Research Guides: HIS 295: The Historian's Craft: Digital Archives and Libraries

How to Use This Guide

This page contains a long, but incomplete list of various online archives and online libraries for finding primary sources. The vast majority of these resources will offer primary sources in English, either from their original text or through translations. However, this is just a starting point and there are many hundreds more online archives that are not listed.

You can read more about finding other archives in "Finding and Online Archive".

Generally, the resources listed below are grouped by geographic location or time period. If you need more specific help, please Ask a Librarian.

General Online Archives

Hathi Trust
Offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. These resources come from contributing organizations such as university libraries, which include many primary source documents and other scholarly materials. The Hathi Trust categorizes its materials using subject headings like those found in a library catalog.
Archive.org
Long running online resource that contains millions of digital objects from many different cultural heritage organizations. Searching can be a bit cumbersome and digital resources are not always described comprehensively.
Internet History Sourcebooks Project (Fordham University)
A collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use. It offers a wide-range of documents on a variety of different subjects, which are broken down by geography and time-period.

Ancestry Library Edition This link opens in a new window
For ancestry/genealogy research. This database combines content from around 4,000 databases.

United States

National Archives
Website run by the National Archives and Records Association, which is a branch of the United States Government. You can search for documents related to the government, military, and other important historical events. Contains a number of online digitized exhibits.
Digital Public Library of America
The DPLA aggregates millions of documents from its member institutions (of which the Hathi Trust is a member). These can be searched using keywords and narrowing it down by collection and by organization.
NYPL Digital Collections
NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 520,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division (NYPL Digital Collections)
The NYPL Digital Collections is a contributor to the DPLA, but their website is particularly useful for browsing their subject specific collections and some items and documents are not found in other platforms. They have many relevant international records, from books and magazines to letters and plantation records.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Historical collections (primary documents, sound recordings, images, maps, etc.) that include such topics as advertising, African American history, and women's history.
Smithsonian Collections
Contains millions of digital objects from historical artifacts to documents and letters. Additionally, items come from all over the world and are not exclusive to the United States.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
Project run by the Library of Congress that contains scanned newspapers from all over the country from between 1789-1963.
Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
This site includes digitized primary sources from several collections. Items include texts, images, and audio files related to Southern history, literature, and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century.
Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection (Cornell University)
A rich and diverse set of materials from Cornell University on the anti-slavery movement of the 1800’s. Over 10,000 pamphlets and articles cover local and national topics.
Civil War Resources (Virginia Military Institute)
Contains letters and papers on a variety of Civil War topics and people, ranging from Stonewall Jackson to cadet life during the war. While not all items are offered in full text, descriptions are given of other items that may be found at the VMI archives.
Women in the Civil War (Duke University)
Digitized materials from Duke and other collections feature manuscripts on the role of women in the war, including their duties as soldiers and spies.
Private Voices (UGA)
Part of the Corpus of American Civil War Letters Project (CACWL), this is a collection of thousands of letters written by Civil War soldiers who wrote "by ear." Almost all of these men were army privates, and their letters reveal a great deal about the lives and motivations of the Civil War's common soldiers.
Making of America (University of Michigan)
This collaborative project resulted in a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. The two sites have the same scope, but different content. Cornell University also has a portal to this project, which has their holding in the Hathi Trust.
Amistad Research Center
Committed to collecting, preserving, and providing open access to original materials that reference the social and cultural importance of America's ethnic and racial history, the African Diaspora, human relations, and civil rights.
Discovering American Women's History Online (Middle Tennessee State University)
Provides access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States.
Archives of African American Music and Culture (Indiana University)
Contains materials covering a range of African American musical idioms and cultural expressions primarily from the post-World War II era. The collections highlight popular, religious, and classical music, with genres ranging from blues and gospel to R&B and contemporary hip hop.
Vivian G. Harsh Society Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature
The largest African-American history and literature collection in the Midwest containing thousands of books, many of them rare, reels of microfilm, clipping files, and manuscripts and archival collections.
Black Past List of Digitized Archives
An online reference center makes available a wealth of materials on African American history in one central location on the Internet. This page contains a list of major digitized archives on African American History.
Centro Library and Archives Digital Collections (CUNY)
Provides access to photographs, documents, artifacts, art, maps, oral histories, moving image and audio clips, and other digitized or born digital material pertaining to the history and culture of the Puerto Rican diaspora.
Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC) Digital Collections (University of Miami)
The largest repository of materials on Cuba outside of the island and the most comprehensive collection of resources about Cuban exile history and the global Cuban diaspora experience.
Voces Oral History Project (University of Texas)
The leading Latino oral history archive in the United States. Beginning in 1999, with a mission of capturing untold stories of Latinos and Latinas who served, in the military or on the home front, during World War II and expanding to include the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and Political and Civic Engagement, focusing on the continuing fight for Latino civil rights
Center for Jewish History
The largest and most comprehensive archive of the modern Jewish experience outside of Israel. Collections span five thousand years, with tens of millions of archival documents (in dozens of languages and alphabet systems), more than 500,000 volumes, as well as thousands of artworks, textiles, ritual objects, recordings, films, and photographs.
GLBT Historical Society
Collects, preserves, exhibits and makes accessible to the public materials and knowledge to support and promote understanding of LGBTQ history, culture and arts in all their diversity
LGBT Oral History Digital Collaboratory
Connects archives across Canada and the U.S. to produce a digital history hub for the research and study of gay, lesbian, queer, and trans* oral histories.
NYPL Gay and Lesbian Collections and HIV/AIDS Collections
The NYPL holds over 100 collections pertaining to the history and culture of gay men and lesbians, and to the history of the AIDS/HIV epidemic.
Lesbian Herstory Archives
Home to the world's largest collection of materials by and about lesbians and their communities, with digitized copies of some of the 3,000 oral history cassettes and 950 videotapes.

