Cool Sites @ the USM Libraries

Looking for information about African-American Migrations or African-American experience? Then try In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience. This site from the New York Public Library contains over 8,300 illustrations, 60 maps, and thousands of pages of primary and secondary texts focusing on the thirteen defining migrations that transformed the African-American experience and the United States as a nation, including the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Colonization, Haitian Immigration, the Great Migration, and more . Each section of the site includes full bibliographies and a plethora of related web links. Users can browser by migrations, by geography, or by a timeline of events. The site includes educational materials and lesson plans for teachers. So if you are looking for materials about the African-American migrations or just interested to learn more about American history be sure to try this site.

URL: http://www.inmotionaame.org/home.cfm

The USM Libraries have compiled a guide to resources on Haiti, including links on how to help and how to search for books.  Let us know if you have additional resources you’d like linked to it!

Do you need to know the average drop-out rate for high-school students for 2007? Need to find educational statistics like this and more, then try the National Center for Education Statistics from the U.S. Department of Education. This site is filled with useful statistics on everything from assessment to campus crime rates. There are search options to search by state, year, school, or type of institution. There are also links to other related government agencies statistics and information. Besides schools, there is also data available for libraries, both public and academic. So next time you need to find education related statistics consider this site as a starting place. By the way the answer is 8.7%.

URL: http://nces.ed.gov/

This post is not about Project Gutenberg but rather the open access publishing site from Columbia University, Gutenberg-e. This site contains peer-reviewed works by distinguished historians from the American Historical Association. The works include topics such as colonial Latin American, Europe before 1800, History of Gender, History of North American before 1900 and more. These works are full text and maybe printed out or read online. The advantage to online reading is all of the supplementary materials, images, music, video and links are active hyperlinks. This is a wonderful site for both students and educators who want to use current open access academic works.

URL:  http://www.gutenberg-e.org/

On this day memorializing the birth of one of the greatest civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King, Jr. we will focus on a collection about him. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute from Standford University is a wonderful resource for just about any type of information about the Martin Luther King, Jr. and his message. The site features an online collection of thousands of his documents up to 1958 as well as audio-visual resources and lesson plans for schools. This collection also includes essays, encyclopedias, and sermons about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. Again this is a wonderful site for anyone seeking for information about Martin Luther King Jr. the man and his message.

URL: http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php

With all the snow and the freezing temperatures let us look at a ‘warmer’ resource, Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937-42. This collection is part of the Library of Congress’s American Memory Collection. The collection consists of the ethnographic field collection that documented American life as part of the Work Projects Administration during the late 1930s. In this collection are folksongs and folktales from the many different groups that settled in Florida such as African-American, Arabic, Bahamian, British-American, Cuban, Greek, Italian, Minorcan, Seminole, and Slavic. With over 376 sound recordings and 106 print materials, including transcriptions, essays, recording logs, and correspondence. Exploring this collection will surely add some sunshine to your winter.

URL:  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/florida/

Another year is upon us, after cleaning out the closet of interesting sites and collections we found a few leftovers that are still good. All of these resources are digital photo collections from several time periods and locations. Each is interesting in its own right and together they all make up a good resources for upcoming classes.

The first collection is Picturing Central Siberia from the University of Alberta. This collection contains photographs of indigenous peoples and cultures in the Siberian Arctic and Subarctic. Most of the photos come from Imperial surveys at the beginning of the 20th century, so it is important to remember the Siberians were the subject of the photographs not the photographers. The photos reflect the various ethnic groups of the region as well as everyday life and economy.

The second collection is MOLLUS Massachusetts Civil War Photos. MOLLUS or Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States is a group which preserves documents and more about the Union Army during the Civil War. The photo collection is mostly from the Massachusetts regiments along with other New England groups involved in the Civil War. This collection contains many interesting photos which would be of interest to both historians and photographers. Most of the photos are scans from original tin types.

The last digital collection is the Historical Photographs of China which covers much of the early history of modern China from the early 1900’s to the 1940’s. This collection consists of various photo collections of  a Chinese diplomat, foreign businessmen, staff of the administrations in the Chinese treaty ports, missionaries, and officials of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. This collection contains interesting insight on social life, commercial history, the history of dress and fashion along with political events such as the 1925 May 30th incident. So enjoy these collections and we will be sure to get the new sites out real soon.

URL: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/vcr/eap016/index.php

URL: http://www.ahco.army.mil/site/finding_aids_redirect.jsp?linkFlag=mmollus

URL: http://chp.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/index.php

This post will cover several interesting collections of sheet music and music manuscripts.

First is the Sheet Music Catalog from University of Southern Carolina. This collection includes over 10,000 pieces of 19th and 20th century music, many of with MP3 recordings of the music as well. This collection can be searched by title, composer, arranger, or even by the first line of the lyrics.

The next collection is the Music Manuscripts and Printed Music collection from the Morgan Library & Museum. This collection of digitized music manuscripts is very interesting in that in addition to the works of Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Schubert and many others, this collection also includes letters and other original documents from the composers. This resource does not include a search option so it must be browsed in order to locate items.

The final collection in this roundup is the Juilliard Manuscript Collection. This collection contains over 130 manuscripts, engravings, and sketches for many well renown classical composers. Highlights of this collection include a proof of the 9th Symphony with markings and annotations by Beethoven himself. The collection is organized by composer with all their available works listed on their own page. As with the Music Manuscripts and Printed Music Collection, there is no search option (yet) so browsing by composer then selecting a work is the only way to access the items. We hope that you find some of these music collections helpful and useful to you in the upcoming semester.

URL: http://sheetmusic.library.sc.edu/

URL: http://www.themorgan.org/collections/collectionsMusic.asp

URL: http://www.juilliardmanuscriptcollection.org/home.html

Now that classes are over and the grades are in, let us take a look at a resource for enjoyments sake. American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915 is a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This exhibit examines how art depicting everyday life in America changed as the country changed. Included in this exhibit are many of the nation’s most celebrated painters—John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Sloan, and George Bellows—along with their lesser-known colleagues which according to the website “captured the temperament of their respective eras, defining the character of Americans as individuals, citizens, and members of ever-widening communities.” The exhibit is divided into four time periods, inventing American stories, 1765-1830, Stories for the public, 1830-60, Stories of war and reconciliation, 1860-77, and Cosmpolitan and Candid Stories, 1870-1915. Within each period there are several paintings with notes about each piece and how that particular piece reflects its time period.

URL:http://www.metmuseum.org/special/americanstories/