The University of Chicago's Special Collections Research Center has started a program to digitize selected archives and manuscript collections. The digital images are being made available via the online finding aid for each collection. This will recreate for the online user the experience of a researcher encountering the original materials in the SCRC Reading Room, with documents displayed as they are housed in each folder, and with description of the contents in the form of folder headings.
Individual, high-resolution images of each page will be permanently preserved in the Library's digital repository, and can be made available for publication or other research needs. Digitization efforts are currently focused on materials in the public domain, or those for which the University of Chicago holds copyright.
Collections with digitized content now available online include:
• The Ida B. Wells Papers: The collection contains diaries, correspondence, manuscripts and photographs documenting the life of the teacher, journalist,
and anti-lynching activist.
• The Dr. Harry Bakwin and Dr. Ruth Morris Bakwin Soviet Posters Collection:
Nineteen Soviet political posters produced in the early 1930s, collected by the American physicians Dr. Harry Bakwin and Dr. Ruth Morris Bakwin during two trips to the Soviet Union.
• The Fielding Lewis Papers: Business, personal, and legal records documenting life on a plantation on the
James River in Virginia, both before and after the Civil War.
• The University of Chicago Laboratory
School Work Reports:
These reports are about the
Elementary and Secondary division
of the Laboratory School, and
document classroom activities in
the School's first decade.
This initiative is a collaborative effort between University of Chicago Library Special Collections, Preservation, and the Digital Library Development Center. Many thanks to Eileen Ielmini, Kathleen Feeney, Daniel Meyer, Kathy Arthur, Karen Dirr, Charles Blair, and the student scanners in Preservation.
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