New Digital Collections to Add to Your LibGuides and Resources 

Fantastic resources on labor, civil rights, LGBTQ+, and more!

Posted on October 18, 2023 in Blog Posts

Thanks to the hard work of many digitization efforts across the GLAM sector, new digital collections seem to emerge every day. This week, we wanted to highlight a few new collections that have appeared on our radar over recent months. Specifically, we selected collections that are free to use and browse, making them great additions to your library’s resources pages and LibGuides. 

👷 Advancing Workers’ Rights in the American South (University of Maryland) 

This new collection on workers’ rights in the American South will be a huge boon to historians of both the labor movement and the civil rights movement. Across personal correspondence, memos, reports, newsletters, and more, this collection showcases the intersection between racial and economic justice, illuminates the relationship between the AFL-CIO and the NAACP, and records the voices of many prominent civil rights figures on labor issues. The collection includes more than 90 thousand pages of digital content, offering a rich field of study. 

📜 Copyright Historical Record Books (Library of Congress) 

The US Copyright Office released digitized versions of its historical record books, including registrations, renewals, assignments, notices of use of musical compositions, and patent records, among other documents, between 1870 and 1977. The documents total more than 9 million pages. Though great for historical research, this collection, thanks to its end date range, also features many patents that are still active, opening up its possible uses to other fields of study. 

Also note: ALA released a LibGuide about using LoC digital collections for programming that is worth perusing. 

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✡️ Hebraic Manuscripts (Library of Congress) 

The LoC also released 230 manuscripts written in Hebrew and its cognates, including Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, and Yiddish. The LoC describes it as “a highly diverse collection with materials ranging from rabbinic responsa and commentary to poetry, Jewish magic, and folk medicine, and together they offer a rich, often intimate glimpse into Jewish life over the centuries.” The collection obviously has much to offer scholars of religion, Judaica, linguistics, and history, but it’s also worth remarking on the beauty of many of the documents, especially The Washington Haggadah (1478), which might inspire artistically inclined students and scholars. 

🏳️‍🌈 LGBTQIA+ Periodical and Ephemera Collection (Princeton University) 

Composed of more than 60 boxes of magazines, zines, ephemera, monographs, and other materials from the 1950s to the present, this collection preserves a wide range of LGBTQ+ voices and experiences. It has special foci on transgender and drag materials and physique and muscle periodicals, making this collection a rich resource for scholars and students interested in transgender, gay, masculinity studies specifically as well as visual culture and performance studies more broadly. The collection is also international in scope, which will no doubt promote fascinating comparative and transnational analyses. 

💿 Archives Research Compute Hub (Internet Archive)  

We discussed ARCH in our interview with Internet Archive’s Thomas Padilla, but in case you missed it, ARCH allows researchers to use collections as data and take on large and exciting questions with the power of Big Data. ARCH features petabytes of historical internet data. It takes some technical know-how and learning to use ARCH effectively, but just one look at the scholarship ARCH has aided makes clear how much it can offer researchers. 

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