EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History is a digital history portal that offers links to online facsimiles, transcriptions, and translations of European primary historical sources. The sponsoring organization is the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, where it was begun in 1995 by Richard Hacken, European Studies Bibliographer.
The main page of EuroDocs points to 46 separate web indexes for countries and city-states of Europe,
as well as to sites for "Medieval and Renaissance Europe" and for “Europe as a Supranational Region”.
Countries include:
Most of the links are to external sources, but within the scope and linkage of EuroDocs are a number of digital treasures connected to the sponsoring institution, BYU.
Jesse Hurlbut of the French and Italian Department has assembled DScriptorium (“D” stands for “digital”), an online image collection of medieval manuscripts.
The page for Spain features facsimiles and transcriptions of previously unpublished, late fifteenth-century letters of King Philip II held in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library.
In cooperation with Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerche sul Viaggio in Italia, CIRVI, an international research center housed in Turin, Italy, and initially as part of a sister-city relationship between the 2002 and 2006 Winter Olympic venues, digitization of Accounts of American Travelers to Italy is ongoing – from Henry Adams to Washington Irving, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Mark Twain.
Monaco's history – from a barren rock fortress protecting the marine interests of the Holy Roman Empire to a principality sheltering high rollers and billionaires – is being documented online with BYU efforts in league with European archives.
A number of EuroDocs pages point to the World War I Document Archive, a high-traffic attraction on the BYU Library server, among whose sources are found hundreds of transcribed Austro-Hungarian documents on the 1914 outbreak of war. The library was also fortunate to get ownership of complete copies of the original Eisenhower Communiqués, a collection of dispatches documenting the Allied advance across Europe after D-Day in 1944, so that these typescripts and their searchable transcriptions could become a part of the HBLL's digital collections.
The site has full search facilities through its MediaWiki interface.
Since the site is in a wiki structure historians, archivists, and other interested collaborators are welcome, by writing to the wikimaster, to add links to primary documents online or to transcribe and add important documents available to them.
A manuscript was, traditionally, any document written by hand – or, once practical typewriters became available, typewritten – as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has come to be understood to further include any written, typed, or word-processed copy of an author's work, as distinguished from its rendition as a printed version of the same. Before the arrival of printing, all documents and books were manuscripts. Manuscripts are not defined by their contents, which may combine writing with mathematical calculations, maps, music notation, explanatory figures or illustrations.
The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is assembling a digital library of reproductions of primary source materials to support the study of the history and culture of the United States. Begun in 1995 after a five-year pilot project, the program began digitizing selected collections of Library of Congress archival materials that chronicle the nation's rich cultural heritage. In order to reproduce collections of books, pamphlets, motion pictures, manuscripts and sound recordings, the Library has created a wide array of digital entities: bitonal document images, grayscale and color pictorial images, digital video and audio, and searchable e-texts. To provide access to the reproductions, the project developed a range of descriptive elements: bibliographic records, finding aids, and introductory texts and programs, as well as indexing the full texts for certain types of content.
Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project ; multiple Wikisources make up the overall project of Wikisource. The project's aim is to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has expanded to become a general-content library. The project officially began on November 24, 2003 under the name Project Sourceberg, a play on the famous Project Gutenberg. The name Wikisource was adopted later that year and it received its own domain name.
FamilySearch is a nonprofit organization and website offering genealogical records, education, and software. It is operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and is closely connected with the church's Family History Department. The Family History Department was originally established in 1894 as the Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU) and is the largest genealogy organization in the world. FamilySearch maintains a collection of records, resources, and services designed to help people learn more about their family history. Facilitating the performance of LDS ordinances for deceased relatives is another major aim of the organization. Although it requires user account registration, it offers free access to its resources and service online at FamilySearch.org. In addition, FamilySearch offers personal assistance at more than 5,100 family history centers in 140 countries, including the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Family Tree section allows user-generated content to be contributed to the genealogical database. As of February 2021, there are over 1.3 billion individuals in the tree and the historical records database contains over 5.7 billion digital images, including digitized books, digitized microfilm, and other digital records.
Baude Cordier was a French composer in the ars subtilior style of late medieval music. Virtually nothing is known of Cordier's life, aside from an inscription on one of his works which indicates he was born in Rheims and had a master of arts. Some scholars identify him with Baude Fresnel, a harpist and organist in the court of Philip the Bold, though other scholars have rejected this.
The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management and improved support for teaching and research. In collaboration with the ten University of California Libraries and other partners, CDL assembled one of the world's largest digital research libraries. CDL facilitates the licensing of online materials and develops shared services used throughout the UC system. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog, CDL has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country and works in partnership with the UC campuses to bring the treasures of California's libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations to the world. CDL continues to explore how services such as digital curation, scholarly publishing, archiving and preservation support research throughout the information lifecycle.
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.
Microsoft TechNet was a Microsoft web portal and web service for IT professionals. It includes a library containing documentation and technical resources for Microsoft products, a learning center which provides online training, discussion forums, an evaluation center for downloading trialware, blogs for Microsoft employees and a wiki.
The Digital Classicist is a community of those interested in the application of digital humanities to the field of classics and to ancient world studies more generally. The project claims the twin aims of bringing together scholars and students with an interest in computing and the ancient world, and disseminating advice and experience to the classics discipline at large. The Digital Classicist was founded in 2005 as a collaborative project based at King's College London and the University of Kentucky, with editors and advisors from the classics discipline at large.
Wikimedia Commons is a media repository of open images, sounds, videos and other media. It also contains JSON files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought together on a single platform and presented in a variety of ways relevant to modern users. The prototype for Europeana was the European Digital Library Network (EDLnet), launched in 2008.
The Papers of Abraham Lincoln is a documentary editing project dedicated to identifying, imaging, transcribing, annotating, and publishing online all documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his lifetime (1809–1865).
Transcribe Bentham is a crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, run by University College London's Bentham Project, in partnership with UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Library Services, UCL Learning and Media Services, the University of London Computer Centre, and the online community. Transcribe Bentham was launched under a twelve-month Arts and Humanities Research Council grant.
The Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) is a non-profit academic service provider. It is the only complete listing of all medieval and early modern manuscripts of European polyphonic music. It is founded on a digital archive of images of European medieval and early modern polyphonic music ranging from complete manuscripts to fragments. The collection, created by the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway University of London, includes metadata for all manuscripts from 800 to 1550 A.D., and most of those from 1550 to 1650, with images for about 20% of the sources. The image collection is added to on a regular basis thanks to donations from libraries and collaborations with projects who acquire images and are able to donate them to DIAMM for display.
Medieval Nordic Text Archive (Menota) is a network of leading Nordic archives, libraries and research departments working with medieval texts and manuscript facsimiles. The aim of Menota is to preserve and publish medieval texts in digital form and to adapt and develop encoding standards necessary for this work.
The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) is a digital library of 17th-century English Broadside Ballads, a project of the English Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The project archives ballads in multiple accessible digital formats.
The Family History Research Wiki provides handbook reference information, and educational articles to help genealogists find and interpret records of their ancestors. It is a free-access, free-content, online encyclopedia on a wiki, hosted as part of the FamilySearch site. It is sponsored by FamilySearch, a non-profit organization, and a genealogical arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Anyone with access to the Internet may read any of the over 91,000 articles, and almost all articles can be edited by registered users (contributors). Registration is free.
Mormon missionary diarists are the Mormon missionaries who kept records in the form of diaries and journals recounting their activities on behalf of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in various parts of the world. Both male and female missionaries kept these diaries and were encouraged to do so by the church. Many of these documents have been donated to the Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library, and since 2003, a large selection of these have been transcribed and digitized.