Research by Subject: Primary Sources: Digital Collections

Digital Collections: Open Access

A. World

World Digital Library The World Digital Library (WDL) is a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of UNESCO and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world. The WDL offers significant multilingual primary source materials from all countries and cultures.
Internet Archive Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

B. Regional

California Digital Newspaper Collection "[C]ontains over 1,500,000 pages of significant historical California newspapers published from 1846-present, including the first California newspaper, the Californian, and the first daily California newspaper, the Daily Alta California. It also contains issues of several current California newspapers that are part of a project to preserve and provide access to contemporary papers."
California Revealed Primary sources documenting 150 years of California’s unique stories from collections across the state. includes manuscripts, audio, video, photographs and more
Calisphere Calisphere is the University of California's free public gateway to a world of primary sources. More than 150,000 digitized items — including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts — reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history.

C. United States

Library of Congress Collections Free access to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.
Making of America Materials accessible here are Cornell University Library's contributions to Making of America (MOA), a digital library of primary sources in American social history. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. The project represents a major collaborative endeavor in preservation and electronic access to historical texts.
Digital Public Library of America Discover 37,080,103 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States.
Plateau People's Portal The Plateau Peoples' Web Portal is a collaboration between the Spokane Tribe of Indians, the Confederated Tribes Of The Colville Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Coeur d'Alene Tribe of Indians, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation and Native American Programs at Washington State University. This Portal is a gateway to Plateau peoples' cultural materials held in multiple repositories including WSU's Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections, the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture, the National Anthropological Archives, the Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution. The materials in the Portal have been chosen and curated by tribal representatives. Each item has one or more records associated with it as well as added traditional knowledge and cultural narratives to enhance and enrich understanding to many audiences.
Chronicling America Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963, from the Library of Congress.
Documenting the American South Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs. The University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsors Documenting the American South, and the texts and materials come primarily from its southern holdings.

D. Latin America

Calisphere: Hispanic Americans
SALALM Digital Primary Sources This site hosts a database of listings that provide links to open access digitized collections of primary sources that relate to Latin America and the Caribbean. Currently, the listings may be searched by country, genre/format, hosting institution, and collection title.
Digital Library of the Caribbean The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean.
Latin American Pamphlet Digital Collection Scarce and unique pamphlets, primarily from Chile, Cuba, Bolivia and Mexico, published during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

E. Asia

China, America, and the Pacific Explore an extensive range of archival material connected to the trading and cultural relationships that emerged between China, America and the Pacific region between the 18th and early 20th centuries. Manuscript sources, rare printed texts, visual images, objects and maps document this fascinating history.
National Archives of Japan Digital Archive National Archives of Japan Digital Archive provides access to the descriptions and digitized images of the historical records preserved by the National Archives.
Southeast Asia Digital Library The SEADL maintains free access to archives of textual, still image, sound, and video resources, covering both historical and current information from the region. The Southeast Asia Digital Library is a collaboration between partner institutions in the US and Southeast Asia.
Afghanistan Digital Library The immediate objective of the Afghanistan Digital Library is to retrieve and restore the first sixty years of Afghanistan’s published cultural heritage. The project is collecting, cataloging, digitizing, and making available over the Internet as many Afghan publications from the period 1871–1930 as it is possible to identify and locate.
Islamic Heritage Project A digital collection of Islamic manuscripts, published texts, and maps from across Harvard's libraries and museums.
Princeton Digital Library of Islamic Manuscripts The manuscripts are chiefly in Arabic but also include Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and other languages of the extended Islamic world written in Arabic script. They date from the early centuries of Islam through the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Most of the manuscripts originated in Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and other main centers of Islamic civilization.
Palestine Poster Project

