African American History Resources, Part Two: pre-20th century, slavery, emancipation etc

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To follow up my previous post listing some of the resources we have available for African American history in the 20th century, here I’ll set out some of the resources we have for earlier time periods, in particular related to slavery/anti-slavery, emancipation, and the Civil War (another core area of our collection). My period-division here has been very rough, just to avoid having an enormously long post, so some of the resources listed here will reach into the 20th century, and I will also not repeat resources here from my previous post that do cover earlier periods (especially our government publications and newspaper resources).

Microfilm and archival collections

The Freedmen’s Aid Society Records cover 1866-1932, and extend to 120 reels of microfilm (guide available at Micr. BX 8235 .F74 2000).  The Freedman’s Aid Society was originally founded as the Fugitives’ Aid Society with the aim to assist fugitive slaves and to lobby and protest against slavery in the United States. With the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fugitives’ Aid Society became the Freedmen’s Aid Society. The organisation sent money and volunteer aid to the South after the defeat of the Confederacy. They also had a strong education initiative and was responsible for the establishment of many historically Black colleges and universities.

One of the major archival collections held in Rhodes House Library (next door) are the Papers of the (British) Anti-Slavery Society. This society, founded in 1835, had as its aim the abolition of slavery throughout the world in general and in the United States in particular. It convened the first World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London in June 1840, at which some fifty leading American abolitionists were present. After 1840 the society’s transatlantic prestige declined and a second convention held in 1843 attracted only a few American delegates. The Society continued to concern itself with American problems and correspond with American abolitionists up to the Civil War but it was affected by the divisions in the American movement and there came a realisation that it could do little to affect the outcome of the Americn situation. If you’re interested in consulting papers from this archive, contact staff in Rhodes House Library.  See http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/blcas/anti-slavery-society.html for more information.

Another archival collection held at Rhodes House is that of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which was founded in 1701 as a result of an enquiry into the state of the Church of England in the American colonies. Its remit was broadened to encompass evangelisation of slaves and Native Americans. More information can be found at http://www.mundus.ac.uk/cats/11/1052.htm, and again, if you want to consult this archive, contact staff in Rhodes House Library.

In addition to these papers of societies, we have several microfilm collections of the papers of individuals who were active in American politics in the mid-19th century, and which will include material on slavery and emancipation to a greater or lesser extent.  These are the papers of James Buchanan (Micr. USA 458), Salmon P. Chase (Micr. USA 331), William H. Seward (Micr. USA 346), and Thaddeus Stevens (Micr. USA 353).  Abraham Lincoln‘s papers can be found online via the Libary of Congress, who have digitised around 20,000 documents from the 1850s through to Lincoln’s death in 1865.

The Records of the American Colonization Society, founded in 1817 to resettle African Americans in West Africa, cover 1792-1964, but the bulk of the material dates from 1823-1912. There is a guide available at Micr. E 448 .U54 1979, and selections of these records are also available online via footnote.com.

On a similar theme, we also have the Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior relating to the suppression of the African slave trade and Negro colonization, which is a comprehensive set of government papers on many aspects of executive federal involvement in colonisation between 1854 and 1872. These are on microfilm at Micr. USA 456, and can also be found online via footnote.com.

Online resources

And finally, here’s a list of some of the useful free online resources I have come across relating to African American history pre-20th century, slavery, emancipation etc, all saved on our delicious page for future reference: 

These are just some of the more specific online resources available, but there is so much more to be found in various state digital libraries or wider Civil War web resources, just to point you to two subsets of our delicious list.  Happy hunting!

Credit: some of the text in this post was originally written by the History Librarian, Isabel Holowaty, as I have just borrowed her descriptions where they already existed.

African American History Resources, Part One: 20th Century

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February is Black History Month, and so I thought I’d put together a couple of blog posts about some of the resources we have available in the library for African American history.  Resources for African American history are increasingly a particular strength of the VHL’s collection, and with our recent acquisition of the electronic archives of two major black newspapers of the 20th century (The New York Amsterdam News, 1922-1993 and The Pittsburgh Courier, 1911-2002 – see this blog post for more information), we are now the only institution in Western Europe to have access to the archives of three black newspapers.  In this first blog post I will focus on 20th century African American history resources, in particular relating to civil rights, and will follow it up (by the end of the month, I promise!) with one on the 19th century and slavery & emancipation.

