Libraries and other academic organizations from around the world are busy digitizing and making accessible massive collections of material and then making it available online, often for free. Here’s a look at a selection of publicly available digitized materials from the Cornell University Libraries in Ithaca, NY. Look for overviews of digitial collections from other university libraries and archives in the future. We would welcome your suggestions.

• The Making of America Collection. The MOA project is a multi-institutional initiative to create and make accessible over the Internet a distributed digital library of important materials on the history of the United States. Cornell University Library and the University of Michigan libraries cooperated in the initial phase of MOA. This site provides access to 267 monographs and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.
• Samuel May Anti-Slavery Collection.The Samuel May Anti-Slavery Collection gathers together over 8,500 of the important pamphlet and leaflets relating to the anti-slavery struggle at the local, regional, and national levels. Sermons, position papers, off-prints, local Anti-Slavery Society newsletters, poetry anthologies, Freedmen’s testimonies, broadsides, and Anti-Slavery Fair keepsakes all document in an intimate manner the social and political implications of the movement.
• The Core Historical Literature of Agriculture. CHLA is a core electronic collection of agricultural texts published between the early nineteenth century and middle to late twentieth century. Full-text materials cover agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, crops and their protection, food science, forestry, rural sociology, and soil science.
• Cornell University Image Collections. The Cornell University Image Collections consists of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art Collection, the Utopia Collection of Renaissance Art, Ancient Art and Architecture, the Andrew Dickson White Collection of Architectural Photographs, the Icelandic and Faroese Photographs of Frederick W. W. Howell, the Claire Holt Indonesian Art Collection, Political Americana Collection, Reuleaux Collection of Kinematic Mechanisms, with more being added.
• Digital Himalaya Project. Digital Himalaya is a pilot project based in Cornell’s Department of Anthropology to develop digital collection, storage, and distribution strategies for multimedia anthropological information from the Himalayan region. Five ethnographic collections representing a broad range of regions, ethnic groups, time periods, and themes are currently being digitized, together with a set of important journals on Himalayan studies.
• Global Performing Arts Consortium. The Global Performing Arts Database (GloPAD) is a project of the Global Performing Arts Consortium (GloPAC). GloPAD includes images, sound recordings, video clips, and 3-D models of the world’s performing arts with detailed descriptions in standardized formats to enable effective cross-cultural searching.
• Historic Monographs Collection. 441 monographs that were originally scanned in the 1990s as part of a joint digital preservation research project with Cornell University Library and Xerox are now available for online viewing. These books are part of a group of materials that included the Historical Monographs in Mathematics, Cornell Dissertations, New York State Historical Literature, and Core Historical Literature of Agriculture.
• The Home Economics Archives. Funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, HEARTH is a core electronic collection of home economics texts published between the early nineteenth century and mid-twentieth century. The digital library covers home economics in its broadest sense, including applied arts and design; childcare; clothing and textiles; food and nutrition; home management; housekeeping and etiquette; and more.
• Witchcraft Collection. Selected scanned works from Cornell Library’s Witchcraft Collection which contains over 3,000 titles documenting the history of the Inquisition and the persecution of witchcraft.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.