Category: Open Library

Categories
English Open Library

Library of Southern Literature

The “Library of Southern Literature” includes a wide range of literary works of the American South published before 1924. This collection was originally based on Dr. Robert Bain’s bibliography of the hundred most important southern literary works and continues to expand under the guidance of scholarly advisors Dr. Joseph M. Flora and Dr. William L. Andrews. This collection begins with some of the earliest texts about America written by British discoverers that set the foundation for American letters and traces the development of southern literature through to the beginning of the twentieth century.

https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/

Level: All

Categories
Art History English History Open Library

Digital Scriptorium

Digital Scriptorium is a growing consortium of American libraries and museums committed to free online access to their collections of pre-modern manuscripts. Our website unites scattered resources from many institutions into a national digital platform for teaching and scholarly research. It serves to connect an international user community to multiple repositories by means of a digital union catalogue with sample images and searchable metadata. Many DS records also link out to the websites of our contributors, where users can discover further information.

https://digital-scriptorium.org/

Level: All

Categories
History Open Library

The Biodiversity Library

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

Categories
English History Open Library

Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature

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

Categories
History Open Library

Food Research: The New York Public Library’s menu collection

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?

http://menus.nypl.org

Level: All

Categories
Computer Science Open Library

Digital Silk Road: Digital Archives of Cultural Heritage

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

Categories
English Open Library

Irish Poetry Reading Collection

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

Categories
Open Library

Chronicling America: History American Newspapers

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

Categories
Architecture Art History English History Information Studies Open Library

Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant Garde

Artist, poet, feminist, entrepreneur, inventor, and world traveler, Mina Loy consorted with nearly every avant-garde movement, including Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, but was contained by none. Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde documents her avant-garde affiliations, pursuing new modes of textual and visual expression in order to invite a closer, more informed engagement with her work. This peer-reviewed, digital, multimedia scholarly book is an open educational resource authored by students, staff, and faculty at Davidson College, Duquesne University, and the University of Georgia (UGA). It is the culmination of a five-year collaboration, supported by a generous Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

https://mina-loy.com

Level: All

Categories
Computer Science English History Open Library

Mapping readers and readership in Dublin, 1826-1926: a new cultural geography

This project is centred on the reconstruction of biographical and geographical patterns of readership and reading in Dublin between 1826 and 1926. The project aims at collating and exploit data from unique extant records of readership at Marsh’s Library for this period and it draws on Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to provide an innovative research resource which will transform academic and popular understanding of Dublin’s cultural and literary history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

When Archbishop Narcissus Marsh founded the Library in 1707, he intended it to be at the intellectual heart of the city, a place in which ‘graduates and gentlemen’ could consult the latest and most up-to-date knowledge in a range of subjects, as well as a host of rare and curious older texts. Through a creative alignment of humanities research and GIS technology, this project seeks to explore and reconstruct the role and scope of Marsh’s as a knowledge node in Dublin’s book and reading culture during the long nineteenth century.

http://marshreaders.ucd.ie/

Level: Researcher