American Memory

When I mentioned to my co-author I thought we should do a column on the Library of Congress's American Memory collection, he replied, "I can't think of a more content rich site on the Web." And, indeed, American Memory http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html stands out as a gateway to an extraordinary collection of primary source material that depicts the history and culture of the United States.

Specifically, American Memory offers more than 7 million digital items, including prints, photographs, manuscripts, maps, sheet music, sound recordings and motion picture clips. Ready access to this diverse material can be obtained through American Memory's "Collection Finder" at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/finder.html.

A tiny sampling of items from this incredible online archive:

• The portrayal of "America at Leisure," including video clips of "Shooting the Chutes" at Coney Island in 1903, the annual "Baby Parade" in Asbury Park, N.J. in 1904 and "Sleighing in Central Park" in 1898
• Nine thousand images relating to the early history of advertising from 1850-1920, including all types of ads for tobacco, laundry flakes, burial caskets, corsets, gum, hair nets, cologne, thread and cough remedies (Did you know that the first advertisement for Smith Brother's cough drops appeared in a Poughkeepsie, N.Y. paper and the two brothers in the illustration are named "Trade" and "Mark?")
• More than 2,000 images of baseball cards dating from 1887 to 1914, including depictions of such legendary players as Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker and Cy Young
• Sound recordings, including Civil War-era band music, folk music from the Dust Bowl, Omaha Indian music, vaudeville routines and Southern Appalachian fiddle tunes
• The papers of Hannah Arendt, Alexander Graham Bell, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Woody Guthrie, Abraham Lincoln, Samuel F. B. Morse and Walt Whitman
• Nineteenth-century Sunday school books that include such topics as slavery, temperance, immigration, missionary travels and advice

The main American Memory screen features a new search example daily to give one a sense of the range of topics that can be researched using this vast resource. At this writing, yesterday's sample search was "patent leather" and today's is "piracy." Yesterday's "Today in History" link led to a hypertextual essay celebrating the Feb. 7, 1867 birth of Laura Ingalls Wilder, while today's link goes to primary source material related to the NAACP's opposition to the 1915 D.W. Griffith film "The Birth of a Nation." Finally, the main page features a "Learning Page" link that provides activities and lessons for K-12 classrooms.

The American Memory collection provides testament to the content richness of the Web itself. We tend to celebrate the Web's ability to deliver current, and at times "as it's happening" material. American Memory reminds us not to ignore the power of the Web to vividly transport us to our captivating heritage.

—Gemma DeVinney and Don Hartman, University Libraries