Making of America

Last updated

Making of America (MoA) is a collaborative effort by Cornell University and the University of Michigan to digitize and make available a collection of primary sources relating to the development of U.S infrastructure. The Making of America collection at Cornell contains close to a million pages from more than 250 monographs and almost 1000 serials. The University of Michigan Library holds almost 13,000 volumes containing nearly four million pages of e-text. [1] [2]

Contents

History

The initial phase of the Making of America project began in 1995 with the development of an organized collaboration between the University of Michigan and Cornell University. The original funding for the project was in the form of grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. [2] For the beginning phase of the project, the Antebellum Period through the Reconstruction Era, 1850-1877 was selected; the project initiators felt that the literature of this period was appropriate for the beginning phase because it was manageable in scope, of high interest to potential users and the original documents were in need to reformatting due to rapid deterioration. The two participating institutions each focused on different aspects of this period of literature based on what each already had in its collections. The University of Michigan libraries worked primarily on monographs while Cornell University focused on the journal literature of this period. [1] Plans are underway to continue the expansion of the Making of America Project with the involvement of other major research libraries and the Digital Library Federation. [2]

Digital conversion and implementation

The original print documents included in the Making of America project were scanned to create the digital copies that are included in the collection. The digital conversion process was completed by Northern Micrographic, Inc. in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The digital Making of America collection is mounted online using the Digital Library Extension System (DLXS) which was developed by the University of Michigan. [3] [1] [2]

Using the collection

The Making of America collection can be searched through both the University of Michigan Library and Cornell University Library websites. The interface provides browsing and searches of various types including basic, Boolean, bibliographic, and proximity. The Cornell University Library site specifically states that permissions are not required to use items from the Making of America project collection, but recommends a credit line to be included. The University of Michigan offers reprints of included materials and Cornell University can provide enhanced files if desired. [1] [2]

Related Research Articles

The Perseus Digital Library, formerly known as the Perseus Project, is a free-access digital library founded by Gregory Crane in 1987 and hosted by the Department of Classical Studies of Tufts University. One of the pioneers of digital libraries, its self-proclaimed mission is to make the full record of humanity available to everyone. While originally focused on the ancient Greco-Roman world, it has since diversified and offers materials in Arabic, Germanic, English Renaissance literature, 19th century American documents and Italian poetry in Latin, and has sprouted several child projects and international cooperation. The current version, Perseus 4.0, is also known as the Perseus Hopper, and is mirrored by the University of Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JSTOR</span> Distributor of eBooks and other digital media

JSTOR is a digital library founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. Most access is by subscription but some of the site is public domain, and open access content is available free of charge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Diet Library</span> National library in Japan

The National Diet Library (NDL) is the national library of Japan and among the largest libraries in the world. It was established in 1948 for the purpose of assisting members of the National Diet of Japan in researching matters of public policy. The library is similar in purpose and scope to the United States Library of Congress.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core, but may also support additional representations.

The United States National Agricultural Library (NAL) is one of the world's largest agricultural research libraries, and serves as a national library of the United States and as the library of the United States Department of Agriculture. Located in Beltsville, Maryland, it is one of five national libraries of the United States. It is also the coordinator for the Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC), a national network of state land-grant institutions and coordinator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) field libraries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cornell University Library</span> Library system of Cornell University

The Cornell University Library is the library system of Cornell University. As of 2014, it holds over 8 million printed volumes and over a million ebooks. More than 90 percent of its current 120,000 periodical titles are available online. It has 8.5 million microfilms and microfiches, more than 71,000 cubic feet (2,000 m3) of manuscripts, and close to 500,000 other materials, including motion pictures, DVDs, sound recordings, and computer files in its collections, in addition to extensive digital resources and the University Archives. It is the sixteenth largest library in North America, ranked by number of volumes held. It is also the thirteenth largest research library in the U.S. by both titles and volumes held.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Michigan Library</span>

