From ancestry.com: From a printed mailer in 1888 to the final publication in 1993, the Sears Catalog has grown into an important record of what life was like through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Beginning with mail order goods the company followed the railroad in America’s westward expansion and quickly became a national institution providing a wide variety of goods. This particular database contains images of these historic catalogs over the years. Do you know what your great grandparents would have worn? What would they have wanted for Christmas? Get an idea by looking at the Sears Catalog through the...

From the press release: Gale, part of Cengage Learning, and McMaster University today announced an agreement for Gale to digitize McMaster University’s collection of materials related to the Holocaust, propaganda and the Jewish underground resistance movement during the Second World War. “The depth and importance of the McMaster collection make it one of the leading Holocaust and Resistance archives in the world,” said Jim Draper, vice president and publisher, Gale. “We are proud to have the opportunity to digitize these invaluable documents--and to make them available to a wider audience--so that students and researchers, no matter their location, can access these...

From the press release: Gale, part of Cengage Learning, today announced the release of Gale NewsVault, a specially designed online platform that enables cross-searching of Gale’s enormous range of historical newspaper and periodical collections from a single interface. Providing access to more than 2,000 titles and 10 million digitized pages, Gale NewsVault provides an unparalleled window to the past for researchers and students. Libraries that have purchased any Gale historical newspaper or periodical collection will have immediate access to Gale NewsVault. Users are able to simultaneously search or browse across multiple products offered by their institution. Users will also see an...

On Friday, we posted about the launch of the Mexican Digital Library (MDL). Art Daily has a bit more about the MDL in this article: Promoted by the National Council for Culture and Arts (Conaculta), the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the National General Archives (AGN) and the Centro de Estudios de Historia de Mexico (CEHM-Carso), the web page of the library was presented on November 24th 2010, with a digital collection of nearly 20 historical documents safeguarded by these institutions, dated from 500 to 1949 of the Common Era. The mentioned institutions collaborated with the Mexican Digital Library with the aim of...

From Xinuha: Mexico has joined a world online library project, with the launch Wednesday of its Mexican Digital Library. The library, launched by president of the state-run National Culture and Arts Council Consuelo Saizar, will make historic texts available in eight languages to participants worldwide under the World Digital Library project, which is being promoted by the U.S. Library of Congress. Mexico's contribution to this program includes key codices, published in the pictorial script used in the nation before Spanish colonists arrived in the 16th Century: the Colombian Codice, Testeriano Catechism, the Marquesado del Valle Codice and the Totomixtlahuac Codice. Direct to World Digital Library See Also: "Mexican...

From an Article by David Sarno: "It's very common for people to say, 'Why do I need a library when I've got a computer?' " said Pam Sandlian-Smith, director of the seven-branch Rangeview, Colo., Library District. "We have to reframe what the library means to the community." In the struggle to stay relevant — and ultimately to stay open — libraries are reinventing themselves in ways unimaginable even a few years ago, preparing for a future in which most materials can be checked and read from a home computer, smart phone or electronic reading device. University and public libraries are rushing to push...

In an article in The Atlantic, David Rothman discusses the need for a national digital library system. Here's a snippet: But there is one thing I currently cannot do with my Kindle despite all the sizzle in the commercials--read public library books. Local libraries do not use the Kindle format for their electronic collections, relying instead on rival standards used by Sony Readers and certain other devices. Amazon undoubtedly would love to fix this under terms favorable to CEO Jeff Bezos and friends. But then other issues will remain. How many Kindle books--or those readable on Sony Readers, iPads, and...

From MobyLives: The Calicut University in Kerala is scanning over 12,000 palm leaf manuscripts, which apparently comprise over 3,250 individual works and date from as early as 14th century to as lat as the 18th century. The smallest of these fascinating manuscripts is a mere 7cm by 3cm. The project is of course intended to preserve the manuscripts and make them accessible to academics worldwide. OneIndia reports: The varsity accorded special attention to the digitization project as slight mishandling could result in damage of the rare manuscripts, copies of which were not available, University’s Malayalam Department Head T M Vijayappan, who was coordinating...

From the Announcement (via Israel Antiquities): As part of the celebrations on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of its establishment, the Israel Antiquities Authority is launching a unique project – The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library – to document the entire collection of the Dead Sea Srolls. A major lead gift from the Leon Levy Foundation, with additional major funding from the Arcadia Foundation and the support of Yad Hanadiv Foundation, will enable the Israel Antiquities Authority [IAA] to use the most advanced and innovative technologies available to image the entire collection of 900 manuscripts comprising c. 30,000...

400 Ph. D. theses on Middle Eastern and Islamic studies have been digitized and released in a partnership between the British Library and the Chicago-based Center for Research Libraries. They will be available for free through the British Library's EThOS (Electronic Theses Online) service. Interestingly, EThOS is funded by 111 partner UK universities. More than 38,000 theses have been digitized and are available for free download. More information here....

From a NARA Announcement: The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the grantmaking arm of the National Archives, is pleased to announce a cooperative agreement with The University of Virginia (UVA) Press to make freely available online the historical documents of the Founders of the United States of America. The NHPRC and UVA Press will create a new web site which provides access to the fully annotated published papers of key figures in the nation’s Founding era. The project is designed to include the papers of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin. The National...

From a Newspaper Article: ...LSU Libraries recently announced the availability of six historical Louisiana newspapers online through its Digitizing Louisiana Newspapers Project. The six newspapers – The Carrollton Sun, the Louisiana Democrat, the Ouachita Telegraph, The Morning Star and Catholic Messenger, the West Feliciana Sentinel and the Feliciana Sentinel – are available for searching online at the Chronicling America website. The newspapers are the first installment in a collection that, by September 2011, will include 100,000 pages from more than 50 Louisiana newspapers. Learn More About the Digitizing Louisiana Newspapers Project and Access a List of Papers Source: The Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA) See Also:Chronicling America Homepage...