Free Image Collections on the Web: Bringing a Lecture or Paper to Life

See related previous posts!

NYPL Digital Gallery
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm
“NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 415,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.” The diversity of images to be found is enormous and the entire resource works with incomparable smoothness.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html
“The Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) provides access through group or item records to about 65% of the Division's holdings, as well as to some images found in other units of the Library of Congress. Many of the catalog records are accompanied by digital images--about one million digital images in all.” Not all are in the public domain.

Smithsonian Images
http://smithsonianimages.si.edu/
“Browse or search through selected images from the Collections of the Office of Imaging and Photographic Services. Included are images from current exhibits, Smithsonian events and historic collections. Select and download screen resolution images for personal and educational use.”

The Photography Collection of Western History (the American West)
http://photoswest.org/
“Our on-line database contains a selection of historic photographs from the collections of the Denver Public Library Western History/Genealogy Department and the Colorado Historical Society. These collections, which contain more than one million items, document the history of Colorado and the American West. Our on-line database contains some 100,000 images and catalog records of North American Indians, pioneers, railroads, mining, Denver and Colorado towns, city, farm, and ranch life, recreation, scenery, news events, and numerous other subjects and states.“

The Gallery of Albumen Prints
http://albumen.stanford.edu/gallery/
”Presenting the art and science of albumen printing, this site brings together 19th Century technical instruction, contemporary research, an online forum for conservation treatment and a wealth of images. This unique resource is dedicated to those who value the application of technology to the creative process of image making.” This was the dominant form of photography from 1855 to the turn of the century.

North Carolina Civil War Image Portfolio
http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/pcoll/civilwar/
“Images in the North Carolina Collection depicting the war are from woodcuts, engravings, lithographs, and photographs. The overwhelming majority of these were made by persons accompanying Union forces or were made from sketches and other information they provided. Numerous woodcuts appeared in publications based in the north such as Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Lithographers, including Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives in New York City, produced hand-colored prints depicting Civil War events including some in North Carolina. The North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives has twenty-seven carte-de-visite prints attributed to Union photographer O. J. Smith made in New Bern about 1863, following the town's occupation. Most of the images owned by the Collection, regardless of format, are from a northern perspective and provide limited insight into life within the Confederacy.”

American Museum of Photography
http://www.photography-museum.com/
There’s a great variety here ordered in small exhibits on such topics as spirit photography, African Americans, photographic fakes, Japan, and masterworks.

Sites included were taken from the annotated list in Irene E. McDermott, “Digital Gallery: Image Collections on the Web,” Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals 13, no. 5 (May 2005): 8-12.

Web site: Born to Be Wired: Technology, Communication and the Millennial Generation

The following is a link to a presentation given at the University at Buffalo that I think you will find interesting: both as teachers and as historians. The presentation is entitled “Born to Be Wired: Technology, Communication and the Millennial Generation,”
http://wings.buffalo.edu/provost/webservices/presentations/se2005/.
There’s a good abstract of the talk along with a rich selection of links to complementary materials and a useful bibliography. Learn about such things as blogs, podcasts, wikis, and social networking.

Music for Enjoiyment and Study: NAXOS

NAXOS Music Library
http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/NAXOS.html

The NAXOS Music Library provides recordings of classical, jazz, world, folk, and Chinese musics, from the complete catalogues of the Naxos, Marco Polo and DaCapo recording companies. Instructors may create playlists to supplement music courses with listening material. Accompanying texts include program notes, listeners' guides, biographies of composers and artists, and opera librettos.

This must be used to be appreciated. A diversity of music from around the world, from the Middle Ages (1150-1400) to the recent past, is avaibale free -- to listen to -- on the NAXOS database/server to members of the University community. This large collection of superbly recorded music can be enjoyed for pleasure or used for instruction. A search engine enables one to identify material using single fields or by combining fields.

Fields that may be searched singularly or in combination are:

Genre and Music Categories
Composer/Arranger/Lyricist
Disc Title/Composition Title
Artist (Soloist/Conductor)
Performing Group
Instrument
Period (Centuries)
Country
Year Composed (Enter a Range)
Moods and Scenarios (enchanted, disturbed, etc)

New Insights into the Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Each year numerous books are published on Abraham Lincoln. Recently two outstanding contributions have been made, one by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (FDR and WWII, No Ordinary Time) , Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster, 2005) and the other by Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

The Week of 4 November 2005 (p. 30) carries a brief column that notes the difficulties Goodwin has weathered because of her admission of plagiarism of portion of a recent book. Thomas Mallon, author of Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (Ticknor & Fields, 1989), notes in The Atlantic Monthly (November 2005 and available online through InfoTrac OneFile http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/eai.html) that Goodwin found solace in Lincoln’s philosophy: “His whole philosophy was not to waste precious energies on recriminations about the past.” From the article: "I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress," Lincoln wrote at the end of 1862 to the daughter of a friend whom been killed in battle. His consolations, his urgings, his epistolary loss-cuttings, have been stacked and shelved around Goodwin, nearly walling her in, for years now. When I sat with her in Concord last summer, she showed me, one by one, copies of the pictures that would go into the book, clearly eager to push it over the finish line, just as clearly hesitant to let it go. Abraham Lincoln is a subject to which she's done justice, and he is a subject she needed more than she first knew.”

