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Primary Sources: General Resources & Databases

Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.

General

-Artstor

The Artstor Digital Library contains over 1.8 million digital images in the arts, architecture, the humanities and science from outstanding international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, and photo archives.

-The British Library

The British Library website contains an extensive amount of digital content including newspapers, manuscripts, theses, multimedia, festival books, etc.

-Columbia University Libraries: Digital Collections

The Digital Collections offers users electronic access to a number of Columbia University’s collections.

-CREDO

CREDO is a digital repository that holds the digital collections of the University of Massachusetts Special Collections and University Archives. Collections of interest include the W.E.B. DuBois Papers and the Horace Mann Bond Papers.

-Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America  became available April 18, 2013. This search engine provides access to millions of texts, images, audio files, video files, and other resources digitized by libraries, archives, museums, and other organizations in the United States. The DPLA is an incredible resource of historical primary source material.

-Duke University Libraries: Digital Collections

The Digital Collection includes historical manuscripts, images, maps, advertisements, and more.

-Empire Online

Spanning five centuries, and charting the rise and fall of empires around the world, explore colonial history, politics, culture and society. From Columbus to debates on American Imperialism.
 
This collection features a rich variety of primary source material, split into three modules: Personal Experiences, Propaganda and Recruitment, and Visual Perspectives & Narratives.
 

-Fordham University: Internet History Sourcebook

"The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use." 

-Google Books

In partnership with several major academic institutions, Google has created a comprehensive and searchable library in the attempt to democratize information and make knowledge avaliable to a larger swath of the population. 

-Harvard University Library: Open Collections Program

The Open Collections Program (OCP) has created six subject-specific, web-accessible collections that can support teaching and learning around the world. Today, OCP collections account for over 2.3 million digitized pages, including more than 225,000 manuscript pages.

-HathiTrust

"HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world."

-Hoover Institution Library and Archives

The Hoover Institution Library and Archives is “dedicated to documenting war, revolution, and peace in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” The Institution currently holds one million volumes and six thousand archival collections from over one hundred countries. A small selection of the collections have been digitized and are available online.

-The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its mission is to provide “permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.” 

-The Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the nation’s first established cultural institution and the largest library in the world, with millions of items including books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections.

-Making of the Modern World

Comprised mainly of books and primary sources this collection contains international coverage of social,economic, history, law and women's studies from the late half of the nineteenth century.

-The National Archives and Records Administration Catalog

The National Archives Catalog is the main portal to search NARA’s collections. The catalog currently contains archival descriptions for 85% of the holdings of the National Archives, authority files, and over 2 million digitized records.

-National Archives and Records Administration: Research Guides

The National Archives offers a number of research guides to aid users in executing a successful search of NARA’s collections.

-The National Archives, United Kingdom

The National Archives is committed to preserving government records of the United Kingdom. The collection is one of the largest in the world, containing over 11 million historical government and public records.

-New York Public Library: Digital Collections

The site offers users access to over 600,000 items digitized from the New York Public Library’s collections. The database features prints, photographs, manuscripts, maps, and video that can be accessed through keyword search or browsing.

-Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg offers over 50,000 free ebooks.

-Thomson Gale Databases

This family of databases includes Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center (primary sources included), Custom Newspapers, and The Times (London) Digital Archive, 1785-1985. 

-UCLA Library: Digital Collection

The UCLA Digital Library Program (DLP) provides a number of materials including text, images, maps, and audio/visual.

-The University of Chicago: Digital Libraries Collections & Activities

The Digital Libraries Collections & Archives provides access to a number of the University of Chicago’s collections--including manuscripts, maps, books and journals, and photographs.

-Smithsonian Institution Archives

The Smithsonian Institution Archives “captures, preserves, and makes available to the public the history of this extraordinary Institution.” 

-Smithsonian Institution Collections Search Center

The Smithsonian Collections Search Center is an online catalog containing most of Smithsonian major collections. There are 9.3 million catalog records relating to areas for Art & Design, History & Culture, and Science & Technology with over 1.3 million images, videos, audio files, podcasts, blog posts and electronic journals.

-Smithsonian Libraries Digital Collections

The Smithsonian Libraries Digital Collections provides users access to over 5,000 scanned books, photo collections, videos, scholarly bibliographies, virtual exhibitions, and searchable databases of resources related to art, history, science, technology and library and museum collections or exhibitions.