Tag: primary source
Primary Sources: The Bassi Veratti Collection
From Stanford Library’s News Release:
“In the eighteenth century, Laura Bassi was a scientist, professor at the University of Bologna, and member of the Bologna Academy of Sciences. Among the very first female professional scholars, her life (1711-1778) and work can tell us much about the personal and professional lives of early women scientists, their place in Enlightenment intellectual networks, as well as the spread of Newtonian physics in the Italian peninsula. Stanford history professor Paula Findlen is currently completing a scholarly biography on Bassi, while the Stanford University Libraries – in partnership with the Biblioteca comunale dell’Archiginnasio di Bologna and the Istituto per i Beni Artistici, Culturali e Naturali della Regione Emilia-Romagna – has brought Bassi’s family archive to the web.”
“The Bassi Veratti Collection web site developed and hosted by Stanford Libraries features high-resolution digital images of the complete contents of the Bassi e famiglia Veratti Archive in a robust discovery and display environment. This remarkable project undertaken by the Digital Library Systems and Services department is notable for the extent of cooperation with colleagues in Bologna. A fully bilingual website, it showcases the way that new technologies have enhanced the traditional print archive. 672 letters, diplomas, poems, and other documents have been digitized, while the richly detailed inventory created by Archiginnasio archivists has been transformed into a bilingual and fully-indexed search engine to the collection. These two components have been seamlessly united in an intuitive and well-designed scholarly website.”
Resource Trial: The Times of India (1838-2001)
The Library has arranged a trial of The Times of India (1838-2001), an English daily newspaper that was founded in 1838 to serve British residents of West India. As described in the promotional materials, the resource “serves researchers interested in studying colonialism and post-colonialism, British and world history, class and gender issues, international relations, comparative religion, international economics, terrorism, and more.”
Like other full text newspapers we purchase through ProQuest, this resource is searchable by keyword, article types, dates and date ranges, and author. It provides access to all of the newspaper’s contents: articles, photos, advertisements, marriage announcements, cartoons, obituaries, etc.
While the trial is active, you can also access The Times of India through our subscription to Historical Newspapers (ProQuest). At the top of the search screen click on the “Searching: 7 databases” link and select the newspaper from the list that appears in the pop-up window.
The trial runs through March 26, 2013. Your comments on the resource are welcome. You can leave them here or send them to me at jdorner@library.berkeley.edu.
Primary Sources: Digitized farm newspapers
A digitized collection of weekly farm newspapers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is available online from the University of Illinois Library. The weeklies, according to the Library, were “aimed at a local, regional, or national audience of farmers and their families, with the goal of disseminating information and dispensing advice.” Farm newspapers, they say, “were instrumental in the formation of rural public opinion and in connecting farmers to broader social and economic currents in American life. More than 75% of Midwestern farmers subscribed to one or more agricultural papers in 1913. In a survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farmers overwhelmingly cited agricultural newspapers as the most helpful source of information in their farming–second only to experience.”
The newspapers can be browsed by date or searched by keyword across articles, advertisements and photo captions. Users can print, download, or e-mail individual articles free of charge. There is also a guide available that provides search strategies for finding articles on different themes (e.g., Indian Lands, Health & Hygiene) and links to examples of representative articles.</>
Primary Sources: The Sunday Times Digital Archive
The Library recently acquired access to the full text digitized content of the Sunday Times Digital Archive, 1822-2006.
The Sunday Times is a distinct newspaper with no editorial connection to The Times (London). Accessible on the same platform as The Times Digital Archive, this resource has the same basic and advanced search features (see the previous blog post). If you prefer to search both newspapers simultaneously, use the link to the Gale News Vault on the basic search screen. This gives you access to both publications, plus additional newspaper content subscribed to by The Library.
Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive
The Times Digital Archive was recently upgraded to include content from 1986-2006, and now includes every complete page of every issue of The Times (London) from 1785 to 2006.
Search tips:
- Use Advanced Search to search for keywords in the title, author, or entire story.
- Advanced Search allows you to limit your search to a broad (News, Business) or narrow (Display Advertising, Deaths) category of story.
- “Fuzzy search” in Advanced Search allows you to locate a word or words within works despite imperfect matches in spelling between the searched term and document content (and possible OCR errors). The Low setting will slightly expand your search results to include very near matches on your term(s) and the High setting will expand your results to include very broad matches on your term(s).
- Use quotation marks to search for phrases.
- Use an asterisk (*) to search for variations of a word: A search on carib* finds Carib, Caribs, Carribbean, caribe, caribou.
- Use an exclamation point (!) to substitute for a letter in a word: A search on colo!r finds color and colour.
- The Browse by Date option lets you find an individual issue of the newspaper and view the articles page by page.
