Digital Library of the Week

The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, includes over 7,600 photographs organized in 76 separate albums, scrapbooks, or loose collections, replicating how British collector Humphrey Winterton organized the collection. The photographs depict life, primarily in East Africa, between about 1860 and 1960. Assembled by Winterton over about 30 years, the collection depicts the breadth of African experience and also documents African life, European life in Africa in all its manifestations, and the African landscape, in particular as it changed over time. Included are photos showing the building of East Africa’s railways, the growth of its urban centers, and the development of European colonial administration. The photographs extensively document rural life as well as the travels and work of European colonial officials and private businessmen. There are outstanding examples of portraiture, some of which were taken by commercial studios. The Winterton Collection provides an unsurpassed resource for the study of the history of photography in East Africa.

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Nebraska Memories is a cooperative project to digitize Nebraska-related historical and cultural heritage materials and make them freely available to researchers of all ages. The site uses CONTENTdm software to house digital collections created by Nebraska libraries. The Keene Memorial Library in Fremont, the Polley Music Library in Lincoln City, Alegent Health Immanuel Hospital, the Bess Streeter Aldrich House and Museum, the Lincoln Police Department, Omaha Community Playhouse, and the Durham Museum are some of the contributors. The database currently contains approximately 3,500+ digitized items and continues to grow each month. At this time searchers can find material from the 1890s to the 1970s. The Nebraska Memories website is owned by the Nebraska Library Commission.

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Summit Memory is an online scrapbook capturing the history of Summit County, Ohio. Administered by the Akron–Summit County Public Library, the site is a county-wide collaborative project with gateways to such collections as Akron Remembers 1968 (above), the Trucking History Collection, the Summit County Civil War Collection, the Akron Banknotes Collection, the Firestone and B. F. Goodrich Tire and Rubber Collections, the Doodlebug Train Disaster Collection, and the David P. Campbell Postcard Collection. The project is funded by a grant from the Robert W. Little Foundation. Little (1917–2000) served as a librarian at the Akron-Summit County Public Library for nearly 30 years.

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The Wyoming Memory Portal brings the histories of Wyoming to life through a virtual gateway to the state’s rich collections of manuscripts, books, photographs, documents, newspapers, maps, audio, video, and other resources. These sources document Wyoming’s past from prehistory through the present. Collections and exhibits are provided by archives, libraries, historical societies, museums, governments, organizations, and individuals from throughout Wyoming. the site is hosted by the University of Wyoming Libraries. One collection includes images from the 1920s and 1930s of Charles J. Belden’s Pitchfork Ranch near Meeteetse, Wyoming. Photographs include depictions of everyday life on the ranch, raising antelopes, dude ranching, and Belden’s family members.

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The Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ Galaxy of Images collection includes thousands of images representing a small portion of the more than 1.5-million printed books and manuscripts in their collections. Images are browsable or searchable by keyword or topics that include the animal world, art and design, bones and fossils, history and material culture, literature, the natural world, plants and flowers, portraits, science and invention, scientific instruments and apparatus, society and culture, technology and transportation, and trade literature. The libraries encourage the use of images and other content from this website for not-for-profit educational and classroom use.

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The University of New Mexico Libraries hosts New Mexico’s Digital Collections. The collections contain documents, photographs, maps, posters, art, and music. Topics include New Mexico history, water and land issues, and Latin American art and politics. Participating repositories include the Center for Southwest Research, Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, the Palace of the Governors photo archives, the Silver City Museum, and the Tamarind Institute.

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The Cooperative Libraries Automated Network, operated by the Nevada State Library and Archives in Carson City, has begun digitizing its collection of state newspapers. One of the collections is the White Pine News, published in Ely from 1881 to 1906, which contains much valuable information on the copper, silver, and gold mines of the region, as well as everyday life in the Great Basin. Other papers include the Wadsworth Dispatch and the Reese River Reveille.

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The Digital National Library of Serbia offers thousands of Cyrillic books and manuscripts online through an English interface. Collections are divided into manuscripts, epic national poetry, old printed books, old and rare books, books, newspapers and magazines, cartographic materials, engravings and art material, photographs, posters, printed music and sound recordings, and miscellanea. One interesting collection is the graphics from the Mount Athos Monasteries of Chilandar, Vatoped, Simonopetra, and Kutlumuš. During the 1880s and 1890s, the National Library of Serbia, in cooperation with the monks from the Monastery Chilandar and Chilandar Council in Belgrade, started a project to reproduce the halographic original 18th- and 19th-century carved plates and copperplate engravings from Sveta Gora. All materials are housed in the National Library of Serbia in Belgrade.

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The Arhoolie Foundation’s Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican-American Recordings

(the Frontera Collection) is the largest repository of Mexican and Mexican-American vernacular recordings in existence. With funding from Los Tigres del Norte Foundation, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center has sponsored the digitization of the first section of the collection by the Arhoolie Foundation. These performances were recorded primarily in the United States and Mexico and issued on 78 rpm phonograph recordings during the first half of the 20th century. This vast digitized collection of approximately 30,000 recordings is now available to researchers and the general public. In 2006, the Arhoolie Foundation received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize an additional 20,000 performances from the collection of 45 rpm phonograph recordings. Approximately half of these additional recordings are available (as of April 2009) with the remainder to be added to the website in the next few months. This represents less than half of the 45 rpm discs in the collection and further funding will be required to complete the project. Full access to the archive is only available to UCLA patrons, but the rest of us can listen to 50 seconds of each song, look at the record labels, and read the background information. Music is browsable by genre, subject, label, and name.

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The Printer’s Devices Database of the Library of the University of Barcelona, Spain, was launched in October 1998. The database covers the 16th through the 18th century and all of Europe, but mostly Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Germany, and the Low Countries, reflecting the collection’s own personality. Each entry of the database includes information of the printers’ activity, the years and places in which they worked, and other remarkable biographical facts. The records also contain information about the marks they used, including a description of the mark, and the main keywords in Catalan, Spanish, and English. The database is updated on a monthly basis. In March 2009, it contained 1,372 printer files and 2,182 device images.

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