While planning for my public humanities project, I explored several digital repositories. While I am not yet certain about what topic I will ultimately go with, HathiTrust, DPLA, the Smithsonian Collections, and Harvard Library’s “Women Working” collection piqued my interest as potential sources for my project.
I started out with HathiTrust, a repository I have used before. Since it mostly contain full texts as opposed to other materials, such as images, I think this would be a good source for thorough content research. It also is worth noting that some items require additional links to navigate to the item on HathiTrust, as I found when I searched “American Revolution” and selected “United Kingdom” as a place of location and tried to view “The American Revolution, vol. 1.” It makes it a bit harder to navigate, since the link did not have a thorough description, but it is not a very significant challenge.
I then moved on to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). This one has a vast collection and is probably my favorite of the four repositories I looked at. It has a useful tool to create lists of materials that one finds, which I have made use of. It also has a feature to combine search terms which is useful. Unlike HathiTrust, there are a number of items that are not complete books, including photos, cartoons, and other materials, which I will keep in mind in order to have variety in my project. One particularly interesting item I found was a Deringer pistol that, according to the metadata, would have been carried by a female Confederate spy. It is an exhibit at the National Museum of American History. I am not totally clear how whoever wrote the description knows that a female Confederate spy would have carried it and would like to try to learn more about it.
The Smithsonian Collections also has a feature to create lists and to combine terms, although I prefer the interfaces for each of these features on the DPLA website. During my initial exploration, I did not find as many things here that might be useful to my project as I did in other repositories. However, I will continue searching in this repository, since it seems promising in terms of the variety of materials.
Finally, I looked at the Harvard Library’s “Women Working” collection. Within this collection, one can search for materials from specific collections in the library, labeled “repositories,” or search the entire collection. Unlike DPLA and Smithsonian, I did not find a list feature here. Something I particularly liked about this site was the interface used for examining and interacting with items. I enjoyed looking at the print materials available, such as a pamphlet entitled “Annual report of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women” and “The Book of Women’s Power,” both of which provided interesting historical perspectives on the role of women in society.
I intend to continue searching through these repositories for materials and inspiration for my project.