Newspapers

To start briefly with newspapers and periodicals (but not too extensively, as they were the subject of my last two blog posts), in addition to the three archives mentioned above, we also have a collection of 17 black journals from the first half of the twentieth century available on microfiche (to see which, take a look at our online newspapers-on-microfilm list), as well as an extensive run of the leading African American magazine, Ebony, from 1945-1954 (on microfilm) and then 1958-2008 in print.   If you’re looking for really recent African American newspapers, then Ethnic NewsWatch (via OxLIP+) provides coverage of ethnic and minority newspapers from 1990 to the present.

For more information on finding newspapers in general, take a look at the previous two posts on this blog.

Microfilm collections

The Civil Rights Era is a particular strength of our collection, and we have several microfilm collections of papers and records relating to the Civil Rights struggle.   The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Papers cover 1959-1976, and include the records and papers of this organisation, which was founded in 1942 in Chicago and advocated non-violent direct action to address racial discrimination.  A guide to the microfilm collection can be found at Micr. E 185.61 .C75455 1984.

We only have selections of the Papers of the NAACP, but even so this is a massive collection of records, speeches, reports, correspondence, branch files and campaign information from the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People.  We hold parts 1, 2, 11A, 11B, 12B, 12C, 12D, 26B, 26C, 26D, 28A, 28B, 29A, 29B, 29C, and 29D of this collection (along with guides), which cover a range of topics, locations and dates from 1909-1970.

Another substantial microfilm collection we hold is Civil rights during the Nixon Administration, which record the Nixon administration’s broadening of the concept of equal rights beyond desegregation to include affirmative action in hiring women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and an expanding and overlapping list of other groups. Even though the subject matter here is much broader, you will still find records covering the continuing controversy over school desegregation and other topics relating to African American history.

And finally for microfilms, jumping back a little in time, are the Records of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which was set up following the riot of July/August 1919 by Illinois governor Frank Lowden.

Government publications and official papers

You can, as expected, find a huge amount of material in our major government publications resources, particularly of course the US Congressional Serial Set (via OxLIP+) where you can browse for publications related to acts such as the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as search and browse by subject.

One thing you may not realise that we have though is a lot of the printed civil rights hearings, in particular those before the United States Commission on Civil Rights in the early 1960s – search for civil rights hearings on SOLO.  Many of these are down in our stack, so you will need to place a stack request via OLIS to get them fetched up for you.

I will write further blog posts in the future about finding government publications, so keep an eye on the blog for that if you need more guidance.

Books

Just a quick note that the shelfmark range for African Americans in the Library of Congress classification is E 184.5 – E185.98.  Obviously you can search SOLO to find out what books we have, but if you want to go and browse the shelves, that’s where to head for!

Online resources

As ever, there is a huge and growing amount of fantastic primary source material being made available online.   A good starting point is the VHL’s delicious page, and the sites we have saved there tagged as African American: http://www.delicious.com/vhllib/African_American.  Some particular highlights for the 20th century/civil rights are:

Finding US Newspapers II: On the web and elsewhere in the UK

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My last post focused on the newspaper sources that the VHL holds, both in print and as electronic resources.  However, there are a lot more sources of historic US newspapers freely available on the web and in library collections elsewhere in the UK.  This post will point you to some useful sites online where you can find some of these.

Chronicling America (Library of Congress)
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ 
This is the Library of Congress’s historic newspapers site, and has two distinct purposes.  One is the Chronicling America Directory, which provides bibliographic information about newspapers published in the United States from 1690 to the present as well as listings of libraries in the States that have copies.   The second is to provide access to thousands of digitised pages of a wide range of newspapers from 1860-1922.   Full-text coverage is only for certain states: Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.   You can restrict your search by state or date range, as well as search within a specific newspaper title.  Pages can be viewed online or downloaded as PDFs or image files.

The Library of Congress also provides a couple of different ways into the collection.  There is the topics interface, which allows you to browse articles relating to a wide range of topics, from Presidential administrations and events such as the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, to the baseball World Series, Butch Cassidy, or Nikola Tesla.  They are also working with Flickr, uploading images of cover pages from the New York Tribune‘s illustrated newspaper supplements.  They even make their API available, for anyone wanting to create different ways to explore the data.

Google News Archive
http://news.google.com/newspapers 
As well as the Google Books project, Google are also digitising thousands and thousands of pages of newspapers, and the Google News Archive page allows you to browse these directly.  It’s a very basic interface, with just an alphabetical listing of all the newspaper titles available, and information as to what dates are covered, but once you click on a specific title you are brought to a nice timeline view, from where you can easily browse issues by date.  It being Google, the search function is very straightforward, but there is an advanced search available from the very tiny link next to the search box at the top of the page.
 
