Highlighting Digital Collections

In an effort to provide greater accessibility and wider access libraries, museums, and historical sites are frequently digitalizing their collections. This provides access worldwide to specialized resources and allows for archival documents to be viewed without handling or environmental damage.

National Museum of American History: Stories of Freedom and Justice
http://americanhistory.si.edu/freedomandjustice/
In 1960, a group of four African American men sat at the lunch counter in the Woolworth's store in Greensboro, North Carolina and refused to leave when asked. It was an important moment in the growing civil rights movement, and it is the event which serves as the inspiration for this site created by the National Museum of American History. The theme of the site is "Freedom and Justice", and the site contains a frequently updated blog, webcasts, news updates, and an event calendar.

British Museum: A catalogue of the Russian icons in the British Museum
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/online_research_catalogues/russian_icons/catalogue_of_russian_icons.aspx
The British Museum has been beefing up their online research catalog offerings as of late, and this work contains 72 of the Museum's Russian icons. To gain a sense of the context and history of this collection, start by reading the short "Preface". Searching the "All objects" area will reveal thumbnail sketches of all the icons.

NYPL Digital Gallery: Turn of the Century Posters
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=printing&col_id=212
Anna Palmer Draper collected hundreds of posters during her lifetime, and when she passed away in 1914, her will indicated that they would go to the New York Public Library. They did, and in the 1930s and 1940s library staff members mounted the posters on card stock and bound them into large volumes, alphabetically by artist. Many of them are now available on this site, and they represent a broad pastiche of magazine, book, and newspaper posters from the 1890s into the early 20th century.

Nickel Weeklies
http://drc.library.bgsu.edu/handle/2374.BGSU/744
A century or so, a nickel could buy a lot of entertainment. One such form of entertainment was the nickel weekly, which featured tales of detectives, Wild West characters, and evil villains. Bowling Green State University has created this thoroughly delightful digital collection of nickel weeklies for consumption by the general public. This collection includes 221 nickel weeklies, and visitors can browse these offerings by title, date, or author. Visitors can zoom in on the cover page of each weekly, or they may also download each title and view them at another more convenient moment.

New Mexico Museum of Art
http://www.nmartmuseum.org/
Renamed in 2007, the New Mexico Museum of Art (NMMoA) has built a collection of more than 20,000 works of art in its 1917 Pueblo style building in Santa Fe. The Museum's collecting focus has always been art of the Southwest in general and New Mexico in particular, by artists who have worked, lived, or been influenced by travel through the area. The Southwest is widely known as an area of great natural beauty, inspiring artists from all over the world. A variety of cultures have collided and commingled in New Mexico; Native Americans, settlers of European descent, more recently established landowners and tourists - and this cultural heritage is all apparent in the NMMoA collection.

>From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2010. http://scout.wisc.edu/