Tag: primary sources
Trial: Fold3 database
Until October 21, 2019, the Library has trial access to Fold3, which provides access to military records from the Revolutionary War to recent operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, sourced from the National Archives and institutions across the country. The resource also includes non-military records relating to the Holocaust, Black History, Native Americans, the Great Depression, and more.
Fold3 can be accessed from on campus only. Please send any feedback you have to dorner@berkeley.edu.
Trial: America in World War Two: Oral Histories and Personal Accounts
The Library currently has trial access to the Adam Matthew Digital resource, America in World War Two: Oral Histories and Personal Accounts. The collections included in the digital archive are sourced from the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. The publisher states: “Our aim has been to digitize a sizeable proportion of these collections, which document the sweeping narrative of the American experience in this global conflict. In close collaboration with the Museum and with valuable input from our scholarly, editorial board, we have showcased hundreds of archive collections, oral histories and objects. For document collections we have focused on archive content, containing primarily, but not exclusively, diaries, correspondence, scrapbooks, training manuals, periodicals, albums, sketches, greetings cards and photographs. We have also included some rare books, as well as a honed selection of objects, which act as a representative sample of items in the individual collections we have chosen, as well as some choice objects featured in the museum galleries that complement our key themes.”
Access to the resource ends September 27th. During the trial you will not be able to download documents. Please send your feedback to dorner@berkeley.edu.
Primary Sources: Handwritten Text Recognition functionality added to Mass Observation Online
Mass Observation was a social research organization that attempted to record the every day life of British citizens through questionnaires, observation, surveys, and diaries. The digitized content is available in Mass Observation Online, which the Library has owned for many years.
Because much of the content has been handwritten, the search functionality of the resource is limited. Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) has expanded this functionality to some extent. A basic or advanced search for key term will still only search the metadata that has been assigned to each document. If there is a hit in the document’s metadata for the term, then the HTR software will automatically search for that term in the full text of that document when a user selects the document from the Search Results list.
While this is not as useful as a full-text search would be, it does help users quickly find where a term is located in a document, making it easier to determine the value of that document to their research.
Primary Sources: Science, Technology, and Medicine, 1780-1925, Pt. 1
The Library has recently acquired a new module in Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Science, Technology, and Medicine: 1780-1925, Part 1. This includes:
Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia: Minutes and Correspondence
Minutes, correspondence, archival collection summaries, membership lists, and donation ledgers from the academy’s founding in 1812 until 1924 (and 1925 in the case of the minutes).
American Medical Periodicals
A collection of serials covering the entire scope of medical history in the nineteenth-century United States.
Collections of primarily monographs from the 19th century, sourced from the Huntington Library.
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Electricity and Electromagnetism
Civil Engineering
Color Theory and Practice
Evolution and the Origin of Species
Mathematics
Reports of Explorations Printed in the Documents of the United States Government
Throughout the 19th century the U.S. government sent out a wide variety of missions to explore and document the country, its coastal waters, and beyond. This collection includes primarily monographs and reports held at the Library of Congress.
Scientific and Technical Periodicals from the Royal Society of London’s Catalogue of Scientific Papers 1800-1900
A collection of international publications held at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.
Primary Sources: Patriotes aux Armes! (Patriots to Arms!): The Underground Resistance in France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy, 1939-1945
The Library’s recent acquisition of Patriotes aux Armes! (Patriots to Arms!): The Underground Resistance in France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy, 1939-1945 includes newspapers and periodicals, broadsides, leaflets, books, pamphlets, and other documents produced by or relating to the underground resistance in France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy. The organization of the collection housed at McMaster University Library can be found on the landing page. Links to the finding aids at the Library provide access to more detailed PDF documents that describe the holdings.
Primary Sources: National Farm Worker Ministry: Mobilizing Support for Migrant Workers, 1939-1985
Another recent acquisition of the Library is the online archive National Farm Worker Ministry: Mobilizing Support for Migrant Workers, 1939-1985. These records of the California Migrant Ministry, which became the National Farm Worker Ministry, are part of the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs housed at Wayne State University’s Walter P. Reuther Library.