Newspapers on Footnote.com
http://go.footnote.com/newspapers/
Footnote.com is a subscription website that works with the National Archives to digitise vast quantities of records, images and archival material, as well as encouraging the public to add annotations and upload their own material.   They also have a large collection of digitised newspapers, comprising some 4 million pages.   You can search the collections without signing up, but be aware that a lot of the content is only available to paid subscribers, so you may not be able to see the full-text if you have not paid over your subscription fee.

NewspaperCat
http://www.newspapercat.org/
NewspaperCat is an online catalogue of digitised historical newspapers from the United States and Caribbean, hosted by the University of Florida.  It currently links through to over 1000 titles and is expanding.   You can search or browse by title or location.

Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/details/texts
The Internet Archive is the other major site for freely available digitised material on the web, and contains scanned images of books and journals from many major American libraries, including therefore also newspaper issues.   However, tt is not the easiest site to search, particularly for newspapers and periodicals as the search results list doesn’t show you the date of the item, you can’t browse, and there’s no way to limit your search to this kind of material.  Worth checking though if you know the title you’re looking for and have struck out elsewhere – you might be in luck!

Various local digitisation projects
Examples on the VHL’s delicious page: http://www.delicious.com/vhllib/Newspapers 
More comprehensive listing on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newspaper_archives#United_States 
There are a huge number of digitisation projects by University and State libraries, archives and historical societies all over the US, and many of these include newspapers.  Some are distinct projects to digitise runs of specific newspapers, whereas others are wider projects that include newspaper articles, pages or entire issues within them.   I’ve been saving any I’ve come across on the VHL delicious page, but find more and more all the time.  There’s also an excellent listing available on Wikipedia, as well as one provided by Penn Libraries.   If I haven’t already found a site that’s useful to you, then it’s always worth checking the website of the relevant State Historical Society and major University libraries.  The content available and presentation of the interfaces may vary wildly from place to place, but overall there’s an awful lot of good stuff out there.

Newspaper holdings elswhere in the UK
Between them, libraries in the UK hold quite a wide range of US newspapers, so if you can’t find things here in Oxford or online, you may well be able to track them down in other libraries.   The best starting place is the British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale, and you can search their newspaper catalogues online.

For other libraries in the UK as well, the British Association of American Studies (BAAS) maintains a list of US newspaper holdings on their website, which can be searched and browsed by title, and will tell you which UK library holds what.  One caveat about this list is that it relies on the invidual libraries updating BAAS when their holdings change, so you’d be wise to check with the individual library that they definitely do have what you’re looking for before making a trip.

Finding US newspapers I: Oxford resources

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The VHL has just acquired access to the online archives of two new newspapers, The New York Amsterdam News, 1922-1993 and The Pittsburgh Courier, 1911-2002. Along with the access that we already had to the archive of the Chicago Defender, 1910-1975, Oxford is now the only institution in Western Europe with access to three major black newspapers.  We were able to purchase these two major new resources thanks to a generous donation received by the History Faculty, and it brings our total number of US newspaper e-resources up to five (along with The New York Times and Washington Post).  However, if you’re looking for US newspapers, this is by no means all we have!   Prompted by our new acquisitions, this blog post will provide a summary of some of the US newspaper sources available in Oxford and how to use them.   A second blog post soon will cover newspapers freely available online and elsewhere in the UK.  News magazines and other periodicals will also largely be left to a subsequent post.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers (online via OxLIP+)

  • The New York Times (1851-2007)
  • The Washington Post (1877-1994) [1995-2005 available on microfilm in the VHL – see below]
  • The Chicago Defender (1910-1975)
  • The New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993)
  • The Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002)

The above five newspaper archives are all provided by ProQuest and available via OxLIP+.  As they are all available from the same provider, they are cross-searchable with one another, as well as with other ProQuest historical databases (such as the American Periodicals Series or some British and Irish newspapers which Oxford also has access to).   When you click through from any of the titles on OxLIP+, you will be taken to the same ProQuest screen listing available databases.  The historical databases are listed at the bottom of the page so you may need to scroll down. You can then either select several to search, or click on an individual title to just look at that one archive.

Both the basic and the advanced search screen make it easy for you to restrict your searches by date (before, after, or between), and have a ‘more search options’ tab at the bottom which allows you to search specifically by author or document type (advert, editorial, article, etc).  Once you have found an article that interests you, you can view, download, email and print PDFs of the article itself or the page that the article is on.  You can also get citation information and direct links to the article so that you can come back to it later.   Another useful function is the ‘page map’ display, which not only shows you the full page, but allows you to click on other articles within the image to view them, putting the article in context within the newspaper as a whole.