The University of Michigan Library is the academic library system of the University of Michigan. The university's 38 constituent and affiliated libraries together make it the second largest research library by number of volumes in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Books</span> Service from Google

Google Books is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database. Books are provided either by publishers and authors through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners through the Library Project. Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saxon State and University Library Dresden</span>

The Saxon State and University Library Dresden, abbreviated SLUB Dresden, is located in Dresden, Germany. It is both the regional library for the German State of Saxony as well as the academic library for the Dresden University of Technology. It was created in 1996 through the merger of the Saxon State Library (SLB) and the University Library Dresden (UB). The seemingly redundant name is to show that the library brings both these institutional traditions together.

The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) is a not-for-profit organization based in the library of the University of Michigan since 2000. Its purpose is to produce large-scale full-text electronic resources on behalf of both member institutions and scholarly publishers, under an arrangement calculated to serve the needs of both, and in so doing to demonstrate the value of a business model that sees corporate and non-profit information-providers as potentially amicable collaborators rather than as antagonistic vendors and customers respectively.

The University of British Columbia Library is the library system of the University of British Columbia (UBC). The library is one of the 124 members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). In 2017, UBC Library ranked 29th among members of the ARL for the number of volumes in library, making it the third largest Canadian academic library after the University of Toronto and the University of Alberta. However, UBC Library ranked 23rd for the titles held and second in Canada, and had a materials expenditures of $13.8 million, placing it 44th.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Washington University Libraries</span> Library system of Washington University in Missouri, United States

Washington University Libraries is the library system of Washington University in St. Louis. The system includes 12 libraries and over 5.5 million volumes. The John M. Olin Library is the central library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Texas A&M University Libraries</span>

The Texas A&M University Libraries support the teaching, research, and outreach missions of Texas A&M University through leadership in acquiring, managing, and delivering information in an environment that fosters learning and inquiry. In particular, Texas A&M is nationally and internationally recognized for many research collections, including:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michigan State University Libraries</span>

Michigan State University Libraries is the academic library system of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. The library system comprises nine branch locations including the Main Library. As of 2015-16, the MSU Libraries ranked 26th among U.S. and Canadian research libraries by number of volumes and 11th among U.S. and Canadian research libraries by number of titles held.

A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, a library without walls, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital media formats or a library accessible through the internet. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection. Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals or organizations. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. These information retrieval systems are able to exchange information with each other through interoperability and sustainability.

Wallace Olsen was a librarian and early proponent of digital libraries.

Project Euclid is a collaborative partnership between Cornell University Library and Duke University Press which seeks to advance scholarly communication in theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics through partnerships with independent and society publishers. It was created to provide a platform for small publishers of scholarly journals to move from print to electronic in a cost-effective way.

Canadiana.org, formerly the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions, is a non-profit dedicated to preserving Canada's heritage and making it accessible online.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries</span>

The University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries (UTSA Libraries) is the academic library of The University of Texas at San Antonio, a state research university in San Antonio, Texas, United States. UTSA Libraries consists of the John Peace Library (JPL) on the Main Campus, the Downtown Library, and the Applied Engineering and Technology (AET) Library. The libraries provide students and faculty with a comprehensive access to information as well as spaces for active learning, teaching, and interdisciplinary scholarship.

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) is a collaboration between the Library of Congress and WGBH Educational Foundation, founded through the efforts of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The AAPB is a national effort to digitally preserve and make accessible historically significant public radio and television programs created over the past 70+ years. The archive comprises over 120 collections from contributing stations and original producers from US states and territories. As of April 2020, the collection includes nearly 113,000 digitized items preserved on-site at the Library of Congress, and 53,000 items in the collection are streaming online in the AAPB Online Reading Room.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "The Making of America". Cornell University Library: Making of America. 2015. Retrieved December 9, 2015.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "Making of America". University of Michigan Library: Making of America. Retrieved December 9, 2015.
  3. ↑ "DLXS Overview". DLXS.org. Retrieved December 9, 2015.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.