Digital Library of the Week

The Cornell University Library Witchcraft Collection is an online selecton of titles from Cornell’s extensive materials on witchcraft. The majority of the collection was acquired in the 1880s through the collaborative efforts of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s first president and a prodigious scholar and book buyer, and his first librarian, George Lincoln Burr. The collection is a rich source for students and scholars of the history of superstition and witchcraft persecution in Europe. It documents the earliest and the latest manifestations of the belief in witchcraft as well as its geographical boundaries, and elaborates this history with works on canon law, the Inquisition, torture, demonology, trial testimony, and narratives. Most importantly, the collection focuses on witchcraft not as folklore or anthropology, but as theology and as religious heresy. These titles were originally digitally scanned from microfilm by Primary Source Microfilm, and include 104 monographs (about 23,220 pages).

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The Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collection was launched to accompany the 2009 Poe Bicentennial exhibition, “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe,” a joint venture of the University of Texas Harry Ransom Center and the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. The digital collection incorporates images of all Poe manuscripts and letters at the Ransom Center with a selection of related archival materials, two books by Poe annotated by the author, sheet music based on his poems, and portraits from the Ransom Center collections. Poe’s manuscripts and letters are linked to transcriptions on the website of the Poe Society of Baltimore. Most of the items in the exhibition from the Harry Ransom Center collections once belonged to William H. Koester (1888–1964). Koester, a resident of Baltimore, began collecting first editions and manuscripts of Poe in the 1930s; his major acquisition was the collection of the Richmond Poe scholar and collector J. H. Whitty. In addition to the manuscripts of “The Domain of Arnheim,” “The Spectacles,” and some of Poe’s most famous poems, the Koester collection includes many letters written by and to Poe, books belonging to Poe (including the author’s annotated copies of the Tales and Poems and Eureka), and a large group of sheet music for songs based on Poe’s works.

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The Benin Empire Collection: Nigerian Sculpture 1440–1897 is one of the foremost art collections at the Broward County (Fla.) Library’s African-American Research Library and Cultural Center in Fort Lauderdale. The library brings together a breathtaking collection of Royal Court Art from the ancient kingdom of Benin, located in Southern Nigeria. The Benin Kingdom, which flourished for 450 years, was founded in the early 14th century by the son of an exiled king from Ife (a nearby area approximately 100 miles southeast). The indigenous inhabitants of the Benin Kingdom, the Binis, created a thriving civilization, with museums, a well-organized military organization, efficient administration, and relative peace, stability, and prosperity throughout the kingdom.

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The Digital Library on American Slavery offers data on race and slavery extracted from 18th- and 19th-century documents that were processed over a period of 18 years. Launched October 1 by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the collection contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals. The data were painstakingly extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, and amended petitions. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 individual slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slaveowners and non-slaveowners. One of the unique aspects of the Digital Library is the information on individual slaves made available along with additional data on their owners; no other online database connects slaves with their owners in such a manner. Each set of documents is uniquely identified by an eight-digit PAR (Petition Analysis Record) number. The list of subjects reveals the variety of “causes” or “bills of complaint,” in the language of the courts, that petitioners brought, or defendants raised, in their civil suits. The general topics include slave ownership, slave management, freedom suits, crime and punishment, health, death, social and civic life, marriage, women, and family, among others.

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Transforming the Tar Heel State: The Legacy of Public Libraries in North Carolina is a statewide collaborative digital project that celebrates North Carolina public libraries. The core of this collection has been scanned from the State Library of North Carolina’s Public Library History Files. These files contain photographs, reports, newspaper clippings, and other materials that had been sent to the North Carolina Library Commission from public libraries throughout the state. The files span from the late 19th century through the 1970s, with the majority of the materials dating from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. For years, the files were hidden in a storage area where all but a few library staff had forgotten them. They were rediscovered around 2003 when the storage area was being cleaned out for building renovations. In summer 2008, the state library put out a call to public libraries seeking participation in building the collection. In response, 23 libraries sent photos and 34 libraries sent historical information that was added to the collection.

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Wisconsin Heritage Online is a collaborative project with contributions from public, special, and academic libraries, historical societies, and museums from all over the state. Initiated in 2004, the site continues to grow under a grant from the Nicholas Family Foundation, which supports staff who can travel across the state to help institutions get their treasures online. Teachers, students, genealogists, history buffs, and others who value Wisconsin and its wealth of digitized materials will enjoy finding interesting or useful material.

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The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection contains 118 hours of recordings documenting North American English dialects. The collection debuted September 10 on the Library of Congress American Memory website. The recordings include speech samples, linguistic interviews, oral histories, conversations, and excerpts from public speeches. They were drawn from various archives, and from the private collections of 50 collectors, including linguists and folklorists. The collection includes recordings from 43 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and parts of Canada. They were made from 1941 to 1984, with the bulk being recorded between 1968 and 1982. Some of the recordings are by famous Americans (such as aviator Amelia Earhart, above), but most are the voices of people whose specific identities are unknown, but whose comments represent the richness of the American experience. There are Gullah speakers from coastal South Carolina, sharecroppers from Arkansas, Puerto Rican teenagers in New York City, Basque sheepherders from Colorado, Chesapeake Bay watermen, Vietnamese immigrants from Northern Virginia, and many others. 350 of the collection’s 405 recordings are available on this website; of these, 148 have accompanying transcriptions. The remaining recordings, which could not be posted due to copyright issues and other restrictions, may be heard in the American Folklife Center Reading Room in Washington, D.C.

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The Hooked on Los Gatos digital database is a collaborative effort between Los Gatos (Calif.) Public Library and the Museums of Los Gatos, with collections of the two institutions forming the core of the project. Many individuals, families, and organizations have also shared their photo archives. Collections are primarily composed of photographs, but also include maps, letters, postcards, scrapbooks, programs from events, and other materials of historic interest. Included is the Hamsher Collection of approximately 100 historic photographs, many currently hanging on the walls of Los Gatos Library. Most were copied from original images taken between the late 1860s and 1920. Clarence Hamsher was a Los Gatos banker who collected the images in the 1920s. Some images in Hooked on Los Gatos are unidentified. Research is ongoing to create accurate metadata to accompany each image as it is added to the database. Can you help identify or date any of these mystery photographs? Send an email with your facts or suggestions.

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The Joyner Library Digital Collections at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, support the research and teaching mission of the university and preserve the cultural heritage of the eastern North Carolina community. The library was launched in February 2009 and now contains nearly 11,000 digital objects including image, text, audio, and video. The largest collection of materials within the library is a set of 7,000 images digitized from the photo collection of the local newspaper The Daily Reflector. Focusing on the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, the collection covers a period of dramatic social, technological, and economic change in the South as well as in the world in general. Other significant concentrations of material focus on the history of the university, naval and maritime studies, the history of agriculture in the south (particularly tobacco), and the paintings of watercolorist and poet A. R. Ammons.

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Perseus Digital Library at Tufts Univeristy, Boston. Since initial planning in 1985, the Perseus Digital Library Project has explored what happens when libraries move online. Over two decades later, as new forms of publication emerge and millions of books become digital, this question is more pressing than ever. Perseus is a practical experiment in which users explore possibilities and challenges of digital collections in a networked world. Perseus’ flagship collection, under development since 1987, covers the history, literature, and culture of the Greco-Roman world. Perseus’ mission is to help make the full record of humanity as intellectually accessible as possible to every human being, providing information adapted to as many linguistic and cultural backgrounds as possible. The website showcases collections and services developed as a part of Tufts University research efforts over the years. The code for the digital library system and many of the collections are available for other institutions to use, mirror, and develop….

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