F. Africa

African Online Digital Library AODL is an open access digital library of African cultural heritage materials created by Michigan State University in collaboration with museums, archives, scholars, and communities around the world.
South African History Online This is the portal to an extensive archive of over 40,000 resources, including text, pdfs, audio and video material. The archive is searchable by keyword and medium. It is organised into collections of related material.
Nelson Mandela Digital Archive Project The Nelson Mandela Foundation has in its custody an archive of the life and time, works and writings of its Founder, the late Mr. Nelson Mandela. The physical collections include the handwritten papers, official records and unique artifacts from the personal archive of Nelson Mandela in addition to records from the Office of Nelson Mandela after his retirement as President of South Africa in 1999, and the records of related significant organizations and individuals. It is the NMF’s imperative to document this vast resource, facilitate access to it, and promote its preservation and use. This site contains the archival descriptions, finding aids and many of our digitised items. More material will be added over time.

G. Europe

EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History These links connect to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated. They shed light on key historical happenings within the respective countries and within the broadest sense of political, economic, social and cultural history. The order of documents is chronological wherever possible. These open access sources are readily available to all without fees or subscriptions.
European Library The European Library offers quick and easy access to the collections of the 48 National Libraries of Europe and leading European Research Libraries. Users can search and access over 23 million digital objects in addition to bibliographic records for over 160,000,000 items.
Digital Scriptorium The Digital Scriptorium is a growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.

H. Ancient History

Beazley Archive, University of Oxford Art, pottery, and sculpture of the Greek and Roman world. Includes detailed sketches and photographs, dictionary, and chronology.
Perseus Digital Library Full text sources from ancient times and other periods, in the original language and English. Includes commentaries, dictionaries, grammars. Major collections for Greek annd Roman, Renaissance, and 19th century United States documents.
Internet Ancient History Sourcebook Includes pre-history, the Ancient Middle East, Egypt, Israel, Persia, Greece and the Hellenistic World, and Rome.
Project Gutenberg - Classical Antiquity Public domain translations of classic plays, poems, epics, and philosophical works from Ancient Greek and Latin. Also includes some text in original Latin and some audio recordings of English translations.

Digital Collections: SDSU Subscriptions

The Library subscribes to several online collections of primary sources. Remote access to these databases is limited to current SDSU students, faculty, and staff.

Europeana This link opens in a new window
Europeana is the European Heritage Digital Library. It "enables people to explore the digital resources of Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections" and contains 15 million items on Europeana.
Archives of Sexuality and Gender (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
Engage with rare and unique documentation of LGBTQ history through newsletters, government documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, and other types of primary sources on LGBTQ history and activism, cultural studies, psychology, health, political science, policy studies, and other related areas of research. Watch a Tutorial
Archives Unbound (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
Gain access to rare primary source documents with these topically focused digital collections. Supports academic research.
Primary Sources (Gale) This link opens in a new window
Gale Primary Sources is an integrated research environment that allows users to search across all of their Gale primary source collections. Gale Primary Sources takes users beyond a simple search and retrieve workflow, allowing them to analyze content using frequency and term-relationship tools. Through intuitive subject-indexing users will discover new material even in the most familiar of content sets.
U.S. History (Gale In Context) This link opens in a new window
Uncover information on hundreds of the most significant people, events, and topics in U.S. history from a variety of sources.
Watch a Tutorial
Gale platform Listen feature instructions
Content includes reference works, millions of news and periodical articles, and more than 5,000 rare and vital primary source documents that range from slave journals to presidential papers. Topics range from the arrival of Vikings in North America all the way to the first stirrings of the American Revolution and on through the Civil Rights movement, 9/11, and the War on Terror.
World History (Gale In Context) This link opens in a new window
World History in Context pulls together information from multiple Gale databases to create fact sheets on everything from countries, cultures, and civilizations to economies and biographies.
Watch a Tutorial
Gale platform Listen feature instructions

World Heritage Sites: Africa (JSTOR)
World Heritage Sites: Africa links visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites. The materials in World Heritage Sites: Africa serve researchers in African studies, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, Diaspora studies, folklore and literature, geography, and history, as well as those focused on geomatics, advanced visual and spatial technologies, historic preservation, and urban planning.