The Biodiversity Heritage Library, the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve, and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity. Content consists primarily of books and periodicals in the public domain, and is searchable and browsable by title, author, subject, scientific name, location, and year of publication. All images are downloadable and free for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. The European Commission’s eContentPlus program has recently funded the BHL-Europe project, with 22 institutions, to assemble the European language literature. Negotiations are being pursued with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Atlas of Living Australia and contacts in Japan, India, and Russia to join the BHL consortium. Prior to digitization, the resources housed within each BHL institution have existed in isolation, available only to those with physical access to the collections. In November 2009, the collection added more than 21,000 new titles as a result of ingesting open-access texts scanned by the Internet Archive. The collection now includes some 2 million volumes.

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The Ulysses S. Grant Digital Collection at the Mississippi State University Libraries consists of 31 volumes of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, political cartoons, and sheet music from the larger collection. Other materials will be added to the digital collection as processing continues. The physical collection contains some 15,000 linear feet of correspondence, research notes, artifacts, photographs, scrapbooks, and memorabilia and includes information on Grant’s life and times. From this collection, the series of volumes edited by John Y. Simon, entitled The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant were chosen and published by the Southern Illinois University Press.

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The British Library has launched a U.K. Web Archive designed to preserve pages from U.K. web domains, much as the library preserves a physical archive of books. The system uses the open source Hadoop software and was built by IBM. Here you can see how sites have changed over time, locate information no longer available on the live web, and observe the unfolding history of a spectrum of U.K. activities represented online. Sites that no longer exist elsewhere are found here and those yet to be archived can be saved for the future by nominating them. Searches are by title of website, full text or URL; the site is also browsable by subject, special collection, or alphabetical list. The special collections are groups of websites brought together on a particular theme by librarians, curators, and other specialists, often working in collaboration with key organizations in the field. They can be events-based (the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games), topical (the Credit Crunch Collection) or subject-oriented (the British Countryside Collections).

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Connecticut History Online is a digital collection of over 15,000 digital primary sources, together with associated interpretive and educational material. Now in its 10th year, CHO is embarking on a collaboration with the Encyclopedia of Connecticut History Online to serve the needs of scholars, teachers and students, genealogists, and the general public. This new initiative builds upon a very successful collaboration of libraries and museums carried out in two IMLS National Leadership grant-funded phases (1999–2007) that focused on digital capture of historical artifacts, including photographs, maps, broadsides, oral histories, manuscripts, and oral histories. These document events, people, and places that are part of the fabric of Connecticut and American social, business, political, educational, cultural, and civic life. The four current CHO partners (the Connecticut Historical Society, Connecticut State Library, Mystic Seaport, and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center) represent three major communities that preserve and make accessible historical collections within the state of Connecticut. Their combined assets include book and periodical volumes, manuscript materials, photographs and graphics, oral histories, maps, artifacts, and broadsides.

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Crafting Victories: Campaign Materials from the Larry Gibson Collection is a project of the Thurgood Marshall Law Library at the University of Maryland. The site is part of the library’s larger “African Americans in the Law Collection,” which is focused on telling the story and experiences of African-American lawyers. This particular collection explores the role that African-American legal practitioners played in creating political opportunities for black voters in Maryland. Professor Larry S. Gibson has played a leadership role in the campaigns of many Maryland and national politicians beginning with his first effort organizing the campaign of Joseph Howard for Judge on the Supreme Bench of Baltimore City in 1968. Success in the Howard campaign was followed by work on the local campaigns of Milton Allen, William H. Murphy, Paul Chester, Wayne Curry, and Kurt Schmoke. At the national level he has worked on the presidential campaigns of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. Internationally, Gibson’s organizational talents have been employed by candidates as far away as Liberia and Madagascar.

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The permanent collections of the University of Iowa Museum of Art contain more than 12,000 objects, from masterworks of European and American Art of the 20th century to a world-renowned collection of traditional African Art. During the 1940s and 1950s, the University’s School of Art and Art History presented exhibitions of contemporary art and acquired works from these exhibitions. Many of the museum’s most important paintings were acquired during these years, including Max Beckmann’s Karneval and Joan Miró’s 1939 A Drop of Dew Falling from the Wing of a Bird Awakens Rosalie Asleep in the Shade of a Cobweb. Areas represented in the UIMA collections include African arts, art of the Americas, ceramics, drawings, paintings, photography, prints, sculpture, and other arts. Currently, the UIMA Digital Collection features over 5,100 of the museum’s 12,000 objects; the rest of the holdings will be added in the near future.

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of the Week

The Scottsdale (Ariz.) Public Library Digital Collection provides access to digital images of cultural and historical interest to Scottsdale residents and researchers. The collection showcases the history and growth of what has changed from a small farming community into a world-class city. At present, the collection’s time period spans the late 1800s to the mid-20th century and beyond. It contains digital versions of increasingly valuable, fragile, and hard-to-use originals of people, places, and things pertaining to the city.

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The J. León Helguera Collection of Colombiana provides access to unique primary sources on 19th-century Colombian history and culture. The result of a half-century of collecting on three continents, it is one of the largest and most wide-ranging in the United States. Materials are grouped into three separate types: broadsides, 1825–1972; pamphlets (including novenas), 1785–1969; and programas, 1819–1914. The site allows for easy browsing (by date, type, or subject), or detailed searching. The collection is curated by the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Currently only 66 documents are searchable, but the library hopes to expand the project.

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The University of Houston Digital Library opened its virtual doors in November 2009 with the goal of documenting the history of the University of Houston, the city of Houston, and state of Texas, as well as other historically and culturally significant materials related to the university’s teaching and research mission. Featured collections include the scrapbooks of the Ewing Family that document the suffrage activtities of Mrs. Kittridge Ewing; letters of Mrs. Anson Jones, wife of the President of the Republic of Texas from 1844 to 1846; Marine Bombing Squadron photos from World War II; photos of the Galveston hurricane of 1915; historic Houston photographs; Houstonian yearbooks; photos of the 1947 Texas City disaster; and photos of University of Houston buildings and people.

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The Fort Collins History Connection is an online collaboration between the Fort Collins (Colo.) Museum and Discovery Science Center and the Poudre River Public Library District, incorporating historical resources from the library, the museum artifact collection, and the Fort Collins Local History Archive. The project was funded in part by a 1997–1998 LSTA grant. Fort Collins history is a microcosm of the development of the West. The settlement of the Cache La Poudre River Basin has now achieved national significance with the designation of the Cache La Poudre National Corridor. Searchable collections include historic photographs, maps, museum artifacts, city directories, oral histories, and building permits. Not all documents are available online.

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