Princeton University’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library offers a digital collection of more than 500 historical postcards depicting the Princeton campus and the towns surrounding it. Featuring both monochrome and color postcards, the bulk of the Historical Postcard Collection ranges in date from 1900 through the 1960s. Both unmarked and canceled postcards exist in the collection, and several postcard makers are represented.

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Duke University Libraries recently launched the Sidney D. Gamble Photographs collection of about 5,000 images taken primarily in China between 1917 and 1932 by the grandson of Procter and Gamble cofounder James Gamble. From 1908 to 1932, Sidney Gamble (1890–1968) visited China four times, traveling throughout the country to collect data for socioeconomic surveys and to photograph urban and rural life, public events, architecture, religious statuary, and the countryside. A sociologist, renowned China scholar, and avid amateur photographer, Gamble used some of the pictures to illustrate his books. The Sidney D. Gamble Photographs digital collection marks the first comprehensive public presentation of this large body of work that includes photographs of Korea, Japan, Hawaii, San Francisco, and Russia. His 1908 photographs will be digitized and uploaded as part of future additions to the site.

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The AV/AR audio/video collection is a rich source of oral history and other recorded material hosted by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, a department of the Central Arkansas Library System. Oral history interviews, lectures about Arkansas, and various kinds of film footage have been indexed with subject descriptions that provide a variety of sources relating to a specific topic. This collection began in the summer of 2007 when the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation funded a two-year project to explore the role of race relations in Arkansas history. Researchers can search through audio and/or video clips by subject or interviewee, most of which are shorter than two minutes.

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The Digital Library on American Slavery, a cooperative effort of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is a searchable database of detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color. Designed as a tool for genealogists and historians, the site provides access to data collected from legal petitions filed from 1777 to 1867 in all 15 slaveholding states in the United States. This information documents where, when, and by whom slaves were owned, and provides insight into where, when, and how free people of color lived. Petitions can be searched by keyword, named individuals, or topic. The Race and Slavery Petitions Project was established in 1991. Its mission was to locate, collect, organize, and publish all requests for legal remedy, called petitions, filed with the legislatures of the slaveholding South, from the end of the American Revolution to the end of the Civil War. Copies of the original petitions are available on microfilm. Published under the title Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks by University Publications of America, the microfilm version and related guides are published in series according to state groupings and by type of petition—county or legislative.

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IN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana is a search and discovery system for accessing more than 10,000 pieces of sheet music from the Indiana University Lilly Library, the Indiana State Library, the Indiana State Museum, and the Indiana Historical Society. Funded through a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, IN Harmony features Indiana-related sheet music—sheet music by Indiana composers, arrangers, lyricists, or publishers as well as sheet music about the state. The collection includes works by such well-known composers as George M. Cohan, Cole Porter, Al Jolson, and Jerome Kern. Stacy Kowalczyk, IU’s manager of the project, said that one outcome of the project was to work through the issues of providing consistent terminology and mapping to ensure content is retrieved reliably. You can search the entire collection of sheet music by genre, composer, subject, name, title, year, instrumentation, or holding institution.

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The University of Rochester Rare Books & Special Collections Department’s Lincoln and His Circle project is digitizing the letters to, from, and about Abraham Lincoln that are held in its collections. Many of the letters come from the papers of Secretary of State William H. Steward (donated to the university by William Henry Seward III), and others are found in the Lincoln collection that was a gift of the Fred L. Emerson Foundation of Auburn, New York. Selected transcriptions of the letters are provided.

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The University of Pittsburgh has digitized and mounted online one of the rare, complete sets of John James Audubon’s Birds of America. Only 120 complete sets are known to exist. John James Audubon (1785–1851) set out to paint every known (to him) North American bird in the early 19th century. He eventually stopped at 435 paintings after he exhausted his personal resources. His original paintings of over 1,000 birds, and the hand-colored plates that were subsequently engraved from them, are considered unique. All the birds were painted life-size, and many are shown interacting with other birds and wildlife, often in violent, predatory ways. In August of 2007, the Darlington Digital Library digitized all 435 plates. Each master image comprises over 500 MB and uses an interface that enables users to view portions of the plates at 100%.

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The University of Pittsburgh has digitized and mounted online one of the rare, complete sets of John James Audubon’s Birds of America. Only 120 complete sets are known to exist. John James Audubon (1785–1851) set out to paint every known (to him) North American bird in the early 19th century. He eventually stopped at 435 paintings after he exhausted his personal resources. His original paintings of over 1,000 birds, and the hand-colored plates that were subsequently engraved from them, are considered unique. All the birds were painted life-size, and many are shown interacting with other birds and wildlife, often in violent, predatory ways. In August of 2007, the Darlington Digital Library digitized all 435 plates. Each master image comprises over 500 MB and uses an interface that enables users to view portions of the plates at 100%.

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Digital Past is a local history digitization initiative undertaken by libraries, historical societies, museums, and other cultural venues throughout Illinois in partnership with the North Suburban Library System in Wheeling, Illinois. It began in 1998 with a grant from the Illinois State Library and has become a popular resource for researchers of all ages and interests including schoolchildren, genealogists, historians, authors, producers, and special interest groups—for more information, watch the public service annoucement (video). Digital Past contains collections from nearly 40 institutions of varying topics and formats including over 87,000 records in 85 collections….

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The International Children’s Digital Library is a free online library of digitized children’s books in many languages from various countries. Designed specifically for use by children ages 3 to 13, ICDL is operated by the International Children’s Digital Library Foundation and originally developed in the College of Information Studies and the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park. Children can search for books by location, color, length, intended age group, content type, and emotional quality, among other qualifiers. An advanced search option is also provided for more experienced or older users, and all users can register to save search preferences and favorite books. Books are selected based on quality and appropriateness, and are presented in their original language with copyright permission from publishers or authors. The Library’s ultimate goal is to foster a love of reading, a readiness to learn, and a response to the challenges of world literacy.

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American Social History Online is a Digital Library Federation portal that provides scholars with access to distributed digital library collections pertaining to American culture and life. Its tools and services are designed to make it easy to find, organize, use, and share items from diverse collections. By using Zotero, a free and easy-to-use research tool that works with the Firefox web browser, scholars can gather and organize resources as well as annotate and share them. To support the use of images, Collectus and ImageViewer tools developed at the University of Virginia are integrated into American Social History Online. These tools not only support saving and organizing image collections but provide for slide-show creation so the image material can be used easily in the classroom. The portal was developed using open source software and is currently available without fees or restrictions through generous support from the Mellon Foundation.

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