The ProQuest platform also offers a range of options for saving records.  You can mark documents both from the article view and from the results list, and they are then available by clicking on the ‘My research’ tab at the top of the search screen.  From here, there are a variety of options for exporting your list of records – as a printed or emailed bibliography, as citations into reference manager software, or as HTML files.  The email option also allows you to send yourself the articles themselves as PDFs (though you might not want to do this for too many at once!).

19th Century US Newspapers (online via OxLIP+)

 19th Century U.S. Newspapers provides access to approximately 1.7 million pages of primary source newspaper content from the 19th century, featuring full-text content and images from numerous newspapers from a range of urban and rural regions throughout the U.S. The collection encompasses the entire 19th century, with an emphasis on such topics as the American Civil War, African-American culture and history, Western migration and Antebellum-era life among other subjects.

The search interface offers both basic and advanced keyword searching, with options to restrict by location or newspaper title as well as by date and type of article.  In addition there is a newspaper search screen, which allows you to search for specific publications, again with the option to limit by location (state or city).  It is not possible to browse the newspaper titles available but you can download a list of all the newspapers included as a Word document.  Once you have found a newspaper that you are interested in, it is then possible to browse the available issues.

Much like the ProQuest interface described above, you can download PDFs of pages or individual articles, and the same page map facility is also offered here, allowing you to click through to the individual articles from the full page.

Newspapers available on microfilm in the VHL

In addition to the newspaper archives we have access to electronically, the VHL also has a substantial collection of American newspapers on microfilm.   Most of the newspapers we have are either part of the Early American Newspapers collection, or the Black Journals collection, but we also have runs of both the New York Times (the printed index to which is also available in the reference section) and Washington Post from 1851/1877 respectively up to the end of 2005.  For the Washington Post, the electronic version stops in 1994, so the microfilms are the only way to access the years after that.

The titles that make up the Early American Newspapers collection cover the years 1690-1876 (largely 1760-1860), and include titles from all thirteen original states, plus Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Ohio, Tennessee, Vermont, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.  The VHL holds 79 titles from this collection on microfilm, as well as a guide to the entire collection (in the reference section at Micr. PN 4855 .E18 1987) which contains descriptions of each newspaper.

The Black Journals collection contains 17 titles from the first half of the 20th century, providing a historical record of black Americans and their culture. Titles include The Crisis, Colored American Magazine, Harlem Quarterly, Race Relations and the Tuskegee Messenger.

A list of all the newspapers that we hold on microfilm can be found in the microfilm subject guide in the library, and also viewed online. 

Ethnic NewsWatch (online via OxLIP+)

This bilingual database (English and Spanish) covers US ethnic and minority newspapers and other periodicals. Coverage begins in 1990, although you can find full-text access to some articles dating further back, and abstracts for more.  A full list of titles included in the database can be found by clicking on the ‘Publications’ tab at the top of the search screen, and there are also RSS feeds available for current titles if you want to keep up to date.   Ethnic NewsWatch is provided by ProQuest, like the Historical Newspapers, so the search interface should look familiar if you have used those before.  However as it is not a historical database it cannot be cross-searched with those newspapers and must be searched separately.  

Nexis UK (online via OxLIP+)
Nexis UK is a vast database that provides access to thousands of news sources from all over the world. Its coverage is largely current and recent, but does go back 20 years in some cases.  If you want to restrict your search to US newspapers you can do so by selecting ‘US news’ in the ‘sources’ box towards the bottom of the search screen.  This will then provide you with a list of available titles to restrict your search further by specific publications if you would like to do so.

December 7, 1941: Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor

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One thing I thought might be fun to do on occasion on this blog is to showcase some individual documents from our various resources that tie in with events and days in history.  Yesterday was the 69th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and today is the anniversary of the USA’s declaration of war on Japan and entry into World War II (mutual declarations of war with Germany and Italy followed a few days later).  I’ve had a look through some of our e-resources to see what I could find relating to the Pearl Harbor attack, as follows:

Newspapers and contemporary reports
We have electronic access to the archives of both the New York Times and the Washington Post. You can search them individually or both at once, if you select them both on the first screen you come to after clicking through from OxLIP+.   Searching both for December 8, 1941 brings up a large number of articles and editorials, and you can also get to images of the front pages of both papers from that day.

