New electronic resource: The American Founding Era Collection (Rotunda)

We have just purchased permanent access to the American Founding Era Collection, which we trialled back in December and January.  If you'll forgive me for re-using old material, I thought it would be helpful therefore to re-post one of the earliest posts on this blog, which goes into detail about what the collection contains and how to navigate it.

The American Founding Era Collection contains digital versions of the published papers of several major figures of the time.  The collections it contains are as follows:

• The Adams Papers
• The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
• The Dolley Madison Digital Edition
• The Papers of James Madison
• The Papers of George Washington
• The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution 
• The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (coming soon!)

With the exception of the Dolley Madison papers, these are digital editions of the print versions, which have been being published in large, ongoing series for many years.  We do have these print volumes at the VHL (which you can locate by searching SOLO), but the digital versions offer a variety of ways to access the papers and are of course fully searchable - no need to go hunting through indexes or worry you might miss a reference along the way, which for such enormous publications is a huge help.

Note on the Adams Papers: The Founding Era Collection only contains these papers from the founding-generation of the Adams family, and so the bulk of the papers available date from the 18th century.

Note on the Dolley Madison Digital Edition:  This is the first ever complete edition of all Dolley Madison's correspondence. This collection was 'born digital', and is currently complete up to 1837. It is included in and can be accessed via the Founding Era Collection, but also has a separate platform, the one on which it was originally built, which also includes annotations that aren't accessible from the Founding Era platform. There are links across to the standalone platform from each document in the Founding Era Collection so that these annotations can be found easily.

Note on the Papers of Alexander Hamilton: This collection was not available when we initially trialled the resource, but we have decided to add it to our purchase. We will gain access to these papers when they become available later this summer.

How to use the database
As well as the full-text search, the browsing options are very powerful. You can browse collections individually or the whole lot at once, and have a choice of doing so by chronology (date of document) or by contents (order of the documents in the published volumes).  There are also browsable indexes available to the Adams, Jefferson, and Washington Papers.

Once you have started browsing any of the contents, chronology, indexes or your search results, there is a navigation compass to take you forward and back through the different levels and documents.  It looks a bit like part of the background (at least, I didn't realise what it was at first!), so in case it's not just me that overlooked it, I thought it was worth pointing out.  The platform's own guide describes how the compass works as follows:

 The navigation compass can be used to move between different places in the current view. The up and down arrows are used to move up and down within the hierarchy. For example, starting at the top of the contents view and repeatedly clicking the down arrow takes you from the publication to a series to a volume and so on down to individual documents. For the chronology view, doing the same thing takes you from decade to year to month to day to documents within that day. The left and right arrows are used to navigate between adjacent items at the same hierarchical level. Thus, if you are in the level corresponding to volumes of a publication, then clicking the left or right arrow takes you to the preceding or following volume, respectively. Again, if you are at the months level of the chronological hierarchy, then clicking the left or right arrows takes you to the preceding or following month. 

It took me a bit of getting used to, but once you've got your head round the structure of the collection, it is an easy way to move from one part to another.  Next to it you always see where you are in the hierarchy.

The documents themselves are transcribed, not page images, and contain links to notes, explanatory references and other documents where relevant. You can print documents, but there are no options for exporting/saving records other than to make a note of the durable URL given in the citation box at the bottom of each document.  This box is a useful addition though, giving you guidance on how to cite the document in bibliographies, which can often be tricky to know how to do for online resources.

The collections are still being added to, as the print publication projects are still ongoing.  There is also a complementary project, Founders Early Access, which is freely available online as well as accessible within the main site.  The Early Access collection contains documents that are in the process of being prepared for both print and online publication.  Once the documents are added to the main collection, they disappear from the Early Access site.  The link for the Early Access collection is: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/FOEA.html and you can keep up with updates to it at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/FOEA-history.html.  It might also be worth pointing out that the University of Virginia is working with the National Archives to make some of the Founders' papers freely available online from 2012. 

The American Founding Era Collection is accessible via OxLIP+.  If you are away from Oxford, you can get into the database as long as you sign in via SOLO/OxLIP+ first with your University single sign-on.

New! Online guide to US History sources

I'm pleased to announce the publication of the online Guide to US History Sources, on the Bodleian Libraries' LibGuides site.  This guide replaces the old yellow paper versions which used to be available in the library, and provides links to and information about a whole variety of resources available for research in US History.


