Digital collections
Archives and virtual libraries of texts and images in digital format.
Digital library of primary sources on US history and culture, maintained by the Library of Congress. It offers more than 7 million digital documents.
A project promoted by the Senate of the Republic in 2003 with the aim of creating a single virtual archive of the documentary heritage of political personalities, parties and parliamentary groups, preserved in the Senate Historical Archive and in Institutes and Foundations. Together with the Central State Archive, 22 Institutes and Foundations joined the project: Associazione nazionale per gli interessi del Mezzogiorno d’Italia (Animi), Ancona State Archives, Fondazione Lelio e Lisli Basso, Fondazione Bettino Craxi, Fondazione Biblioteca Benedetto Croce, Fondazione De Martino, Fondazione Einaudi per gli studi di politica ed economia di Roma, Fondazione Goria, Fondazione Giovanni Gentile, Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, Fondazione Ugo La Malfa, Fondazione Giacomo Mancini, Fondazione Giovanni Spadolini, Fondazione Ugo Spirito, Fondazione di studi storici Filippo Turati, Istituto Luigi Sturzo, Istituto storia età contemporanea (Isec), Istituto per la storia della democrazia repubblicana (Isder), Istituto di studi sindacali della UIL, Opera nazionale Mezzogiorno (Onpmi), Società geografica, Comune di Sedegliano – Università degli studi di Udine.
A project for the digitisation and research of the historical series of parliamentary acts edited by the Library of the Chamber of Deputies, it offers free access to the heritage of parliamentary documentation and contributes to the protection and preservation of the historical collections of parliamentary acts. The digital conversion provides for the publication of the texts, in PDF format, of the stenographic reports of the Assembly and the Committees in legislative session, bills and other parliamentary documents starting with the Acts of the Constituent Assembly.
A catalogue of electronic texts divided into three different categories of documents: the texts of the codes of the pre-unitary states; the acts of the provisional governments; the new codes of 1865. Links to the digital formats on the web are provided, made available by the Central Legal Library itself, by Google Books, and by the Library of the Medieval and Modern Law History Section of the University of Milan. The BUG is completed by the Catalogue of Pre-Unitarian Periodicals, which presents a collection of the Biblioteca Centrale Giuridica that is little known, but of great historical and bibliographical interest.
Database of articles and monographs that can be freely consulted and downloaded. With this digital library, Sissco aims to facilitate the circulation of texts that are often difficult to find, thus contributing to the development of scientific research and historiographical debate, as well as to the enhancement of contemporary Italian historiography.
The digital military library consists of around 50,000 public domain texts in word, jpg and especially PDF format, including several hundred sixteenth-century books, and texts rich in images, including colour images often in very high resolution, half of which are in English, a quarter in French, and the rest in German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Latin, and various other languages. IEssi are archived in 25 large sections, the first of which is dedicated to the history and military thought of the ancient world. The second includes the online works of about a hundred famous writers on military art from the 16th to the 19th century, the third and fourth works on military science and war, and the fifth on the theory of military history. The following four (6-9) include bibliographies, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, magazines, yearbooks. The tenth brings together collections of illustrations of all kinds. The following three (11-13) deal with the history of individual wars and campaigns from 1494 to 1918. The next eleven bring together texts on national military history: Italy (14), United States (15), British Empire (16), France and Colonies (17), Germany (18), Austria-Hungary (19), Spain (20), Russia (21), Minor European Powers (22), Asian Powers (23), Latin America (24) and Africa post 1945 (25). In addition, there are three sections that include texts produced by myself and my collaborators and related preparatory materials (26-28).
Project, created in 1999, for the digital edition of the Spanish and Spanish-American bibliographic and documentary heritage. The HISTORIA section includes several thematic portals, including one dedicated to Christopher Columbus and one to Charles V.
The project was born from the collaboration between the Institute of Renaissance Studies and the Computer Research Centre for Humanistic Disciplines (Signum) of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, carried out in collaboration with the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities – Directorate General for Library Heritage and Cultural Institutes, with the aim of directing historical, philosophical, historical-artistic and philological research to the constitution of a virtual library on line, capable of offering rare texts in the most significant editions and translations, made available through appropriate computer systems, guaranteeing research at various levels, including philosophical, historical-artistic, philological researches to the constitution of an on-line virtual library, able to offer rare texts in the most significant editions and translations, made consultable by adequate computer systems, guaranteeing research at various levels, from the simplest to the most sophisticated (frequencies, concordances, relationship between texts and images).
It was founded in 2002 in response to the progressive shrinking of the market for historical non-fiction and scientific journals. It ensures, through telematic networks, the widest possible circulation of the results of historical research, while at the same time continuing to guarantee reading on paper thanks to print-on-demand technology.
The Austrian Akademie der Wissenschaften has made available free of charge on its website the complete edition of ‘Die Fackel’ by Karl Kraus: 922 issues with around 22,500 pages in which the writer from 1899 to 1936 published all his writings. Access is free, with registration. Intertextual research is also possible on the site.
With this portal, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation has aimed to enhance this cultural heritage by making the hitherto published volumes of Italian diplomatic documents, the exhibitions created with the original documents of the Historical Diplomatic Archive and some valuable works kept in the Library accessible online. The technical implementation of the portal was handled by the Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, which provided for the digital acquisition of the documents and the implementation of a user-friendly platform for the use of archival and library material.
It offers unabridged classics and theoretical works in the field of modern historiography.
It offers historical documents of Western Europe transcribed or in facsimile from the Middle Ages to the European Union.
