Large digital archives - ENGL 330: Women in Literature and World Thought - Archival research

Digital collections

Living Atlanta Oral History Recordings
"From 1977-1978 WRFG (Radio Free Georgia Broadcasting Foundation, Inc.) produced a series of fifty half hour radio programs exploring Atlanta history between World War I and World War II. Each program explored prominent topics and events during the period between 1914 and 1948 and was based on oral history interviews of Atlantans who were involved in the events and topics. The programs were composed of excerpts of the interviews connected by music and explanatory narration. During the course of the project, hundreds of Atlantans were interviewed, resulting in close to four hundred hours of taped material. The people interviewed made up a broad cross section of Atlanta society, from maids and textile workers to millionaires."
Digital Bodleian
For the first time ever, the digital collections of the various Oxford college special collections and archives are now available in one portal. Many writers attended Oxford over the years, and their works may be represented among the digital collections.
Digital Public Library of America
The DPLA includes archival material and rare publications digitized by archives and libraries across the US to increase access. For your assignment use keywords like composition, writing, rhetoric, grammar, or syllabi and select one of the subjects on the left-hand side of the results list to focus your results.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Online access to materials held by the Library of Congress. You may also see much of this material in the Digital Public Library of American (DPLA).
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
"In twenty-plus years of award-winning work, RRCHNM has developed more than sixty projects, including online resources for teachers; online collections, exhibits and collecting sites; open-source software; and forums to develop knowledge and build community among those in the humanities working with digital technology."
British Library Digitised Content
Due to a recent cyber attack, much of the British Library's digitized content is not available via their website. You can still view 1 million images of items from their collection on Flickr.

Online archival research tips

Most archival materials are not digitized and online
Often archives include collection guides (also called finding aids) that describe a collection of items (photographs, syllabi, reports, letters, etc.), but nothing from that collection has been digitized
You can email or call the archives staff to double-check - sometimes the items have been digitized but not made available on their website
Be flexible with your search terms (also called keywords) - often a single word is better than a phrase (more than one word) to start a search
Google might help you find archives or collection guides, but you probably won't easily find digitized items from archival collections
Context is important to understand primary sources - often what you find in Google images is removed from its context (where it came from, who made the original, why they made it)
Archivists love context - (who, what, where, why, when) and make sure to provide as much as they can
You can ask archival staff to digitize something in a collection - but understand that they might say they don't have time or that it will cost money
Some digitized archival items can be easily downloaded as high-resolution digital files - others may require you to contact the archives staff and request a high-resolution digital file directly (this is typically determined based on the copyright status of the item)