The web address for the guide is http://ox.libguides.com/ushistory.  The benefits of an online guide are that the links to e-resources are active (if you're not connected to the University network you will need to sign in on SOLO first), and the guide can be easily and frequently updated.  Hopefully it will provide you with an excellent starting point for your research.  Please feel free to make suggestions about more resources to include, or if the guide could be made more user-friendly.  We also have a separate online guide available for US Government Publications, and could potentially create further specific guides in the future.



The online guide is designed to be complemented by this blog, which will continue to go into more depth about individual resources and topics.  I'm also always happy to help you if you have questions about resources available either in the library or online.

April 15, 1912: Sinking of the Titanic

A quick post this one, to point you in the direction of an interesting document we have available in the US Congressional Serial Set.  If you came to the talk on the Serial Set by August Imholtz from Readex in January you'll have seen this before, and we've had it out on display a couple of times, so it may already be familiar. It is however an example of the way that the Serial Set contains documents and primary sources for a huge range of historical events.

Following the sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912, the US Senate's Committee on Commerce held a series of hearings into the disaster. The Committee was directed by S.Res 283 'to investigate the causes leading to the wreck', and a large number of people testified, including eye-witness accounts of the disaster itself.  One of these accounts, from a Mrs Emily Ryerson, a passenger on the boat, was used as a source for the 1997 film.  The full hearings document runs to 1170 pages, and you can also access the (much briefer!) final report, submitted to Congress on May 28. 

Link to the full hearings [Oxford users only] Mrs Ryerson's testimony is on pages 1107 and 1108.
Link to the full report [Oxford users only]

I'll be writing a fuller post on the Serial Set, what it contains and how to use it, in due course!  If you're curious in the meantime though, there is a slideshow presentation embedded on our online US Government Publications Guide (click on the 'Legislative/Congressional' tab and then scroll down the page).

North American Women's Letters and Diaries

For International Women's Day, here's a blog post on one of our e-resources available via OxLIP+: North American Women's Letters and Diaries.  This database contains 150,000 pages of letters and diaries written by 1,325 women from Colonial times to 1950.  More than 7,000 of these pages are previously unpublished.  The material is drawn from over 600 different sources, including journals, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs and conference proceedings, and was largely collated using existing bibliographies.  It's important to note that much of the material is still in copyright.

The database creators had strict criteria for deciding whether to include material:

• Authors must be women and must have been resident in North America for a significant time.
• Materials must have been written contemporaneously. Autobiographical material are excluded, unless they are considered of particular value.
• Memoirs are included when they are of particular value.
• Collections of letters begun before 1950 are included until they are complete. Collections of letters written after 1950 are excluded.
• Diaries that began before 1950 are included until they are complete. Diaries that began after 1950 are excluded.
• Letters written by men are excluded.

They state that "all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous" are respresented by the material contained within the database.  There are also biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography to support the primary source material.


Using the database

There is a variety of ways to access the material within the database. In the top menu bar are the options to browse, find and search. The first few browse options and the simple search are pretty straightforward (browse by author, source, year, and simple full-text keyword search with some options to limit your results by author, year, document type etc), however this database offers some really nice other search/browse options that provide a different way to find material.


Under browse you will find options to browse by place (which also demonstrates that the material in this database has a much wider geographical interest than just North America, even if the authors are all American), historical events (eg Salem Witch Trials, Lincoln's assassination, the sinking of the Titanic), and personal events (death of child, emigration, religious experience, starting a job).  There is also a showcase of a few selected documents of interest.

The difference between find and search is basically whether you are trying to find documents themselves, or search within them.  Under 'find' you have the option to search for sources (ie, the documents) or authors.  Searching for sources will only search on the bibliographic information attached to that document, and will bring you to the record (from where you can click through to the full text).  Searching for authors is useful both when you're trying to find a known author (for which there is also an alphabetical browse index at the top of the search screen), and if you're trying to find authors that match certain criteria - ie, from a certain time period, place, ethnicity, religion etc. By each search box in all the different search screens is a 'terms' button, which will bring up a list of all the terms available in the index that you can select and add to your search - this also effectively offers you another way to browse, or restrict your search to specific subsets of the database.

The search menu options allow you to search within the text of the documents. As well as the usual simple and advanced search options, there are also options to specifically search either letters or diaries, and each search can be limited by a whole variety of different terms.  The advanced search is particularly good if you want to search for something very specific (eg, restricting your search to letters written on military bases).  The advanced search option also allows you to specify a proximity range for more than one search term.  These incredibly detailed search options are a particular strength of this resource.