Internationally Focused

Endangered Archives Programme
facilitates the digitisation of archives around the world that are in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration. Since 2004, eight million images and 25,000 sound tracks have been digitized and archive types so far include rare printed sources, manuscripts, visual materials, audio recordings.
Digital Library for International Research
Created as a collaboration between American overseas research centers and foreign archives and special collections that hold unique and rare research materials. Selected materials come from from Guatemala, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Yemen, and Mongolia, and numerous other countries.
World Digital Library
A project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of UNESCO, and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world. Content includes books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, prints and photographs, sound recordings, and films.

Africa

African Online Digital Library
Provides free universal access to cultural heritage materials from and about African countries and communities. It brings together tens of thousands of digitized photographs, videos, archival documents, maps, interviews and oral histories in numerous African languages, many of which are contained in curated thematic galleries and teaching resources.
African Activist Archive
Preserves and makes available online the records of activism in the United States to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s.
Digital Innovation South Africa
A freely accessible online scholarly resource focusing on the socio-political history of South Africa, particularly the struggle for freedom during the period from 1950 to the first democratic elections in 1994, providing a wealth of material on this fascinating period of the country’s history.

Asia

Abhilekh Patal Portal for Access to Archives and Learning
Web-portal to access the National Archives of India’s reference media (more than 2.7 million files) and its digitized collections through the internet
Southeast Asian Images and Texts (University of Wisconsin)
This collection contains digitized images, including photographs and slides, that librarians, scholars, and other subject specialists have deemed important to these fields of study will be added to the collection on an ongoing basis.
Granth Sanjeevani
An effort of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai, to showcase its digitized collections to the worldwide users, with over 20,000 books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, journals, government publications and reports.
National Archives of Singapore Digital Collections
The official custodian of Singapore's collective memory. Ranging from government files, private memoirs, historical maps and photographs to oral history interviews and audio-visual materials, the NAS is responsible for the collection, preservation and management of Singapore's public and private archival records
Chinese Text Project
An online open-access digital library that makes pre-modern Chinese texts available to readers and researchers all around the world. Selected texts are translated into English.
Japan Center for Asian Historical Records
An online database for accessing historical documents of Japan related to modern Japanese relations with other countries, particularly those in Asia. Only selected resources are translated into English.
National Archives of Japan Digital Collections
Official online collections for the National Archives of Japan. Contains important cultural and historic documents and images. Not all materials are available in English.
South Asian Open Archive (JSTOR)
A free open-access resource for research and teaching - a rich and growing curated collection of key historical and contemporary sources in arts, humanities and social sciences, from and about South Asia, in English and other languages of the region. The collection currently contains hundreds of thousands of pages of books, journals, newspapers, census data, magazines, and documents, with particular focus on social & economic history, literature, women & gender, and caste & social structure.

