Friday, April 25, 2008

American Memory @ Library of Congress


American Memory @ Library of Congress
(http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html)

If primary source material on the United States is sought, look no further than to the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world and it is making a concerted effort to bring that same presence to the virtual world. The National Digital Library Program (NDLP) began in 1995 to digitize books, pamphlets, motion pictures, photographs, sheet music, manuscripts, maps and sound recordings, and out of it was born “American Memory”, a massive digital archive containing around 11,000,000 files. The collection can be browsed by subject, time period, format type or geographic region and, like a good book, will hold you captive for many hours on end.


Regarding primary sources from other parts of the world, there are two websites of note – Internet History Sourcebooks Project, located at the Fordham University History Department and Center for Medieval Studies, and Eurodocs: Primary Historical Documents from Western Europe, begun at Brigham Young University in 1995 and broken into 46 separate web indexes representing the countries and city-states of Europe.

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