Europeana

Europeana, a portal compiling 2 million objects from 1,000 institutions in the EU, went live today.  Or it tried to go live and failed, with Wired reporting that it’s been receiving 10 million hits per hour.  Nice!

Europeana says that the goal is not only to merge existing resources but to promote further European digitization efforts.  Just the idea of having a single portal for so many different resources is fantastic, and I’m quite intrigued by this statement:

You can use My Europeana to save searches or bookmark things. You can highlight stuff and add it to your own folders.

Will we be seeing social networking and bookmarking applications along with the content?  The site is currently in beta, with version 1.0 scheduled for 2010, and I’m definitely excited about watching its evolution.  Hopefully things will have calmed down enough in a few days for a good look.

Filed under digital archives, digital libraries, europe, internet, technology | Comment (0)

African American Pamphlets & WWI Postcards

Today I want to point out two nice digital collections at Emory University.

When most of us think of pamphlets the first things that come to mind are the broadsides and revolutionary tracts of the early modern era followed by the religious and social works of the 19th century.  The Emory University Portal for African American Pamphlets, however, sheds light on what I would consider to be an often overlooked but significant aspect of American printing history.  You can look through notable examples beginning on the home page, many of which have striking covers, or browse based on author, illustrator or publisher.  It would be nice if Emory made available more background information and full scans of these tracts (at least for the notable examples,) but I did enjoy just looking through the cover images.  The site also provides, at the bottom of the ‘About‘ section, a list of important pamphlet collections at other institutions.

The second site is The Great War, which features a nice collection of WWI era postcards and poetry.  I’m not much into poetry so I haven’t delved into that section, but the postcards are wonderful and can be browsed via a range of subjects like nationality, image type and content (there are even some WWII era cards in the mix.)  I was particularly taken with the embroidered cards—do give them a look.  A bit disappointed, though, that the ANZACs have been mostly left out.

Filed under US history, WWI, african american history, civil rights movement, europe, great britain, pamphlets, postcards, printing history | Comment (0)