Europe

Europeana
Provides access to millions of digitized objects – books, music, artworks and more – from EU member nations. The platform is searchable in English, but many written items will be in their original languages.
EuroDocs: Primary Historical Documents From Western Europe
A source for Western European (mainly primary) historical documents transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated that shed light on key happenings within the respective countries and within the broadest sense of political, economic, social, and cultural history. The order of documents is chronological wherever possible.
British Library Digital Collections
Contains selected digitized collections from the British Library's extensive archival holdings.
Gallica
A digital library project of the French National Library. It provides access to 90,000 texts on a variety of subjects, 80,000 images, and hours of audio files. This searchable interface also provides access to browsable thematic categories.
Bibliothèque Francophone Numérique
Brings together heritage collections from eleven libraries from Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, France, Canada, Morocco, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Madagascar, and Haiti. Does not contain English translations.
Jewish Heritage Network
Network of Jewish cultural heritage institutions, counting more than thirty Jewish museums, libraries, and research centers, mainly in Europe, but also in Israel and US. Provides access to hundreds of thousands of records on Jewish cultural heritage.
osmikon
Research Gateway on Russia, East and Southeast Europe and offers interdisciplinary, academically relevant information and services on this region. Includes archival materials as well as secondary sources. Not all resources are available in English.
Libraries and Archives in Germany
An official government page listing Germany's major digital archives and libraries. Not all resources have English translations.

Latin America and Caribbean

Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano
Contains digitized materials from national libraries in the Caribbean and Central and South America. While you can search in English, this will only produce a portion of available resources as most of the primary resources will be in Spanish or Portuguese.
Digital Library of the Caribbean
A cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean and provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.
Latin American Pamphlet Digital Collection (Harvard)
Scarce and unique pamphlets, primarily from Chile, Cuba, Bolivia and Mexico, published during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Latin American and Caribbean Digital Collection (University of Florida)
Supports scholarly interest in Latin America and the Caribbean and holds approximately 500,000 volumes, over 50,000 microforms, a large collection of rare books and manuscripts, and a wealth of digital resources, many of them open access.
National Digital Library of Brazil
Official digital library and archive of Brazil that seeks to digitize and preserve Brazil's cultural history. Resources not available in English.

Middle East

Qatar Digital Library
Achive featuring the cultural and historical heritage of the Gulf and wider region and includes archives, maps, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs and much more, complete with contextualised explanatory notes and links, in both English and Arabic
American University in Cairo Digital Collections
Supports research and teaching in the arts, culture, and society of Egypt and the Middle East by providing online access to unique cultural heritage resources
Digital Library of the Middle East
Offers free and open access to the rich cultural legacy of the Middle East and North Africa by bringing together collections from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions.
Middle East & Islamic Studies Collection Digital Collections (Cornell University)
Extensive bibliography of online digital archives, libraries, and projects relating to the Middle East and Islamic Studies.

Ancient and Medieval History

Perseus Digital Library
Sponsored by Tufts University, this site includes a digital library that provides a variety of resources on the ancient world from primary texts to site plans. Many sources from the Classical world are provided both in the original language and in translation. Perseus also provides tools to help you translate works or cross-reference word usage.
Digital Scriptorium (under maintenance)
A growing consortium of American libraries and museums committed to free online access to their collections of pre-modern manuscripts.
Mandragore
Extensive collection of illuminated manuscripts housed by the National Library of France. Not available in English.
Morgan Library and Museum Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts List (CORSAIR)
Database providing unified access to over 330,000 records for medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, rare and reference books, literary and historical manuscripts, music scores, ancient seals and tablets, drawings, prints, and other art objects.
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Yale University)
Collections span thousands of linear feet of manuscript and archival material, ranging from ancient papyri and medieval manuscripts to the archived personal papers of modern writers, artists’ books, photographs, avant-garde, audio-visual and born-digital material. Digital Library allows visitors to browse more than 1 million images of material from across the collections.
UC Chicago Manuscripts LibGuide
Extensive guide for finding more online archives for conducting Medieval manuscripts research.
The Labyrinth
Provides free, organized access to resources in medieval studies, including connections to databases, services, texts, and images around the world.