summer and a PDF Sourcebook of key documents for teachers. I'd be grateful if you'd forward this note to colleagues and educators who might be interested. As the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer approaches, we want teachers, students, historians, librarians, museum curators, the media, and anyone else to use these primary sources in their 50th anniversary programming. We'll be adding a few thousand more pages this year, so please "like" us on Facebook and follow along: www.facebook.com/WHS.Freedom.Summer.collection?fref=ts Best wishes, Michael Edmonds Deputy Director, Library-Archives Division Wisconsin Historical SocietyContinue reading
Note to FullTextReports followers — Grab It When You See It!
Our friends Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy over at Full Text Reports have a handy reminder today:
...some of the papers and reports posted on FullTextReports.com are freely available online for just a limited time before they disappear behind a paywall (or go away entirely). If you see something you suspect might be useful to you (or a colleague) in the future, download it the day you see it because it may not be accessible later without a subscription (or it may have been moved or taken offline). -- Note to FullTextReports followers — Grab It When You See It!, Full Text Reports (April 17, 2013).Just another reason to remember that libraries should be collecting, not pointing. (See: When we depend on pointing instead of collecting.) (By the way, in case you hadn't noticed: the left hand navigation pane here at FGI has a feed of the latest reports listed at Full Text Reports!) Continue reading
Wilson Center makes declassified documents accessible and searchable
There's a new digital archive in town, from the Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project and its new Digital Archive of declassified official documents called www.digitalarchive.org.
Digital collections include: the Berlin Wall, Chinese nuclear history, Cuban foreign relations, Geneva Conference of 1954, Mitrokhin archive, and much more.
From the Wilson Center Web Site:
The Wilson Center [recently] launched a new Digital Archive of declassified official documents from nearly 100 different archives in dozens of different countries that provide fresh, unprecedented insights into the history of international relations and diplomacy. [Clip] The new website – www.digitalarchive.org – features uniquely powerful new search tools, an intuitive user-interface, and new educational resources such as timelines, analysis from leading experts, and biographies of significant historical figures. The Digital Archive will continually expand with new documents, translations, and analysis as they become available. [Clip] The new Digital Archive has been designed from the ground-up to make these historical document collections available to the broadest possible audience, from high school students through world-renowned scholars. Thousands of official documents from dozens of governments are now accessible through intuitive searching with filters such as location, date, subject, or language. Users can also browse topics by exploring themes or collections like the Database on Inter-Korea Relations and popular subjects such as the Warsaw Pact or the Cuban Missile Crisis.[HT to InfoDocket!] Continue reading
Using LoC’s Viewshare to create a digital collection
We've mentioned the Library of Congress's Viewshare, a free and open tool for creating interfaces for digital cultural heritage collections, here before. Here is an interview with Jennifer Brancato digital archivist at East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, about her use of Viewshare to create a fascinating view of a set of digitized funeral records.
- Better Know a Viewshare: Exploring Texas Funeral Records, by Trevor Owens, The Signal Library of Congress Digital Preservation blog, (April 18th, 2012).
I love Viewshare! It is free and easy to use. No programming skills are required and there is no need to involve your IT staff. I think this tool is something any institution -- small, large, museum, library, archive -- could easily and quickly put into action. Viewshare made it possible to accomplish our goal of presenting our digital collections in a more dynamic and visual way.Continue reading
Providing better services by building digital collections
March 2, 2012 / Leave a comment
In an excellent article in the current issue of Library Hi Tech, Eric Morgan, the Digital Projects Librarian at the Hesburgh Libraries at the of the University of Notre Dame, provides examples of building services based on digital collections. As he says:
- Use and understand: the inclusion of services against texts in library catalogs and "discovery systems." by Eric Lease Morgan, Library Hi Tech, Vol. 30 Iss: 1, (2012) pp.35 - 59. [subscription required]
It goes without saying that no library can develop such innovative services without actually acquiring copies of the digital information and building its own digital collection. Pointing to resources that are controlled by others limits the services that libraries can provide. Continue reading →Continue Reading →