INTRODUCTION
Digitized primary source collections transform research in the humanities and social sciences by significantly reshaping the study and teaching of anthropology, the arts, language and literature, history, politics, sociology, theology, and cultural heritage, to name just a few of the disciplines that study human culture, society, and the human condition.
Catalogs of digital archives have become an essential resource for Digital Humanities Project development. A comprehensive listing of such resources is not possible in view of the rapid growth of such catalogs published by institutions, museums, professional organizations, and publishers. The listing below aims at providing a miniscule bird's eye view of this continuous evolving practice.
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TRANSNATIONAL CATALOGS
Catalogue of Digital Editions (European Association for Digital Humanities, EADH ). "Since 2012 this Catalogue has been gathering digital editions and texts in an attempt to survey and identify best practice in the field of digital scholarly editing. Development on this web application began in 2016 and aims at delivering the Catalogue data in an interactive and user-friendly manner, allowing users to browse, search, filter and order projects around their research interests. Analogous initiatives exist but don't provide the granular analysis of features necessary to better understand the rationale and methodology behind the creation of a digital edition. This Catalogue provides an accessible record of standards and building technologies used, and thus an insight into past and present projects. The Catalogue continuously adds digital editions and always seeks external contributions."
CENDARI (Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure) is a research collaboration aimed at integrating digital archives and research resources on medieval era and modern European history (in particular, World War I). It has a strong transnational focus and one of its aims is to include many archives and institutions which are little known or rarely used by researchers. It is a web-based, open source application for standards-based archival description and access in a multilingual, multi-repository environment. When browsing by archival institutions users can adjust results by language, archive type, geographic region, geographic sub-region, locality and thematic area. Click here for thematic research guides, or here to watch this video for a step-by-step introduction to using the Archival Directory.
Readex. Established more than 80 years ago, Readex, a division of NewsBank, Inc., publishes unique, important, and carefully curated digitized primary source collections for academic research. Readex partners with the world’s most renowned archives, libraries, and historical societies to identify and digitize primary source documents that are compelling in the classroom and vital for researchers. (...) / Our ever-growing catalog of digitized primary source collections includes historical newspapers, historical imprints, and government publications that span more than five centuries. / Best known for its Early American Newspapers and Early American Imprints series, Readex recently introduced Black Life in America and Hispanic Life in America—two extraordinary collections of historical and current news sources that reveal American life through a diverse lens. The acclaimed Readex portfolio also includes indispensable collections supporting global studies and geopolitics, including BBC Monitoring: Summary of World Broadcasts, the World Newspaper Archive, Twentieth-Century Global Perspectives, and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Reports, among many others.”
DATABASES BY PUBLISHERS - ADAM MATTHEW DIGITAL
- Mass Observation Online This link opens in a new windowOriginal manuscript and typescript papers created and collected by the Mass Observation organization, together with printed publications, photographs and interactive maps. The social research organization, Mass Observation, was founded in 1937. The aim was to create an 'anthropology of ourselves', and by recruiting a team of observers and a panel of volunteer writers, they studied the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. This resource covers the original Mass Observation project, the bulk of which was carried from 1937 until the mid 1970s. Includes surveys, diaries, directives, File Reports and monographic publications issued as a result of the project. This resource is provided by Adam Matthew.
- Confidential Print: Africa, 1834-1966 This link opens in a new windowThis resource contains papers issued by the British Government between c. 1820 and 1970. These are the most important papers generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices and include single-page letters or telegrams to comprehensive dispatches, investigative reports, and texts of treaties. The documents in Confidential Print: Africa cover the whole of the modern period of European colonization of the continent. Provided by AM (formerly Adam Matthew).
- Confidential Print: Latin America, 1833-1969 This link opens in a new windowThe Confidential Print: Latin America series offers in full text the most important papers generated by the Foreign and Colonial Office, from one-page letters or telegrams to large volumes or texts of treaties. These items were printed and circulated to leading officials in the Foreign Office, to the Cabinet and to heads of British missions abroad. The documents cover Latin America and the Caribbean, from just after the final Spanish withdrawal from mainland America in the 1820s to the height of the Cold War in the 1960s. Covering revolutions, territorial changes and political movements, foreign financial interests, industrial and infrastructural development (including the building of the Panama Canal), wars, slavery, immigration from Europe and relations with indigenous peoples. Provided by AM (formerly Adam Matthew).
- Confidential Print: Middle East, 1839-1969 This link opens in a new windowConfidential prints issued by the United Kingdom Foreign and Colonial Office since approximately 1820.
- Confidential Print: North America, 1824-1961 This link opens in a new windowConfidential prints issued by the United Kingdom Foreign and Colonial Office since approximately 1820 concerning Canada, the Caribbean and the United States.
- Apartheid: Global Perspectives, 1946-1996 This link opens in a new windowTranslated news broadcasts and publications on the international reaction to apartheid throughout the African continent and from around the world.
