As a college librarian, I often hear stressed-out students searching for primary sources say, "I'll take anything." Don't settle for just anything. There is a treasury of primary source material available electronically. Peruse my selection of 200-plus primary source sites by conducting a keyword search, exploring the tag cloud at left, or browsing by historical era. You can also visit my Delicious and Diigo sites to review my bookmarks. Here's hoping you find what you're looking for.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Digital Camelot: Access to a Legacy

I spent far too much time today browsing through the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation’s digital archive. I scanned digitized copies of Kennedy’s Harvard’s notebooks and perused family photos taken at Kennedy’s Hyannis compound. These, and much more, are part of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation’s digitization project – Access to a Legacy.

That project is massive in scope. According to the Kennedy Library website, in constructing Access to a Legacy, staff digitized, described, and made available three entire textual collections or subcollections. Those collections included photographic and audio components (the President's Office Files, the White House Central Chronological Files, and the John F. Kennedy Personal Papers); one collection of audio files (the White House Audio collection); one moving image collection (the White House Film collection); one collection of museum artifacts (the State Gifts); and a portion of the White House Photograph collection, which consists of over 35,000 photographs.

You can read more about the collection in this Washington Post article. The photo above comes from Access to a Legacy and shows a casually dressed Kennedy clan gathering in their Hyannis compound on Cape Cod in September, 1963 to celebrate the birthday of family patriarch Joe Kennedy.

Posted by Trish Mc at 2:13 PM
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