Link to full page image (Oxford users only)


Link to full page image (Oxford users only)

 
The official response
The US Congressional Serial Set is our major e-resource for US government publications. I’ll write in more detail about it in forthcoming blog posts, but it contains all the reports and documents submitted to Congress from 1817-1994.  A search for ‘Pearl Harbor’ and ‘1941’ brings up both the House and Senate Documents from the Joint Session where President Roosevelt addressed Congress and requested that they declare war:

Serial Set Vol. No. 10599, Session Vol. No.22
77th Congress, 1st Session
H.Doc. 453
State of war between the United States and the Japanese empire. Address from the President of the United States before a joint session of the two houses of Congress requesting that Congress declare that there exists a state of war between the United States and the Japanese empire. December 8, 1941. 

Link to access the full document from the Congressional Serial Set (Oxford users only)

The President’s address can also be found in the Congressional Record, along with the resolution to declare war and the record of the proceedings in the Joint Session. We don’t have the Congressional Record as an electronic resource, but the print volumes are all held in the library – the volume that includes the proceedings on December 8th is v.87, pt.24.  The Senate record also includes various newspaper editorials in response to the attack that were entered into the record at the request of Senator Bridges.  This is the kind of material that is sometimes additionally found in the Congressional Record that you might not otherwise expect or be able to get hold of here in Oxford, as we don’t have holdings of many US newspapers for the 20th century.
 
Another Pearl Harbor-related document that you can find in the Serial Set is the report of the commission appointed by the President to investigate the attack, which was submitted to the Senate in January 1942.

Serial Set Vol. No. 10676, Session Vol. No.8
77th Congress, 2nd Session
S.Doc. 159
Attack upon Pearl Harbor by Japanese armed forces. Report of the commission appointed by the President of the United States to investigate and report the facts relating to the attack made by Japanese armed forces upon Pearl Harbor in the Territory of Hawaii on December 7, 1941.

Link to access the full document from the Congressional Serial Set (Oxford users only)

On the web: Eyewitness accounts and more
As ever, there is a huge amount of material available on the internet, including eyewitness accounts, oral histories, documents and images of all sorts.  Here’s just a sample of things available on the web related to the Pearl Harbor attack:

  • World War II diaries (Footnote.com): Footnote.com is a subscription website, but regularly makes parts of its collections free for a month at a time.  For December, they have opened up their World War II diaries collection.  Most of the content starts in 1942, but it does include this eyewitness account of the 1941 attack.
  • Hawaii War Records Depository Photos: a wealth of digitised photographs documenting the impact of World War II in Hawaii, which were deposited at the Hawaii War Records Depository at the University of Hawaii.  The collection includes 86 images related to the Pearl Harbor attack.
  • Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (University of California): Not about the attack per se, but this online archive contains a huge number of images (photographs, paintings and drawings) and some documents relating to the internment of Japanese Americans following the attack.
  • Various oral histories can also be found on YouTube, and even some old film footage, such as the video embedded below.

For more links to freely available web resources, take a look at the VHL’s delicious page.

How to access electronic resources away from Oxford

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(Cross-posted to the VHL blog)

If you’re going to be away from Oxford over the Christmas vacation, you can still access library electronic resources even when not connected to the University network.   There are two ways to do this.  One is to sign up for a remote access account with OUCS and install VPN (Virtual Private Network) software on your computer, but if that seems fiddly (or you’ve already left Oxford and not sorted that out), library resources are still accessible to you without it.   All you need to do is sign in on SOLO or OxLIP+ using your University single sign-on account, and then click through to the resource you’re looking for – it will know who you are and grant you access as a University member. Now you can enjoy uninterrupted research, no matter where you are!

American Founding Era Collection

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For the first proper post on this blog, I thought I’d start with a resource that we don’t actually own yet, but which we are currently trialling.   We have access to the American Founding Era Collection from the University of Virginia Press until 3rd January 2011, and so if this is your period, I’d encourage you to make the most of this resource while we do.   We would like to be able to purchase it permanently, funds-permitting, and if you’d like us to do so, then lots of usage and positive feedback would be great!

UPDATE: We have now purchased this resource.

The American Founding Era Collection contains digital versions of the published papers of several major figures of the time.  The collections it contains are as follows:

  • The Adams Papers
  • The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
  • The Dolley Madison Digital Edition
  • The Papers of James Madison
  • The Papers of George Washington
  • The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution 

With the exception of the Dolley Madison papers, these are digital editions of the print versions, which have been being published in large, ongoing series for many years.  We do have these print volumes at the VHL (which you can locate by searching SOLO), but the digital versions offer a variety of ways to access the papers and are of course fully searchable – no need to go hunting through indexes or worry you might miss a reference along the way, which for such enormous publications is a huge help.