- Apartheid South Africa, 1948-1980 This link opens in a new windowApartheid South Africa provides comprehensive coverage of the British files on the apartheid Governments of South Africa from 1948 onward. These formerly restricted documents, sourced from The National Archives, UK, provide unprecedented levels of detail, with in-depth analysis of events, international reaction and policy dilemmas, accompanied by numerous first-hand accounts and reports.
- Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration and Cultural Exchange This link opens in a new windowThis resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of global commodities in world history. The commodities featured in this resource have been transported, exchanged and consumed around the world for hundreds of years. They helped transform societies, global trading operations, habits of consumption and social practices. The fifteen commodities explored in this resource are: chocolate, coffee, cotton, fur, opium, oil, porcelain, silver and gold, spices, sugar, tea, timber, wheat, wine and spirits. Provided by Adam Matthew.
DATABASES BY PUBLISHERS - GALE PUBLISHER
- Digital Scholarship This link opens in a new windowProvides information and commentary about artificial intelligence, digital copyright, digital curation, digital repository, open access, research data management, scholarly communication, and other digital information issues. It was established in 2005 by Charles W. Bailey, Jr., who has been an open access publisher since 1989 when he launched The Public-Access Computer Systems Review—the first open access journal in the field of library and information science. Digital Scholarship's digital publications are open access (i.e., free of charge) and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. All works are in English. Digital Scholarship is a noncommercial publisher.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new windowA vast eighteenth-century library - a fully text-searchable corpus of books, pamphlets and broadsides in all subjects printed between 1701 and 1800. It currently contains over 180,000 titles amounting to over 32 million fully-searchable pages. ECCO is a digitization of the eighteenth-century section of the works catalogued in the English Short-title Catalogue (ESTC). The ESTC project has been recording all works published or printed in Britain, Ireland, territories under British colonial rule, and the United States. It also catalogues material printed elsewhere which contains significant text in English, Welsh, Irish or Gaelic, as well as any book falsely claiming to have been printed in Britain or its territories. Provided by Gale.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online - Text Creation Partnership This link opens in a new windowIncludes significant English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. ECCO-TCP resulted from a partnership with Gale, part of Cengage Learning, created to produce highly accurate, fully-searchable, SGML/XML-encoded texts from among the 150,000 titles available in Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database.
- Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new windowProvides centralized access to 48 Gale Primary source collections
- Nineteenth-Century scholarly projects (NINES) This link opens in a new windowNINES has developed an innovative, federated online publishing model and the software system to support it. Listed below are the important 19th-century scholarly projects, journals, and archives.
- Sabin Americana, 1500-1926 This link opens in a new windowBased on Joseph Sabin's landmark bibliography, this collection contains works about the Americas published throughout the world from 1500 to the early 1900's. Included are books, pamphlets, serials and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions and much more. With over 6 million pages from 29,000 works, this collection is a cornerstone in the study of the western hemisphere.
- Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) This link opens in a new windowThe collection includes digitized 19th century monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more in both Western and non-Western languages. Currently available are over 10,000,000 pages in twelve thematic modules. Provided by Gale.
Current modules:
Asia and the West
British Politics and Society
British Theatre, Music, and Literature
Children's Literature and Childhood
Europe and Africa, Colonialism and Culture
European Literature, the Corvey Collection, 1790-1840
Maps and Travel Literature
Photography
Religion, Reform and Society
Science, Technology, and Medicine: 1780-1925, Part I
Science, Technology, and Medicine: 1780-1925, Part II
Women and Transnational Networks
OXFORD TEXT ARCHIVE
- Oxford Text Archive This link opens in a new windowCollects, catalogues, preserves and distributes high-quality digital electronic texts and other literary and language resources for research and teaching. It currently holds thousands of texts in more than 25 different language (e.g., Middle High German, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit). As of November 2021, no new deposits are being made until further notice.
MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS CATALOGS
Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis "is the online home for documentation and progress reports on PACSCL’s (Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections) medieval manuscript digitization project. BiblioPhilly (our nickname for the project) includes high-resolution images of more than 160,000 pages of European medieval and early modern codices — virtually all of the holdings of PACSCL member libraries."
Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts (Johns Hopkins). "This manuscript library celebrates this advancement in digital humanities by gathering volumes from libraries around the world to compare related manuscripts side by side in a digital environment." Click on Manuscript Viewer.
Digital Scriptorium (DS) "is a growing consortium of North American institurions with collections of global pre-modern manuscripts. DS is dedicated to building an online catalog for manuscripts in US collections."
DMMapp (Digital Medieval Manuscripts app). "At the heart of the DMMapp is a deep love of history and a belief that these manuscripts belong to us all. We’re committed to openness and transparency, and we’ve built our platform on open source code to encourage others to build on and contribute to our work. Our content is available under a CC-0 license, ensuring that it remains freely accessible to all. The DMMapp is a project by Founder & Developer Giulio Menna, MA, and Co-Founder Marjolein de Vos, MA."
