The digitization of rare books, manuscripts, and archival material has been a major focus of library special collections for the past several decades, and the 2020 pandemic greatly reinforced the value of this work in making library collections accessible to researchers worldwide. Below are some of the major digital collections available, but the list is nowhere near exhaustive.
Suggestions for collections to include are welcomed and encouraged!
The Bodleian Libraries have been digitizing content since the early 1990s and Digital Bodleian was and is designed to enable access to that content for the widest possible audience. The collection counts over a million images of rare books, manuscripts, and other treasures from the Bodleian Libraries and Oxford college libraries.
The Cambridge Digital Library combines digitized material from the Cambridge University Library collections and research outputs related to the collections from the University of Cambridge and beyond.
Harry Ransom Center - Digital Collections
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is an internationally renowned humanities research library and museum. Its extensive holdings provide a unique record of the creative process of writers and artists, deepening our understanding of literature, photography, film, art, and the performing arts. The digital collections represent just a sample of the Ransom Center's diverse holdings.
Europeana provides access to millions of items from over 2,000 different providing institutions across Europe. Material includes artworks, books, music, and videos on art, newspapers, archaeology, fashion, science, sport, and much more.
Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) and its partners. It offers free and open access to 10 million items - almost 1 million books as well as newspapers and magazines, as well as manuscripts, maps and plans, prints, photographs, sheet music, videos, sound recordings and objects - can be consulted freely on the web.
The Biblioteca Digital Hispánica is the digital library of Biblioteca Nacional de España. It provides free access to over 222,000 titles, including documents, including printed books (15th-19th c), manuscripts, drawings, engravings, pamphlets, posters, photographs, maps, atlases, music scores, historic newspapers and magazines and audio recordings.
Over 232,395 digitized copies of prints, manuscripts, sheet music, maps and other media from the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin). Search within bibliographic metadata, tables of contents, or fulltexts, or browse a variety of content categories. In addition, there are curated collections waiting to be explored.
Library of Congress’ Digital Collections
Nearly half a million digitized books from the 11th to the 20th centuries. Collections also include maps, photographs, letters, diaries, newspapers, personal oral accounts of events, sound recordings, and historic films.
Das Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum - Munich DigitiZation Center (MDZ)
Discover 3,114,240 digitized manuscripts, prints, music, maps, photographs, newspapers, and magazines from the rich holdings of the Bavarian State Library (BSB).
The Huntington Digital Library is the online database of Huntington Library digitized materials. New content is regularly added, yet only a fraction of the Huntington Library’s more than eleven million items is available in digitized form.
Folger Digital Image Collection
The Folger Shakespeare Library’s digital collections contain high-quality, high-resolution images of a large number of Folger collection items. Users have the ability to store their preferred images in media groups and export images.
This site features thousands of digitized manuscripts, maps, books, photographs, artworks, audio and video recordings, and other rare and unique materials from the collections of the Newberry, Chicago's independent research library since 1887. The content here represents only a fraction of the library's vast holdings; materials are continuously digitized and made freely available online as resources allow.
High resolution images from the Library's archive of early American images, map collection, and political cartoon collection are available through Luna. Scans of over 15,000 full books are available through Internet Archive.
English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA)
A project of the the Early Modern Center in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the EBBA is a collection of 9,912 Early Modern Broadside Ballads. The EBBA has made broadside ballads from many different holdings easily and fully accessible: gathered together on one site as ballad sheet facsimiles, facsimile transcriptions, text transcriptions, and recordings, and extensively catalogued. All ballads can be viewed via a basic search (using the magnifying glass at the top right of the window) and robust advanced search functions. The EBBA team’s priority is to archive all of the surviving ballads published during the heyday of the black-letter ornamental broadside ballad of the 17th century—currently estimated to stand at some 11,000 extant works.
Resources through the Folger Shakespeare Library
A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama
A Digital Anthology is a hub for exploring over four hundred extant printed English plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries that were publicly performed between 1576 and 1642, the era of the first commercial playhouses in London.
Early Modern Manuscripts Online
Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) provides scholars and the general public with convenient web access to transcriptions, images, and metadata for a substantial number of English manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Material includes letters, diaries, wills, coats of arms, literary pieces, recipe books, miscellanies, and more.
British Book Illustrations (BBI) digitizes and indexes 10,000 woodcut and engraved illustrations in British and English-language books. BBI began by systematically digitizing and indexing ca. 6,700 illustrations for the years 1604–1640. The use of illustration in books increased significantly in the mid-17th century, so for the rest of the century (1641–1700) BBI focused on indexing books renowned for their illustrations - digitizing and indexing an estimated 3,300 illustrations contained in the Folger collection of British imprints.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) collaborates with other institutions to make biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community. With nearly 200,000 digitized works, the BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global "biodiversity community."
The Linda Hall Library is one of the world’s leading independent science research libraries. Its collections focus on science, engineering, and technology. Digital collections number over 4,500 books, journals, conference proceedings, technical reports, and other materials.
Digital Collections provides access to the National Library of Medicine's distinctive digital content in the areas of biomedicine, health care and the history of medicine.
The Newberry Library's French Pamphlet Collection primarily consists of material published between 1780 and 1810 from the French Revolution Collection (FRC), the Louis XVI Trial and Execution Collection, and several smaller collections of French Revolution era material. It charts the political, social, and religious history of the French Revolution. The material represents the opinions of all the factions that opposed and defended the monarchy during the turbulent period from 1789 to 1799 and chronicles the events—both dramatic and quotidian—of the First Republic. This collection also includes about 3,000 French political pamphlets published between 1560 to 1653 that document a period of religious wars and the establishment of the absolute monarchy.
Primeros Libros de las Americas
The Primeros Libros de las Américas: Impresos Americanos del Siglo XVI en las Bibliotecas del Mundo project is an international collaboration of more than 25 institutional partners throughout Mexico, Spain, Peru, and the United States that seeks to bring together digitally the first books printed in the Americas before 1601. The collection provides unique primary sources for a variety of academic fields studying Indigenous and Spanish American society during the sixteenth century.