Note on the Adams Papers: The Founding Era Collection only contains these papers from the founding-generation of the Adams family, and so the bulk of the papers available date from the 18th century.

Note on the Dolley Madison Digital Edition:  This is the first ever complete edition of all Dolley Madison’s correspondence. This collection was ‘born digital’, and is currently complete up to 1837. It is included in and can be accessed via the Founding Era Collection, but also has a separate platform, the one on which it was originally built, which also includes annotations that aren’t accessible from the Founding Era platform. There are links across to the standalone platform from each document in the Founding Era Collection so that these annotations can be found easily.

How to use the database
As well as the full-text search, the browsing options are very powerful. You can browse collections individually or the whole lot at once, and have a choice of doing so by chronology (date of document) or by contents (order of the documents in the published volumes).  There are also browsable indexes available to the Adams, Jefferson, and Washington Papers.

Once you have started browsing any of the contents, chronology, indexes or your search results, there is a navigation compass to take you forward and back through the different levels and documents.  It looks a bit like part of the background (at least, I didn’t realise what it was at first!), so in case it’s not just me that overlooked it, I thought it was worth pointing out.  The platform’s own guide describes how the compass works as follows:

 The navigation compass can be used to move between different places in the current view. The up and down arrows are used to move up and down within the hierarchy. For example, starting at the top of the contents view and repeatedly clicking the down arrow takes you from the publication to a series to a volume and so on down to individual documents. For the chronology view, doing the same thing takes you from decade to year to month to day to documents within that day. The left and right arrows are used to navigate between adjacent items at the same hierarchical level. Thus, if you are in the level corresponding to volumes of a publication, then clicking the left or right arrow takes you to the preceding or following volume, respectively. Again, if you are at the months level of the chronological hierarchy, then clicking the left or right arrows takes you to the preceding or following month. 

It took me a bit of getting used to, but once you’ve got your head round the structure of the collection, it is an easy way to move from one part to another.  Next to it you always see where you are in the hierarchy.

The documents themselves are transcribed, not page images, and contain links to notes, explanatory references and other documents where relevant. You can print documents, but there are no options for exporting/saving records other than to make a note of the durable URL given in the citation box at the bottom of each document.  This box is a useful addition though, giving you guidance on how to cite the document in bibliographies, which can often be tricky to know how to do for online resources.

The collections are still being added to, as the print publication projects are still ongoing.  This is of course less relevant for Oxford users at the moment, as we will lose access after 3rd January, but if we do purchase the collection then it will continue to grow from what is currently available.   There is also a complementary project, Founders Early Access, which is freely available online (and therefore available to Oxford users even after 3rd January) as well as accessible within the main site.  The Early Access collection contains documents that are in the process of being prepared for both print and online publication.  Once the documents are added to the main collection, they disappear from the Early Access site, but whether we do purchase the entire collection or not, it’s useful to know that you can access unpublished papers here.  The link for the Early Access collection is: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/FOEA.html and you can keep up with updates to it at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/FOEA-history.html.  It might also be worth pointing out that the University of Virginia is working with the National Archives to make some of the Founders’ papers freely available online from 2012. 

The American Founding Era Collection is accessible via OxLIP+, and as a trial it is currently listed on the front page. If you are away from Oxford, you can get into the database as long as you sign in via SOLO/OxLIP+ first with your University single sign-on.

Welcome

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Welcome to the US Studies Resources at Oxford blog!  The posts that follow are intended to help students and researchers make the most of the collections available at the Vere Harmsworth Library, as well as more widely at the Bodleian and University of Oxford and online.

I’m aiming to post a couple of times a month, all being well (those who are regular faces at the VHL and RAI will know though that there are often many other demands on my time…), and cover both specific resources and more general topics.   Some posts will reflect enquiries I’ve been dealing with, and others may be more practical guidance on locating and using resources.  Hopefully the blog will build up into a useful resource in its own right.  Please feel free to let me know if there are things you’d like me to blog about – topics or resources – and I’ll see what I can do!

If you want to keep up with general news from the VHL, you’ll find that on the VHL blog.

I’m working on the first ‘proper’ post as we speak, and it should be up in a few days.  If you don’t want to miss out, then why not subscribe by RSS or email using the handy links on the right.