Where this resource is not quite so amazing is in what you can do with the results when you get them.  Most of the documents are available only as transcriptions, not page images, although there are some page images available.  There also aren't any save, export, or print options, so all you can really do is copy & paste or print directly from your browser (though bear in mind the fact that most of the material is still under copyright, so fair dealing principles apply).  You can however easily click through from the bibliographic records to other documents by the same author or in the same source, as well as access the author's biography (where available).

For more information about this resource, see the publisher's description at: http://alexanderstreet.com/products/nwld.htm.

African American History Resources, Part Two: pre-20th century, slavery, emancipation etc

To follow up my previous post listing some of the resources we have available for African American history in the 20th century, here I'll set out some of the resources we have for earlier time periods, in particular related to slavery/anti-slavery, emancipation, and the Civil War (another core area of our collection). My period-division here has been very rough, just to avoid having an enormously long post, so some of the resources listed here will reach into the 20th century, and I will also not repeat resources here from my previous post that do cover earlier periods (especially our government publications and newspaper resources).

Microfilm and archival collections

The Freedmen's Aid Society Records cover 1866-1932, and extend to 120 reels of microfilm (guide available at Micr. BX 8235 .F74 2000).  The Freedman's Aid Society was originally founded as the Fugitives' Aid Society with the aim to assist fugitive slaves and to lobby and protest against slavery in the United States. With the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fugitives' Aid Society became the Freedmen's Aid Society. The organisation sent money and volunteer aid to the South after the defeat of the Confederacy. They also had a strong education initiative and was responsible for the establishment of many historically Black colleges and universities.

One of the major archival collections held in Rhodes House Library (next door) are the Papers of the (British) Anti-Slavery Society. This society, founded in 1835, had as its aim the abolition of slavery throughout the world in general and in the United States in particular. It convened the first World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London in June 1840, at which some fifty leading American abolitionists were present. After 1840 the society's transatlantic prestige declined and a second convention held in 1843 attracted only a few American delegates. The Society continued to concern itself with American problems and correspond with American abolitionists up to the Civil War but it was affected by the divisions in the American movement and there came a realisation that it could do little to affect the outcome of the Americn situation. If you're interested in consulting papers from this archive, contact staff in Rhodes House Library.  See http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/blcas/anti-slavery-society.html for more information.

Another archival collection held at Rhodes House is that of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which was founded in 1701 as a result of an enquiry into the state of the Church of England in the American colonies. Its remit was broadened to encompass evangelisation of slaves and Native Americans. More information can be found at http://www.mundus.ac.uk/cats/11/1052.htm, and again, if you want to consult this archive, contact staff in Rhodes House Library.

In addition to these papers of societies, we have several microfilm collections of the papers of individuals who were active in American politics in the mid-19th century, and which will include material on slavery and emancipation to a greater or lesser extent.  These are the papers of James Buchanan (Micr. USA 458), Salmon P. Chase (Micr. USA 331), William H. Seward (Micr. USA 346), and Thaddeus Stevens (Micr. USA 353).  Abraham Lincoln's papers can be found online via the Libary of Congress, who have digitised around 20,000 documents from the 1850s through to Lincoln's death in 1865.

The Records of the American Colonization Society, founded in 1817 to resettle African Americans in West Africa, cover 1792-1964, but the bulk of the material dates from 1823-1912. There is a guide available at Micr. E 448 .U54 1979, and selections of these records are also available online via footnote.com.

On a similar theme, we also have the Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior relating to the suppression of the African slave trade and Negro colonization, which is a comprehensive set of government papers on many aspects of executive federal involvement in colonisation between 1854 and 1872. These are on microfilm at Micr. USA 456, and can also be found online via footnote.com.


Online resources

And finally, here's a list of some of the useful free online resources I have come across relating to African American history pre-20th century, slavery, emancipation etc, all saved on our delicious page for future reference: 

• We Ain't What We Ought To Be: tie-in website for Stephen Tuck's book of the same name, which starts its coverage in 1861. Contains links to lots of online resources and documents mentioned in the book.
• Transatlantic Slave Database: information on some 35,000 slave trading voyages from the 16th-19th centuries.
• The New York African Free School Collection
• Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719-1820
• Digital Library on American Slavery
• End of Slavery (Massachusetts Historical Society)
• Texas Slavery Project
• BlackPast.org: online reference guide to African American history
• Frederick Douglass Papers
• Papers of Booker T. Washington, 1856-1915
• Samuel J. May antislavery collection
• The Friend of Man: Digitised newspaper documenting early anti-slavery and other reform movements.
• Map of American Slavery: from the New York Times website's Disunion blog, the United States Coast Survey's map of the slaveholding states, as used by Abraham Lincoln.
• New York Historical Society slavery collections
• The Alfred Whital Stern collection of Lincolniana at the Library of Congress
• Black History on Footnote.com: all free with basic registration

These are just some of the more specific online resources available, but there is so much more to be found in various state digital libraries or wider Civil War web resources, just to point you to two subsets of our delicious list.  Happy hunting!