This collection reproduces correspondence, reports, speeches, minutes; included are materials relating to the farm workers, poverty programs, Public Law 78, Braceros, labor camps, the United Farm Workers Union and the Delano Grape Strike. The landing page for the online archive includes a descriptive list of contents.
Primary Sources: Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees: The West’s Response to Jewish Emigration
From the publisher’s description: “The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR) was organized in London in August 1938 as a result of the Evian Conference of July 1938, which had been called by President Roosevelt to consider the problem of racial, religious, and political refugees from central Europe…. For the first time, there was discussion on extending protection to would-be refugees inside the country of potential departure, particularly central Europe. The IGCR, however, received little authority and almost no funds or support from its member nations for resettlement of refugees from Europe in countries allowing permanent immigration, and it had little success in opening countries to refugees…. In July 1944, 37 governments participated in the work of the Committee. Of these, representatives of nine countries, including the United States, served on its Executive Committee. The primary responsibility for determining the policy of the United States with regard to the Committee was that of the Department of State. It ceased to exist in 1947, and its functions and records were transferred to the International Refugee Organization of the United Nations.”
The Library recently acquired the online archive of the Department of State’s records relating to the IGCR, which reside in the National Archives. More information about the scope and arrangement of the collection is available in the finding aid for the microfilmed edition.
Primary Sources: Japanese American Internment: Records of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
The Library has recently acquired Japanese American Internment: Records of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, a digitized collection of materials that were assembled by library staff at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. The finding aid for the microfilm version provides more detailed information about what is included in the collection and how it is arranged.
Primary Sources: New additions to ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Our access to ProQuest Historical Newspapers now includes these titles:
Pittsburgh Courier, 1911-2002
Atlanta Daily World, 1931-2003
Norfolk Journal and Guide, 1916-2003
These are cross-searchable with the other historic Black newspapers we have acquired from ProQuest:
The Baltimore Afro-American, 1893-1988
Chicago Defender, 1909-1975
Los Angeles Sentinel, 1934-2005
New York Amsterdam News, 1922-1993
Our link to ProQuest Historical Newspapers provides access to 17 newspaper databases. To limit your search to specific titles, click on Databases in the menu bar, then uncheck the titles you don’t want to include in your search.
You can also use the basic or advanced search to search all the newspaper databases, and then limit your search to specific titles using the Publication title facet that appears to the left of the results.
If you have questions about how to use this resource, contact Jennifer Dorner at dorner@berkeley.edu.
Additions to the Rainforest Action Network Records Now Open at The Bancroft Library
At first I thought I was fighting to save the rubber trees;
then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest.
Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.
– Chico Mendes (1944-1988)
The Bancroft Library is pleased to announce that a series of additions to the ongoing Rainforest Action Network records is now open and accessible to researchers. The processing of the Rainforest Action Network records is part of a two-year grant project funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to make available a range of archival collections relating to environmental movements in the West. A leading resource in the documentation of U.S. environmental movements, The Bancroft Library is home to the records of many significant environmental organizations and the papers of a range of environmental activists.
Rainforest Action Network was founded in 1985 by Randy “Hurricane” Hayes and Mike Roselle as a San Francisco based non-profit grassroots environmental group with a mission to protect and preserve the world’s forests and defend the human rights of indigenous people and others affected by unjust land grabs and the depletion of natural resources. Rainforest Action Network’s direct action, education and marketing campaigns apply pressure to governments and corporations to halt illegal logging, manufacturing, selling and use of old growth trees and tropical forests.
The global breadth of Rainforest Action Network’s activities range from Old Growth campaigns in Northern California, the Pacific Northwest and Canada to Tropical Timber campaigns to protect forests and indigenous rights in Central and South America, Africa, Tasmania and Southeast Asia. They also include the Global Finance campaign which organized and supported civil disobedience during the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, Washington in 1999.
The Bancroft Library has been collecting Rainforest Action Network records since 2006 and the newly opened additions document the group’s campaigns primarily in the 1990s-2000s. Future additions to the records are expected.