Digital Collections
Many institutions including cultural heritage organizations, government organizations, universities, museums, and libraries publish selected content in their physical collections. Below is a brief list of digital collections housed at single organizations and databases that aggregate content from many organizations.
- CalisphereCalisphere provides free access to artifacts for research, teaching, and curious exploration from the University of California campuses and other libraries, archives, and museums in California. Discover photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more.
- Digital Public Library of AmericaThe Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a discovery tool for public domain and openly licensed content held by libraries, museums, archival repositories, and other cultural heritage institutions. Material held in DPLA includes photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and more.
- Hathi TrustHathiTrust is an internationally collaborative repository of digital content committed to the long-term curation and availability of the cultural record. Membership is open to institutions worldwide, HathiTrust contains digital content from over 140 research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and Internet Archive digitization initiatives.
- Internet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts. The Internet Archive contains over: 250 billion web pages; 10 million books and texts; 4 million audio recordings; 3 million videos; 1 million images; and 100, 000 software programs.
- Library of Congress Digital CollectionsSearch from over 300 collections of photographs, manuscripts, audio, books, and other material related to American history; government law and politics; performing arts; world history; art and architecture; social sciences; and other topics.
- National ArchivesThe National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an independent agency of the United States government charged with preserving and documenting government and historical records.
- New York Public Library Digital CollectionsNYPL Digital Collections provide free and open access to over 700,000 items digitized from the New York Public Library's collection. Material includes books, video, maps, manuscripts, photographs, and more.
- World Digital LibraryA Project of Library of Congress with the support of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and with the cooperation of libraries, archives, museums and educational institutions from around the world, The World Digital Library contains books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, sound recordings, and more
A-Z Primary Source Databases
Browse library primary source databases.
Collection Finding Aids
Archivists create documents called finding aids. These documents describe the content in collections. Finding aids are published online as a tool for research access. The links below are just a few examples of websites that bring finding aids together from several institutions.
- Archives GridIncludes over 5 million records from over 1,000 archival institutions in the United States describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more.
- Online Archive of CaliforniaFree public access to searchable finding aids for primary resource collections in repositories maintained by more than 200 institutions throughout California.