Credit: some of the text in this post was originally written by the History Librarian, Isabel Holowaty, as I have just borrowed her descriptions where they already existed.

African American History Resources, Part One: 20th Century

February is Black History Month, and so I thought I'd put together a couple of blog posts about some of the resources we have available in the library for African American history.  Resources for African American history are increasingly a particular strength of the VHL's collection, and with our recent acquisition of the electronic archives of two major black newspapers of the 20th century (The New York Amsterdam News, 1922-1993 and The Pittsburgh Courier, 1911-2002 - see this blog post for more information), we are now the only institution in Western Europe to have access to the archives of three black newspapers.  In this first blog post I will focus on 20th century African American history resources, in particular relating to civil rights, and will follow it up (by the end of the month, I promise!) with one on the 19th century and slavery & emancipation.

Newspapers

To start briefly with newspapers and periodicals (but not too extensively, as they were the subject of my last two blog posts), in addition to the three archives mentioned above, we also have a collection of 17 black journals from the first half of the twentieth century available on microfiche (to see which, take a look at our online newspapers-on-microfilm list), as well as an extensive run of the leading African American magazine, Ebony, from 1945-1954 (on microfilm) and then 1958-2008 in print.   If you're looking for really recent African American newspapers, then Ethnic NewsWatch (via OxLIP+) provides coverage of ethnic and minority newspapers from 1990 to the present.

For more information on finding newspapers in general, take a look at the previous two posts on this blog.

Microfilm collections

The Civil Rights Era is a particular strength of our collection, and we have several microfilm collections of papers and records relating to the Civil Rights struggle.   The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Papers cover 1959-1976, and include the records and papers of this organisation, which was founded in 1942 in Chicago and advocated non-violent direct action to address racial discrimination.  A guide to the microfilm collection can be found at Micr. E 185.61 .C75455 1984.

We only have selections of the Papers of the NAACP, but even so this is a massive collection of records, speeches, reports, correspondence, branch files and campaign information from the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People.  We hold parts 1, 2, 11A, 11B, 12B, 12C, 12D, 26B, 26C, 26D, 28A, 28B, 29A, 29B, 29C, and 29D of this collection (along with guides), which cover a range of topics, locations and dates from 1909-1970.

Another substantial microfilm collection we hold is Civil rights during the Nixon Administration, which record the Nixon administration's broadening of the concept of equal rights beyond desegregation to include affirmative action in hiring women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and an expanding and overlapping list of other groups. Even though the subject matter here is much broader, you will still find records covering the continuing controversy over school desegregation and other topics relating to African American history.

And finally for microfilms, jumping back a little in time, are the Records of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which was set up following the riot of July/August 1919 by Illinois governor Frank Lowden.

Government publications and official papers

You can, as expected, find a huge amount of material in our major government publications resources, particularly of course the US Congressional Serial Set (via OxLIP+) where you can browse for publications related to acts such as the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as search and browse by subject.

One thing you may not realise that we have though is a lot of the printed civil rights hearings, in particular those before the United States Commission on Civil Rights in the early 1960s - search for civil rights hearings on SOLO.  Many of these are down in our stack, so you will need to place a stack request via OLIS to get them fetched up for you.

I will write further blog posts in the future about finding government publications, so keep an eye on the blog for that if you need more guidance.

Books

Just a quick note that the shelfmark range for African Americans in the Library of Congress classification is E 184.5 - E185.98.  Obviously you can search SOLO to find out what books we have, but if you want to go and browse the shelves, that's where to head for!

Online resources

As ever, there is a huge and growing amount of fantastic primary source material being made available online.   A good starting point is the VHL's delicious page, and the sites we have saved there tagged as African American: http://www.delicious.com/vhllib/African_American.  Some particular highlights for the 20th century/civil rights are:

• Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers (Stanford University)
  
• Voices of Civil Rights
• Civil Rights Digital Library
• We Ain't What We Ought To Be: This is a tie-in website for the recently-published book by Stephen Tuck, and includes links to all sorts of free web resources relating to African American history from 1861 to the present that are referred to in the book.
• Documenting the American South
• Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive
• Brown v Board of Education Online Archive
• Martin Luther King Online Encyclopedia
• Television News of the Civil Rights Era
• Black History on Footnote.com: all freely available with basic registration.