Goodwin’s book focuses on Lincoln’s relationship with his cabinet. Her Lincoln is not gloomy or depressed and she says that she “came to know and love” him. Goodwin recently spoke about this book and more on C-Span’s Book TV for three hours. Listen to and see the conversation at http://www.booktv.org/feature/index.asp?segid=6146&schedID=384. National Public radio also covered the book, hear the program at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4994044 and http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4989622.

Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness was also explored by a National Public Radio program, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4976127. From the book: “In three key criteria -- the factors that produce depression, the symptoms of what psychiatrists call major depression, and the typical age of onset -- the case of Abraham Lincoln is perfect. It could be used in a psychiatry textbook to illustrate a typical depression. Yet Lincoln's case is perfect, too, in a very different sense: it forces us to reckon with the limits of diagnostic categories and raises fundamental questions about the nature of illness and health.”

Authoritative Information in Bite-Size and Dinner Plate Servings

Looking for quick but authoritative background information on a host of subjects? Looking for an outline of current interpretations as well as an overview of past interpretations? Need responsible suggestions for further reading? Apart from databases, perhaps the most vibrant child of the reference book publishing industry today is the TOPICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA. Britannica http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/eb.html can be very useful; but subject encyclopedias are in a league by themselves. They’re special. At their best, they parse and tightly define an already tightly defined intellectual universe, whether it is the Enlightenment, American colonial history, American cultural and intellectual history, or American social history. Not all of these sources are avaiabvle online, but for a list of what we have avaiable online, go to Encyclopedias by Subject http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/infotree/resourcesbysubjecEncyclopedias.asp. For some guidance on overview sources freely avaiable on the Web, go to Web Reference Sources http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/selected.html.

These sources are excellent aids for preparing for examinations and wonderful sources of ideas for papers. You could walk through the reference collection of a large research or academic library and bump into many of them – and many other things along the way. Or you might search an online catalog using the form, in keyword mode, encyclopedias.su. and women.su. or encyclopedias.su. and slavery.su. As you can see, it’s formulaic. Confused: Read the directions for keyword searching http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/help/ubwebcat.html! And, also, the distinction between topical/academic encyclopedias and dictionaries is not tightly drawn. A favorite of mine is the erudite Dictionary of the History of Ideas. In fact, students of the history of ideas will want to consult the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, and the new – and online – International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/IESBS.html.
Look at any of these sources across time, that is, in various editions, and you’ll see changing interpretations and fashions concisely presented. In fact, used this way, these sources can be used as primary sources for historical investigation.

Needless to say, the same topic may be treated in “myriad” sources. In fact, the referential publishing business has been so big that the number of these things is speaking modestly -- ENORMOUS. Now, however, you can search across thousands of them at one time using a dandy resource named Reference Universe http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/refuniverse.html. Another source that aggregates or gathers together overview information from a veriaty of publications is History Resoruce Center: U.S. http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/hrc.html.

Finally, be sure to take a look at The Reader's Guide to American History, avaibale only in hardcopy. Peter J. Parish, editor. London: Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997. Lockwood Library and Undergraduate-SCI/ENGR Reference Collections E178.R43 1997 What are the most important books on a topic? This highly useful volume answers this question by offering a brief essay on each topic created through summaries of selected books. It is an encyclopedia and a guide to reading and historical interpretation and is complemented by Reader's Guide to Women's Studies, edited by Eleanor B. Amico (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), Lockwood Library and Undergraduate-SCI/ENGR Reference Collections HQ1180.R43 1998.

The Best Blog Search Engines

What is the best way to find a blog that may interest you? Try these search engines. (From The Wall Street Journal and The Week, 28 October 2005)

http://technorati.com/
From the Web site:
"The power of weblogs is that they allow millions of people to easily publish their ideas, and millions more to comment on them. Blogs are a fluid, dynamic medium, more akin to a 'conversation' than to a library — which is how the Web has often been described in the past. With an increasing number of people reading, writing, and commenting on blogs, the way we use the Web is shifting in a fundamental way. Instead of being passive consumers of information, more and more Internet users are becoming active participants. Weblogs let everyone have a voice.

Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs. "

http://feedster.com/
From the Web site:
"Feedster is a rapidly growing Internet search engine and advertising network that provides timely and meaningful information to consumers and large Internet sites in need of targeted media. Feedster provides a fresh index across over 16 million feeds several times per hour, adding millions of new documents daily. Feedster benefits from the ways that blogging is changing the Internet’s basic building blocks – from unstructured web pages to structured documents.
As blogging became mainstream in 2004, it was accompanied by RSS. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is the structured data format used originally to syndicate blogs and news, but is now spreading quickly to mainstream commercial use in job postings, e-commerce, and enterprise applications. For instance, over five thousand new job postings are added to Feedster via RSS daily. According to Pew Internet and American Life Project’s recent report, 32 million Americans read blogs, 8 million have their own blogs, and 6 million have RSS readers. RSS is growing at a scale comparable to web pages in the mid-1990s.There are now millions of feeds, up from thousands two years ago."

http://icerocket.com/
From the Web site:
"IceRocket, a privately owned and operated Search Engine ...
... is a global leader in commercial search services on the Internet, providing new and more powerful ways for customers to find exactly what they are looking for. IceRocket is pioneering commercial search by putting the interests and wants of consumers before advertisers. IceRocket has innovative blog search technology to search blogosphere."