An impressive feature of this resource is the ability to move easily from the article view to a page view with an accompanying list of articles on that page, to a browsable list of pages in the issue. Marking the items will allow you to save the citations for download, printing or emailing. Printing or downloading the articles should be done from the article view screen.
Primary Sources: NCCO – British Politics and Society
The British Politics and Society archive, part of the newly acquired Nineteenth Century Collections Online, consists of primary sources related to the political climate in Great Britain during the nineteenth century, including papers of British statesmen, Home Office records, ordnance surveys, and working class autobiographies. This is a rich resource for scholars exploring such topics as British domestic and foreign policy, trade unions, Chartism, utopian socialism, public protest, radical movements, the cartographic record, political reform, education, family relationships, religion, leisure and many others.
Each of the collections in the archive is browsable. Basic and advanced searching of the collections is also possible, although the results will vary from collection to collection depending on how much machine-readable content is included. The full text of handwritten documents is not searchable.
Search tip: In advanced search, you have the option to “Allow variations.” This is a good option to choose, since it will look for British and American spelling variations (harbor/harbour) and also may compensate for some Optical Character Recognition (OCR) errors that inevitably occur during the scanning process.
Primary Sources: Local History Digital Resources
Over 2000 new digital objects have been added to Calisphere and the Online Archive of California, as part of the 2011-2012 Local History Digital Resources Project. These include photographs, records, letters, brochures, and other primary source documents. 10 institutions contributed collections:
- Beaumont Library District: images depicting historical buildings, structures, railroads, public institutions, ranches, and topography of the Beaumont and Cherry Valley communities.
- Black Gold Cooperative Library System: photographs portraying life on the California Central Coast from 1853 through the 1970s among four major ethnic minority groups: African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native Americans.
- California State University Channel Islands Library: photographs capturing the history of the Filipino community in Ventura County from the 1900s through the 1990s.
- California State University East Bay Library: Images from various archival record collections, showing the history of the university and student, faculty, and staff life there.
- California State University Fullerton Library: prints and negatives spanning the long history of a leading photography studio and depicting various people and scenes in Orange County, 1882-1853.
- Glendale Public Library: promotional brochures from the early 1900s describing the towns of Glendale and Tropico as idyllic places to live, work, and visit.
- Citrus College, Hayden Memorial Library: papers and photographs documenting the history of Citrus College, originally a high school and later the first community college in Los Angeles County.
- Japanese American National Museum: letters written by Japanese American students who were incarcerated in American internment camps during World War II, addressed to their pre-war teacher.
- Santa Cruz Public library: photographs depicting the first settlers to Scotts Valley and the development of the farming and dairy industries there.
More information on the Online Archive of California and Calisphere can be found on the History Research Guide.
Primary Sources: NCCO – Asia & West Diplomacy & Cultural Exchange
Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange is one archive of the newly acquired digital resource, Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO). It is primarily made up of documents generated by diplomatic missions of the United States and Britain to Korea, Japan, China, and other East Asian nations. Some missionary records and publications and a collection of periodicals related to Asian culture and society are also included. Each of the collections in the archive is browseable. Basic and advanced searching of the collections is also possible, although the results will vary from collection to collection depending on how much machine-readable content is included. The full text of handwritten documents is not searchable.
Researchers of U.S. and British foreign policy and diplomacy; Asian political, economic, and social affairs; missionary activities; the Opium Wars; the Boxer Rebellion; and the Philippine Insurrection will all find a rich body of sources to explore. There are probably few topics related to East Asia and its early interactions with the West that would not be informed by resources in this collection.
Search tip: In advanced search, you have the option to “Allow variations.” This is a good option to choose, since it will look for British and American spelling variations (harbor/harbour) and also may compensate for some Optical Character Recognition (OCR) errors that inevitably occur during the scanning process.
Let me know in the comments or by email if you make any interesting discoveries in the collections or have any particular search tips you want to share.
Primary Sources: The Carlyle Letters Online
The collected letters of the eminent Victorian scholar, Thomas Carlyle, and his wife, are available in electronic form in an archive called The Carlyle Letters Online. This resource provides access to more than 10,000 letters of the Carlyles and is based on the print volumes that make up The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, published by Duke University Press. The collection is searchable, and browsable by correspondent, subject, and date. An excellent list of works about Thomas Carlyle can be found in the resource Oxford Bibliographies.
Primary Sources: Women Making History and Culture: 1963-1982
As part of the continuing partnership between the Media Resources Center and the Pacifica Radio Archives, MRC is developing a new online audio collection devoted to women’s history. These recordings include interviews, panel discussions, literary and musical performances, news coverage, and other programing broadcast on various Pacifica affiliates (including Berkeley’s KPFA) between the mid-1950s and the 1980s.
The first 26 sound recording files are now available for listening at: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/womenpacifica.html Other files will be added to this collection over time.
Listening to these files requires the free Real audio player (www.real.com)