Alumni accessible databases

The original formats include manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music. Each online collection is accompanied by a set of explanatory features designed to make the materials easy to find, use, and understand. Collections may be browsed individually, searched individually (including full-text searching for many written items), or searched across multiple collections.

The American Slavery database contains two basic sections: the overview of the collection with related links, available without charge from the home page, and the collection itself. The overview includes a description of the original Library of Congress project, a history of the project, the introduction and appendices to the initial Rawick compilation, and selections from his analysis of the collection, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community. Follow the 'About the Collection' link to access this material.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) includes fourteen thematic collections of primary sources for the study of southern history, literature, and culture.

The texts, images, and other materials come primarily from the premier Southern collections in the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These original Southern materials can be found in several library locations, including the Southern Historical Collection, one of the largest collections of Southern manuscripts in the country; the North Carolina Collection, the most complete printed documentation of a single state anywhere; the Rare Book Collection, which holds an extensive Southern pamphlet collection; and Davis Library, which offers rich holdings of printed materials on the Southeast.

Making of America (MOA) represents a major collaborative endeavor to preserve and make accessible through digital technology a significant body of primary sources related to development of the U.S. infrastructure. Funded originally by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MOA sought to involve research institutions and national consortia to develop common protocols and consensus for the selection, conversion, storage, retrieval, and use of digitized materials on a large, distributed scale.

The complete MOA collection includes over 1.5 million images, representing approximately 5,000 volumes of primary source materials. The selection process at Cornell focused on the major journal literature of the period, ranging from general interest publications to those with more targeted audiences (such as agriculture).

The initial phase of the project, begun in the fall of 1995, focused on developing a collaborative effort between Cornell University and the University of Michigan. Drawing on the depth of primary materials within their respective libraries, these two institutions developed a thematically-related digital library documenting American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. At Cornell University, 109 monographs (267 volumes) and 22 journals (955 volumes) with imprints primarily between 1840 - 1900 were selected, scanned, and made available. Librarians, researchers, and instructors have worked together to determine the content of this digital library and to evaluate the impact of this resource on research and teaching at both institutions.