Ohio Memory is a collaborative effort between the Ohio Historical Society and the State Library of Ohio. Launched in 2000, the project includes 75,000 primary sources from 330 archives, historical societies, libraries, and museums that document Ohio’s past, from prehistory to the present. Specialized topics include archaeology, gay Ohio history, Ohio battle flags, Ohio governors, county atlases, state hospitals, and World War II oral histories. Do you know of a digital library collection that we can mention in this AL Direct feature? Tell us about it

CORRAL (UK Colonial Registers and Royal Navy Logbooks) is an imaging and digitizing project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee. The project began October 1, 2008, and was funded through September 2009, during which time its principal objective was to image ship’s logbooks of particular historic and scientific value, and to digitize the meteorological observations in those logbooks. The logs of Captains Robert Fitzroy (captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin’s epic voyage around the world), James Cook, and William Bligh of HMS Bounty offer good examples. The logbooks of ships on voyages of scientific discovery and exploration are held in the UK National Archives and are stored under catalog heading ADM55. Such documents record the daily activities and weather that these intrepid explorers encountered on their voyages. As such they stand not only as records of national and historical importance, they are also a unique source of climate information from those distant years and at a time when the scientific community needs to know as much as possible concerning future and past climatic change. CORRAL has now imaged nearly 300 logbooks producing some 40,000 cataloged images, giving access to every page of these remarkable documents. The research group has three principal partners: The University of Sunderland, the UK Meteorological Office at Hadley Centre, and the British Atmospheric Data Centre.

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The Memory of the Netherlands portal includes a total of 650 Dutch Picture Books, 1810–1950 in this collection of digital books, which runs the gamut from Robinson Crusoe to Tielse Flipje (a cartoon mascot on De Betuwe jam-pot labels) and from old nursery rhymes to the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Each successive Dutch generation grew up with its own specific children’s books, and each generation unconsciously adopted such moral standards and values as they contained. Children’s books serve as indispensable witnesses of an ever-changing society. In picture books, the images are just as important as the texts. The books are by no means intended exclusively for young children. Old picture books reflect the views people held about good and evil, poor and rich; about education, with examples of dutiful and bad behavior; about love for one’s own country and about people from foreign countries. The collection is a joint initiative of the National Library of the Netherlands, the Amsterdam Public Library, the Rotterdam Public Library, and the Deventer City Archives and Athenaeum Library.

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The Memory of the Netherlands portal includes a total of 650 Dutch Picture Books, 1810–1950 in this collection of digital books, which runs the gamut from Robinson Crusoe to Tielse Flipje (a cartoon mascot on De Betuwe jam-pot labels) and from old nursery rhymes to the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Each successive Dutch generation grew up with its own specific children’s books, and each generation unconsciously adopted such moral standards and values as they contained. Children’s books serve as indispensable witnesses of an ever-changing society. In picture books, the images are just as important as the texts. The books are by no means intended exclusively for young children. Old picture books reflect the views people held about good and evil, poor and rich; about education, with examples of dutiful and bad behavior; about love for one’s own country and about people from foreign countries. The collection is a joint initiative of the National Library of the Netherlands, the Amsterdam Public Library, the Rotterdam Public Library, and the Deventer City Archives and Athenaeum Library.

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The Cornell University Library Witchcraft Collection is an online selecton of titles from Cornell’s extensive materials on witchcraft. The majority of the collection was acquired in the 1880s through the collaborative efforts of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s first president and a prodigious scholar and book buyer, and his first librarian, George Lincoln Burr. The collection is a rich source for students and scholars of the history of superstition and witchcraft persecution in Europe. It documents the earliest and the latest manifestations of the belief in witchcraft as well as its geographical boundaries, and elaborates this history with works on canon law, the Inquisition, torture, demonology, trial testimony, and narratives. Most importantly, the collection focuses on witchcraft not as folklore or anthropology, but as theology and as religious heresy. These titles were originally digitally scanned from microfilm by Primary Source Microfilm, and include 104 monographs (about 23,220 pages).

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The Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collection was launched to accompany the 2009 Poe Bicentennial exhibition, “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe,” a joint venture of the University of Texas Harry Ransom Center and the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. The digital collection incorporates images of all Poe manuscripts and letters at the Ransom Center with a selection of related archival materials, two books by Poe annotated by the author, sheet music based on his poems, and portraits from the Ransom Center collections. Poe’s manuscripts and letters are linked to transcriptions on the website of the Poe Society of Baltimore. Most of the items in the exhibition from the Harry Ransom Center collections once belonged to William H. Koester (1888–1964). Koester, a resident of Baltimore, began collecting first editions and manuscripts of Poe in the 1930s; his major acquisition was the collection of the Richmond Poe scholar and collector J. H. Whitty. In addition to the manuscripts of “The Domain of Arnheim,” “The Spectacles,” and some of Poe’s most famous poems, the Koester collection includes many letters written by and to Poe, books belonging to Poe (including the author’s annotated copies of the Tales and Poems and Eureka), and a large group of sheet music for songs based on Poe’s works.

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The Benin Empire Collection: Nigerian Sculpture 1440–1897 is one of the foremost art collections at the Broward County (Fla.) Library’s African-American Research Library and Cultural Center in Fort Lauderdale. The library brings together a breathtaking collection of Royal Court Art from the ancient kingdom of Benin, located in Southern Nigeria. The Benin Kingdom, which flourished for 450 years, was founded in the early 14th century by the son of an exiled king from Ife (a nearby area approximately 100 miles southeast). The indigenous inhabitants of the Benin Kingdom, the Binis, created a thriving civilization, with museums, a well-organized military organization, efficient administration, and relative peace, stability, and prosperity throughout the kingdom.

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The Digital Library on American Slavery offers data on race and slavery extracted from 18th- and 19th-century documents that were processed over a period of 18 years. Launched October 1 by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the collection contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals. The data were painstakingly extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, and amended petitions. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 individual slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slaveowners and non-slaveowners. One of the unique aspects of the Digital Library is the information on individual slaves made available along with additional data on their owners; no other online database connects slaves with their owners in such a manner. Each set of documents is uniquely identified by an eight-digit PAR (Petition Analysis Record) number. The list of subjects reveals the variety of “causes” or “bills of complaint,” in the language of the courts, that petitioners brought, or defendants raised, in their civil suits. The general topics include slave ownership, slave management, freedom suits, crime and punishment, health, death, social and civic life, marriage, women, and family, among others.

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Transforming the Tar Heel State: The Legacy of Public Libraries in North Carolina is a statewide collaborative digital project that celebrates North Carolina public libraries. The core of this collection has been scanned from the State Library of North Carolina’s Public Library History Files. These files contain photographs, reports, newspaper clippings, and other materials that had been sent to the North Carolina Library Commission from public libraries throughout the state. The files span from the late 19th century through the 1970s, with the majority of the materials dating from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. For years, the files were hidden in a storage area where all but a few library staff had forgotten them. They were rediscovered around 2003 when the storage area was being cleaned out for building renovations. In summer 2008, the state library put out a call to public libraries seeking participation in building the collection. In response, 23 libraries sent photos and 34 libraries sent historical information that was added to the collection.

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Wisconsin Heritage Online is a collaborative project with contributions from public, special, and academic libraries, historical societies, and museums from all over the state. Initiated in 2004, the site continues to grow under a grant from the Nicholas Family Foundation, which supports staff who can travel across the state to help institutions get their treasures online. Teachers, students, genealogists, history buffs, and others who value Wisconsin and its wealth of digitized materials will enjoy finding interesting or useful material.

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