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Finding Primary Sources: Databases/Digital Collections

A guide to finding primary sources at Smith Library Center.

Databases

Databases Available at SLC or on the Internet

Digital Collections

United States

  • Digital Public Library of America: Discover 44,463,845 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States
  • Library of Congress Digital Collections: Primary source and archival materials covering topics such as art and architecture, performing arts, technology and applied sciences
  • Calisphere: Digitized images including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of arts, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts that reveal the diverse history and culture of California. 
  • The American Presidency Project: Search thousands of documents related to historical and current U.S. presidencies, such as speeches, official papers, executive orders, proclamations, news conferences, and press briefings
  • American Antiquarian Society Digital Image Archive: More than 50,000 items covering the range of the Society's holdings including images and newspapers. 
  • Beinecke Library (Yale University): Digital items from across the Beinecke's collections. 
  • Broadsides and Ephemera Collection: Duke University collection of broadsides, pamphlets, form letters, posters, newspapers, tickets, and other short printed items dating from the eighteenth to the twentieth century (with the majority dating from the nineteenth century).
  • Cornell University Collection of Political Americana: A major collection of materials from U.S. national political campaigns, consisting of images of published material, ephemera, and artifacts dating to between 1800 and 1976.
  • Digital Vaults on Docs Teach: Collections of digitized documents from the National Archives, grouped thematically and searchable.
  • Ad*Access Project: Images and information for advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines. Concentrates on five main subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II.

Latin American History

  • Latin America Digital Initiatives, University of Texas: Collections with an emphasis on collections documenting human rights issues and underrepresented communities.
  • Latin American Pamphlets: Scare and unique pamphlets, primarily from Chile, Cuba, Bolivia, and Mexico, published during the 19th and early 20th centuries.  
  • Princeton's Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribean Ephemera: The Latin American Ephemera Collection contains thousands of digitized pamphlets, brochures, flyers, posters, placards, and other printed items created since around the last quarter of the 20th century by a wide variety of social activists, non-governmental organizations, government agencies, political parties, public policy think tanks, and other types of organizations across Latin America, in order to publicize their views, positions, agendas, policies, events, and activities. The vast majority are rare, hard-to-find primary sources unavailable elsewhere.
  • Early Americas Digital Archive: The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820.

Europe

  • Archive of European Integration: An electronic repository and archive for research materials on the topic of European integration and unification. The AEI collects two types of materials: certain types of independently-produced research materials and official European Community/European Union documents.
  • CVCE.eu by UN.lu: Formerly European Navigator. The site includes documents and other material relating to the history of the European Union as well as an oral history collection of nearly 100 interviews with eminent European figures.
  • EuroDocs: European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated.
  • Europeana: Provides open access to more than 15 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers, and archival papers from more than 1500 European institutions. Europeana -- the European digital library, museum, and archive -- launched in 2008 and is funded by the European Commission and its member states. This current prototype is one of many parallel projects of The European Library.
  • EUscreen: Videos, stills, texts, and audio from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives from the early 1900s onward.
  • Social History Collections: Portal to more than 900,000 digitized items covering European social and labor history from the late 18th to early 21st centuries.
  • World Digital Library: Provides access to digitized items from all over the world including films.
Italy
  • AAMOD - Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico: Contains digitized sound and videorecordings from the Audiovideo archive of the workers democratic movement.
  • AMS Historica: Collection of sources conserved in Alm@DL, the digital library of the University of Bologna. The project hosts the digitization of books, maps, magazines, drawings, etc.
  • Archivio Storico Istituto Luce: Digitized collection of Italian newsreels and 400,000 historic photographs.
  • Biblioteca Digitale Ligure: A portal providing access to the digital sources that have been put online by libraries and institutions of the Italian region Liguria and by the region itself. These sources are of various types (images, texts, audio, video), and can be either born-digital or digitized.
  • Legislature Precedenti: Italian legislative and parliamentary debates and documents from 1948 to 1996.

Africa

  • The Barbary Treaties 1786-1836: Text of and notes the nine treaties the United States made with the Barbary States, as they were then called: Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.
  • American University in Cairo Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library: Collections include digitized postcards, maps, photographs, oral histories, magazines, and more.
  • Duke Papyrus Archive: Provides electronic access to texts about and images of nearly 1400 papyri from ancient Egypt.
  • Emma B. Andrews Diary Project: The site is a product of Dr. Sarah Ketchley's work to transcribe and analyze a multi-volume collection of Nile travel journals written by Mrs. Emma B. Andrews
  • The Giza Archives: The site contains photographs and other documentation from the original Harvard University - Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition (1904 to 1947), from recent MFA fieldwork, and from other expeditions, museums, and universities around the world.
  • Memory of the Suez Canal: The collection includes documents, photos, films and maps relating to the creation and use of the Suez Canal