The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/
Level: All
The Archives of Sexuality and Gender program provides a robust and significant collection of primary sources for the historical study of sex, sexuality, and gender. With material dating back to the sixteenth century, researchers and scholars can examine how sexual norms have changed over time, health and hygiene, the development of sex education, the rise of sexology, changing gender roles, social movements and activism, erotica, and many other interesting topical areas. This growing archival program offers rich research opportunities across a wide span of human history. The Archives of Sexuality and Gender program consists of four archives:
Level: All
The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature in the Department of Special and Area Studies Collections at the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries contains more than 115,000 books and periodicals published in the United States and Great Britain from the mid-1600s to present day. The Library also has small holdings manuscript collections, original artwork, and assorted ephemera such as board games, puzzles, and toys. The Baldwin Library is known for comparative editions of books, with special emphasis on Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, Aesop’s Fables, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Library also has the largest collection of Early American Juvenile Imprints of any academic institution in the United States.
Other strengths and distinctions of the Baldwin Library include: marginalia and inscriptions, nonfiction from the 20th century, Little Golden Books, religious tracts, and illustrated editions from the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Scholars worldwide use the Baldwin Library for research in morality tales and religious tracts, conduct of life, gender roles, comparative editions/book history, and toy and movable books.
The Baldwin Library also runs the Louise Seaman Bechtel Fellowship in conjunction with the Association of Library Services to Children in the American Library Association, has a travel grant program for visiting researchers, and has a year-long Speaker Series, which has featured Dr. Jerry Griswald, Dr. Maria Tatar, author Peter Sis, and Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas. The University of Florida’s Digital Collections provide scholars with access to over 6,000 rare and unique titles from the print collection.
https://ufdc.ufl.edu/baldwin/all/thumbs
Level: All
With approximately 45,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present, The New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection is one of the largest in the world, used by historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts. Trouble is, the menus are very difficult to search for the greatest treasures they contain: specific information about dishes, prices, the organization of meals, and all the stories these things tell us about the history of food and culture. To solve this, we’re working to improve the collection by transcribing the menus, dish by dish. Doing this will allow us to dramatically expand the ways in which the collection can be researched and accessed, opening the door to new kinds of discoveries. We’ve built a simple tool that makes the transcribing pretty easy to do, but it’s a big job, so we need your help. Feeling hungry?
Level: All
Making Victorian Dublin is an exciting and innovative collaborative project between geologists and architectural historians at Trinity College Dublin which has revealed the building industry responsible for Ireland’s Victorian architecture. Funded by the Irish Research Council, the project aims to open new interdisciplinary horizons for the research of Ireland’s past. For too long the craftsmen and quarrymen who cut, carved and constructed splendid buildings in Ireland’s towns, cities and countryside have been lost to history, overshadowed by the architects and patrons who designed and commissioned them. But without the marble masons, stone cutters, carvers and builders these richly coloured and impeccably detailed buildings simply could not have been achieved.
Focused on Ireland’s most significant and influential building of the period, the Museum Building of Trinity College Dublin, researchers have uncovered the remarkable network of quarries, craft communities and transport routes which enabled its construction. A few strides within this building displays the full range of Ireland’s remarkable stone resources. The Museum Building pioneered the patriotic use of native coloured stone and established a taste for Connemara marble and Cork Red limestone which spread across Ireland to Britain and the United States. Connemara marble with its distinctive green and white colour banding would become emblematic of Irish identity.
Level: All
Sometime in the middle of the fifth-century BC, Herodotus, a Greek living on the coast of Asia Minor in a town called Halicarnassus (modern-day Bodrum, Turkey) set out to explain the origins of the Great War that had taken place a generation before between his peoples, the Greeks, and the Persians. The result is his Histories (history means literally an ‘enquiry’ in the Greek), in which he explores the world of his time, the conflicts that had given rise to it, the noteworthy deeds of various kinds of people in it, and the towns and cities that had risen and fallen throughout it. For Herodotus ‘goes through in detail towns of men both small and great alike: for of the places that were once great, most have now become small, while those that were great in my time were small before’ (1.5): the idea that space moves is fundamental to Herodotus, as he uses the new medium of his age—writing—to represent the world around him.
The Hestia project takes up Herodotus’s enquiry through the new medium of our time, digital technology, and involves a collaborative team of researchers from Classical Studies, Geography and Digital Humanities. Using a digital text of Herodotus’s Histories, from which we have extracted all place-names, we use web-mapping technologies such as GIS, Google Earth and Narrative TimeMap to investigate the cultural geography of the ancient world through the eyes of one of its first witnesses. Our aims are twofold. First, we depart from the traditional cartographic idea of geographic spaces as points on a map, by using the digital medium to read text and space alongside each other, thereby allowing a sense of space as something lived and experienced to emerge. In particular, we construct network maps of the relations between places in Herodotus in ways that challenge the schematic division of the world as a clash between East and West, between Asia and Europe. Second, we enable users of different expertise and interests—researchers, students and general enthusiasts—to use our technologies for themselves.
https://hestia.open.ac.uk/hestia/
Level: All
Connecting Early Medieval European Collections (CEMEC) is an EU-funded cooperation project that aims to create a collaborative network, and a cost-effective business model, between eight European museum collections and six technical partners.
Drawing on objects from participating museum collections, the project will produce ‘CROSSROADS’, a travelling exhibition focusing on connectivity and cultural exchange during the Early Middle Ages (300 -1000) in Europe. The CEMEC project includes the development of a Mobile Panoramic Project System (MPPS), which will enable museum and online visitors to explore the rich cultural history and diversity of Early Medieval Europe.
MPPS will connect to a database of 3D scanned objects, allowing users to take a closer look at objects in the exhibition and to learn more about the collections and history from their devices at home.
https://cemec-eu.net/about.php
Level: All
We wish to archive now the huge amount of cultural resources that have been collected and studied from the ancient to the current in a form without deterioration, and inherit those resources for the future. We wish to improve accessibility to those cultural resources for many people to actually see and use those resources.
Digital Silk Road Project is a research project to realize these goals by integrating information technology with the study of culture. To be specific, we must investigate various methods, starting from the digitization of real cultural artifacts, and the construction of digital archives, to the exhibition of digital cultural resources over the network and annotation to digital cultural resources based on collaborative work.
Naturally, this kind of a big issue cannot be solved only by the experts of informatics. That is why we are promoting international collaborative research ranging over various academic fields. We have been working together with several international organizations and several universities in Japan and in foreign countries.
Our future plan includes the dissemination of research results over the network to broaden the outreach of the digital archive. We also understand, however, that another important issue is the improvement of accessibility to digital cultural resources, especially in countries along ancient Silk Road in which the usage of information technology still remains premature.
http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/world-heritage.html.en
Level: All
The Irish Poetry Reading Collection, which forms part of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive, is a central repository for readings by Irish poets, in both the English and the Irish language. This collection aims to capture and preserve the rich and diverse landscape of poetry in Ireland, and includes the voices of: established poets; emerging poets; performance poets; avant-garde poets; English and Irish language poets; and Irish diaspora poets. Many of the readings are accompanied by handwritten or typed transcriptions of the poem, created by the poet especially for the reading.
https://digital.ucd.ie/view/ucdlib:38488
Level: All
Search America’s historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/
Level: All