Fragmentarium Laboratory for Medieval Manuscript Fragments. "Fragmentarium enables libraries, collectors, researchers and students to publish images of medieval manuscript fragments, allowing them to catalogue, describe, transcribe, assemble and re-use them."
Manuscriptorium seeks to aggregate the old written and documentary heritage (medieval and early modern manuscripts, incunabula, and early printed books until c. 1800) of European civilisation in a united user interface and present it to end users as well as have other sources use it (Manuscriptorium is, for example, a domain aggregator for Europeana). In addition to being an extensive digital library, Manuscriptorium has the ambition to become a virtual research environment for working with historical documents and collections by creating digital tools adapted as modules in a digital network. As a result, user data can be created in the personalised environment of an individual account and published in correlation with the aggregated content (data and metadata). The ultimate goal is the full integration in the digital network environment with the use of data standards, digitised document indexes, and persistent addressing of both complex digital documents (manuscripts, books) and their partial objects (pages) or fragments (page details) where blockchainisation is an inspiration rather than big data.
Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts (Harvard Library). "From cuttings of illuminated manuscript borders to massive choir books, from a late antique Bible fragment to early modern inventories: Houghton Library’s early (pre-1600) manuscript collections offer a window into medieval and Renaissance Europe. (...) Although collection development has centered on Western Europe, Houghton’s holdings are broad enough that they can facilitate study beyond Christian Europe. Of note are about 165 Islamicate manuscripts in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, or Persian; dozens of Syriac manuscripts; the Riant Collection that focuses on the Crusades and Near East; and manuscripts in Hebrew, Sanskrit, Church Slavic, Armenian, and Coptic."
Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts (The Morgan Library). The Morgan's collection is made up primarily of Western manuscripts, with French being the largest single national group, followed by Italian, English, German, Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish. There are also examples of Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Arabic, Persian, and Indian manuscripts. More than fifty Coptic manuscripts from Hamouli, Egypt, nearly all of which were found in their original bindings form the oldest and most important group of Sahidic manuscripts from a single provenance, the Monastery of St. Michael at Sôpehes.
Medieval Manuscripts (Free Library of Philadelphia) "Our manuscript collection includes most of the kinds of books used between 1000 and 1500 A.D.: prayer books and poetry, Bibles and political propaganda, philosophical works, and fantastic histories. Learn more about this collection.
Medieval Manuscript Fragments (University College London library. A collection of around 150 fragments of medieval and early modern manuscripts.The fragments are mostly recovered from the bindings of other manuscripts or early printed books where they had generally been used as pastedowns or outer coverings. The earliest item dates from around the 4th century AD, but the majority of the collection dates from the 7th to 17th centuries. A variety of languages are represented, predominantly Latin, but including French, English, German, Greek and Hebrew.
The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts. The SDBM continuously aggregates and updates observations of pre-modern manuscripts drawn from over 14,000 auction and sales catalogs, inventories, catalogs from institutional and private collections, and other sources that document the sales and locations of these books from around the world. Using 36 possible fields, entries in the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts (SDBM) record data from observations made in these sources and assist researchers in locating and identifying particular manuscripts, establishing provenance, and aggregating descriptive information about specific classes or types of manuscripts.
Welcome to IlluminatedManuscripts.org (Editor: Laia Paleo Porta). These pages are intended as a portal and resource-finding guide for scholars and enthusiasts of illuminated mediaeval manuscripts. New links are being added all the time.
Western Medieval Manuscripts. Images from over 2,500 manuscripts from medieval Europe from the Bodleian and Oxford colleges, with 500 fully digitized items. Including liturgical manuscripts, Welsh, Irish and English poetry, mathematical and scientific texts and illuminated manuscripts.
DATABASE BY PUBLISHER - PROQUEST
- Early European Books This link opens in a new windowProvides scholars with new ways of accessing and exploring all works printed in Europe before 1701, drawing together a diverse array of printed sources, regardless of language, as well as works published further afield. Developed and produced in close collaboration with scholars, rare book librarians, bibliographers, and other experts from the library world, this resource offers full-color, high-resolution facsimile images of some of the world's most significant collections of early printed books in Europe. Provided by ProQuest.
- Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new windowFeatures page images of almost every work printed in the British Isles and North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere from 1470-1700. Over 200 libraries worldwide have contributed to EEBO. From the first book printed in English through to the ages of Spenser, Shakespeare and of the English Civil War, EEBO's content draws on authoritative and respected short-title catalogues of the period and features a substantial number of text transcriptions specially created for the product. New content is added to Early English Books Online once per year. See what’s new for more details and the titles list for new content additions. Provided by ProQuest.