AP Archive is the film and video archive of The Associated Press, one of the largest and most trusted sources of independent newsgathering. View AP Archive’s videos via this channel – the collection offers 1.7 million global news and entertainment video stories, which date back to 1895.
A database of dealer and collector archives consolidating information about repositories, dealers, collectors, and dealer archives (including dealer photograph archives). This tool provides essential information for scholars working in the fast-growing field of the history of collecting.
Use the Archives Hub to find unique sources for your research, both physical and digital. Search across descriptions of archives, held at over 350 institutions across the UK.
Contains United States congressional documents, records, and acts from the 18th and 19th centuries, housed in the Law Library of Congress. Compiled by the Library's National Digital Library Program.
Browseable and searchable archive of full-text articles in the cognitive sciences. Includes a wide variety of research papers in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, biology, medicine, anthropology and computer science. Material dates back as far as 1950, although most of it is post 1990. As at June 2010, CogPrints contained nearly 3,500 items. Some areas of the archive require registration, to obtain a username and password. *Eprints here are defined as the digital texts of peer-reviewed research articles, before and after refereeing. Before refereeing and publication, the draft is called a preprint." The refereed
Provides long-term access to a broad range of Cornell-related digital content of enduring value. It is open to anyone affiliated with Cornell University (faculty, staff, students, or groups/organizations) as a place to store, organize, preserve, index, and redistribute materials in digital formats that may be useful for educational, scholarly, research, or historical purposes.
CORRESPONDENCE AND OTHER WRITINGS OF SEVEN MAJOR SHAPERS OF THE UNITED STATES:
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams (and family), Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. Over 185,000 searchable documents, fully annotated, from the authoritative Founding Fathers Papers projects.
The Library of Congress Web Archives (LCWA) is composed of collections of archived web sites selected by subject specialists to represent web-based information on a designated topic. It is part of a continuing effort by the Library to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to, and preserve digital materials for future generations of researchers. The early development project for Web archives was called MINERV
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.
The United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government charged with preserving and documenting government and historical records. It also works to increase public access to those documents. NARA is officially responsible for publishing acts of Congress
Declassified documents, pictures, and recordings obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute and library. Contains electronic briefing books on a variety of foreign relations topics.
The Online Archive of California (OAC) provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by more than 200 contributing institutions including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses.
Find resources on Business, Voting & Elections, Historical Records and audits.
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research is the leading educational facility in the field of public opinion. Users can search the iPOLL Databank" which is organized at the question level
Features records comprising the national Inventory of American Painting and Sculpture databases, the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, and the Pre-1877 Art Exhibition Catalogue index.
The UK Data Archive (UKDA) is a resource centre that acquires
Types of material include documents, photographs, slides, negatives, oral histories, artifacts, moving images, sound recordings, maps, and collection finding aids. All non-copyrighted and digitized materials are available for users to download.
From Mickey Mouse to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, characters and stories introduced decades ago continue to be celebrated in brand-new films, television programs, merchandise items and theme park experiences. Recognizing the unique and enduring creative legacy started by Walt Disney, the Walt Disney Archives was established in 1970 to collect, preserve and make available for research the historical materials relating to Walt and the company he founded.
Archives are records that have been created by an individual, group or organisation during the course of their life or their work. They archives held in archive repositories have been assessed by an archive professional and are considered to have long-term or permanent value for the purposes of research and as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator. Archives come in a wide range of formats, including written, photographic, moving image, sound, digital and analogue. They are primary sources, which are largely unpublished and usually unique.
Archives are usually arranged according to:
Archives are generally arranged differently to books. The arrangement of archives is known as a hierarchical arrangement and is created to reflect, as closely as possible, the way an archive was created, or accumulated.
An archive catalogue contains different levels of description beginning with the fonds, or collection level. This top level description provides a broad overview of the archive as a whole, including its size, information on the origin of the collection and the creator, a date range, and information on catalogues or guides associated with the archive - often known as finding aids. It may also tell you whether the archive is available for consultation or not - open or closed. The catalogue is then arranged in sections from largest [collection/fonds] to smallest [items], as shown below.
Published content offered by a Library is generally a secondary source of information, for example a monograph, biography, or journal article that has used primary sources within the author's research but which presents a thesis. Secondary sources can also include accounts of historical events created many years after the event has happened. The records in an archive, however, are primary sources and provide first-hand information or evidence relating to historical events or figures. - see our Libguide on Primary Sources.
Published books, whether in physical or digital format, are indexed and catalogued by subject and author, whereas information in archives is arranged according to the person or organization that created it. The archives of two organizations or two different people, should generally be kept separately (unless there is a specific reason for keeping them together, for example the records of a business that included historical records of businesses it took over). This means that you will probably need to look at records from more than one source, or more than one archive, as you gather information for your research.