Finding US Newspapers II: On the web and elsewhere in the UK

My last post focused on the newspaper sources that the VHL holds, both in print and as electronic resources.  However, there are a lot more sources of historic US newspapers freely available on the web and in library collections elsewhere in the UK.  This post will point you to some useful sites online where you can find some of these.

Chronicling America (Library of Congress)
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ 
This is the Library of Congress's historic newspapers site, and has two distinct purposes.  One is the Chronicling America Directory, which provides bibliographic information about newspapers published in the United States from 1690 to the present as well as listings of libraries in the States that have copies.   The second is to provide access to thousands of digitised pages of a wide range of newspapers from 1860-1922.   Full-text coverage is only for certain states: Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.   You can restrict your search by state or date range, as well as search within a specific newspaper title.  Pages can be viewed online or downloaded as PDFs or image files.

The Library of Congress also provides a couple of different ways into the collection.  There is the topics interface, which allows you to browse articles relating to a wide range of topics, from Presidential administrations and events such as the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, to the baseball World Series, Butch Cassidy, or Nikola Tesla.  They are also working with Flickr, uploading images of cover pages from the New York Tribune's illustrated newspaper supplements.  They even make their API available, for anyone wanting to create different ways to explore the data.

Google News Archive
http://news.google.com/newspapers 
As well as the Google Books project, Google are also digitising thousands and thousands of pages of newspapers, and the Google News Archive page allows you to browse these directly.  It's a very basic interface, with just an alphabetical listing of all the newspaper titles available, and information as to what dates are covered, but once you click on a specific title you are brought to a nice timeline view, from where you can easily browse issues by date.  It being Google, the search function is very straightforward, but there is an advanced search available from the very tiny link next to the search box at the top of the page.
 
Newspapers on Footnote.com
http://go.footnote.com/newspapers/
Footnote.com is a subscription website that works with the National Archives to digitise vast quantities of records, images and archival material, as well as encouraging the public to add annotations and upload their own material.   They also have a large collection of digitised newspapers, comprising some 4 million pages.   You can search the collections without signing up, but be aware that a lot of the content is only available to paid subscribers, so you may not be able to see the full-text if you have not paid over your subscription fee.

NewspaperCat
http://www.newspapercat.org/
NewspaperCat is an online catalogue of digitised historical newspapers from the United States and Caribbean, hosted by the University of Florida.  It currently links through to over 1000 titles and is expanding.   You can search or browse by title or location.

Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/details/texts
The Internet Archive is the other major site for freely available digitised material on the web, and contains scanned images of books and journals from many major American libraries, including therefore also newspaper issues.   However, tt is not the easiest site to search, particularly for newspapers and periodicals as the search results list doesn't show you the date of the item, you can't browse, and there's no way to limit your search to this kind of material.  Worth checking though if you know the title you're looking for and have struck out elsewhere - you might be in luck!

Various local digitisation projects
Examples on the VHL's delicious page: http://www.delicious.com/vhllib/Newspapers 
More comprehensive listing on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newspaper_archives#United_States 
There are a huge number of digitisation projects by University and State libraries, archives and historical societies all over the US, and many of these include newspapers.  Some are distinct projects to digitise runs of specific newspapers, whereas others are wider projects that include newspaper articles, pages or entire issues within them.   I've been saving any I've come across on the VHL delicious page, but find more and more all the time.  There's also an excellent listing available on Wikipedia, as well as one provided by Penn Libraries.   If I haven't already found a site that's useful to you, then it's always worth checking the website of the relevant State Historical Society and major University libraries.  The content available and presentation of the interfaces may vary wildly from place to place, but overall there's an awful lot of good stuff out there.


Newspaper holdings elswhere in the UK
Between them, libraries in the UK hold quite a wide range of US newspapers, so if you can't find things here in Oxford or online, you may well be able to track them down in other libraries.   The best starting place is the British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale, and you can search their newspaper catalogues online.

For other libraries in the UK as well, the British Association of American Studies (BAAS) maintains a list of US newspaper holdings on their website, which can be searched and browsed by title, and will tell you which UK library holds what.  One caveat about this list is that it relies on the invidual libraries updating BAAS when their holdings change, so you'd be wise to check with the individual library that they definitely do have what you're looking for before making a trip.