Institutional archive of digital documents of the University of Naples. In the spirit of the Open Access Initiative, it aims to promote the free online dissemination of the scientific production of the University’s teachers and researchers. Authors, after registering, can deposit books, articles, conference proceedings, doctoral theses, abstracts of publications.
The site makes it possible to interrogate through various access keys the photographic collection deposited at the Baldini Library in Rome and belonging to the journalist and writer Paolo Monelli. The collection constitutes a documentary complex of considerable interest that includes a large number of photographic objects, approximately 7500, mainly positives of various formats but also negatives, on glass plates or plastic supports. The chronological span of the documentation covers the period from the early 20th century to the 1950s; only a small part of it, mainly private and family photographs, dates back to the 1960s and 1970s. The photographs were mainly taken during Paolo Monelli’s journalistic activity and represent documents of historical facts or events; a small part is made up of family photographs, evidence of the private life of the journalist, his wife Palma Bucarelli and the customs of those years. Particularly rich are the sections on the alpine troops, news reports in Africa and the world wars. Most of the photographs have been digitised and the relevant catalogue can be consulted in pdf format.
US diplomatic documents from the years 1861-1960, digitised by the University of Wisconsis.
It gives access to 70,000 digitised texts, 80,000 images and dozens of sound resources from the digital collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
Project started in 2005. Publishing houses collaborate with the search engine in order to make their books available for search on Google Book Search. There is also cooperation with several large libraries in order to digitise their collections and make them available online. The universities that have so far enabled digitisation are Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, and the New York Public Library.
The digitisation of manuscript and archival collections as a tool for research and dissemination of the culture of historical and iconographic sources.
It tells the history of Italy through digitised images held by important museums and archives throughout the country. The images can be accessed chronologically or by individual location.
Created in 1996, it includes textual, audio and audiovisual documents in digital format from libraries and private institutions, totalling more than two million documents. The site also includes many series of Italian periodicals. In addition to consulting entire years, it is also possible to do text searches.
Portal of the Italian Digital Library, proposes an integrated access system to the digital and traditional resources of Italian libraries, archives and other cultural institutions, promoting and enhancing the knowledge and usability of the cultural heritage both nationally and internationally.
Digital collection of out-of-copyright historical texts from prehistory to the modern age.
The Municipality of Rome, as part of its cultural activities, promotes a project to preserve the historical memory and identity of the city of Rome through photographs from private collections that are pooled by citizens and collected in the following thematic areas: images of everyday life, images of people within the urban landscape of Rome, and the relationship between everyday life and historical public events.
To mark the 60th anniversary of the Constituent Assembly, the Fondazione della Camera dei Deputati organised an exhibition entitled ‘The Rebirth of Parliament. From the Liberation to the Constitution’, which traces the political and institutional events that led to the elections of 2 June 1946, the activities of the Constituent Assembly and the approval of the Republican Constitution. The site offers for consultation the digital reproduction of numerous precious original documents of the time and a wide selection of printed materials and multimedia tools (videos with period footage and original recordings, ad hoc films, multivisions, etc.).
The Visual Arts Laboratory of the Scuola Normale became autonomous in 2003. It is directed by Massimo Ferretti in collaboration with art historians and computer scientists not only from the Normale. It pays particular attention to reproduction images, understood both as a visual language and as an integral part of the very notion of cultural heritage. The research planned for the coming months is intended for online consultation, allowing for faster and broader comparisons. According to the nature of the different fields of work, the data collection and storage phase proposes cognitive experiences around which meetings and seminars will be organised that will more particularly characterise the topic of art history teaching.
Established by a notarial deed in 1994, known for its freely accessible telematic library project (Manuzio project), it is an o.n.l.u.s. (non-profit organisation of social utility) that aims to promote all artistic and intellectual expression. In particular, it aims to promote the conscious use of information technology in the humanities and to bring humanistic and scientific culture closer together.
A project promoted by the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci Emilia-Romagna and started in 2000, it now consists of a large online database of more than 12,000 political and social posters from different collections, dating from the early 20th century to the present day. The database offers a vast exemplification of the national and international production of political and social communication on paper: from the historical posters of electoral propaganda to the creative freedom of the movements at the beginning of the millennium, from the communication of local authorities to the testimonies of Latin America and many European countries, from the works of some of the major international graphic studios to the self-productions of youth movements.
All of Einaudi’s writings scattered in a myriad of journals, newspapers, collective volumes and occasional publications are collected in a single database to provide scholars with a tool for moving through these texts in the manner most suited to their needs.
Wide selection of publications, downloadable free of charge, of the General Directorate for Archives. It includes the sections: Sources, Notebooks of the ‘Rassegna degli Archivi di Stato’, Essays, Tools, Subsidies.
Precious and rare words and sounds, preserved in the two most important Italian sound archives, the RAI and the Discoteca di Stato. It is possible to explore the site through ten thematic channels (culture, chronicle music, politics, radioparade, religion, science, entertainment, sport, history). It currently offers over a thousand sound documents for listening, from 1900 to the present day.
The minutes of the Reichstag sessions from 1918 to 1942 and other documents made available in digital form by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
List of links to digital resources in the field of historiography.
A Yale Law School project established in 1996 and dedicated to providing Internet access to documentary resources in the field of legal, historical, economic, political, diplomatic and governmental studies.
In 2007, thanks to a grant from the Getty Foundation, a project was launched to digitise the iconographic heritage of the British School at Rome. The database contains not only photographs, but also paintings, drawings, postcards, maps, manuscript documents and prints.
It makes available over 300 texts and 1,000 novellas and poems by about 90 authors, which can be downloaded free of charge. It is possible to query a database of over 8,500 quotations.