Archives: A Guide to Information Sources

The American Libraries collection includes material contributed from across the United States. Institutions range from the Library of Congress to many local public libraries. As a whole, this collection of material brings holdings that cover many facets of American life and scholarship into the public domain

The National Archives and Records Administration provides this catalog of their holdings, including regional archives and presidential libraries. While not all of their extensive collections are described in the catalog, new entries are continually added.

ArchiveGrid includes over 5 million records describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. With over 1,000 different archival institutions represented, ArchiveGrid helps researchers looking for primary source materials held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies.

Archives Made Easy is an on-line guide to archives around the globe. Archives Made Easy aims to empower historical researchers of all levels and make unrewarding research trips a thing of the past. Archives Made Easy serves the global research community by providing transparency of the costs and processes involved in an archive visit – the kind of information researchers need to know beforehand in order to avoid costly mistakes and delays.

Archives West offers descriptions of archival and manuscript materials held by institutions in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, Montana, and Utah. This means that if an institution has a collection—whether it’s digitized or not—and has created a description of it, you can find out that they have it and use the available options for getting materials.

BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 150 million documents from more than 7,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.

Connecting-Africa is a gateway to African research information and materials produced worldwide. It provides access to 76624 publications from 95 repositories as well as information on 55 Africa experts (researchers, policymakers, development practitioners) and on 891 organisations (research or development-related institutes with expertise on Africa).

The Council of State Archivists (CoSA) is a nonprofit membership organization of the state and territorial government archives in the fifty states, five territories, and District of Columbia. Through collaborative research, education, and advocacy, CoSA provides leadership that strengthens and supports state and territorial archives in their work to preserve and provide access to government records. CoSA facilitates networking, information sharing, and project collaboration among its member organizations to help state and territorial government archives with their responsibilities for protecting the rights and historical documents of the American people.

Europeana provides access to millions of books, music, artworks and more – with sophisticated search and filter tools to help you find what you’re looking for.

The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 1.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account.

The National Archives is the UK government's official archive, "containing 1000 years of history from Domesday Book to the present", with records from parchment and paper scrolls through to digital files and archived websites.

The New York State Archives preserves and makes accessible over 250 million records of New York’s State and colonial governments dating from 1630 to the present. We provide records management and archival advisory services to New York State agencies, local governments and non-government repositories. We are passionate about ensuring that the essential documentation of New York is effectively managed and appropriately preserved for today and for the future.

The Library of Congress provides free access to NUCMC, which allows you to search two major catalogs of archival materials, the RLG Union Catalog and the OCLC catalog.

OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records that represent open access resources. This catalog was built through harvesting from open access collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Today, OAIster includes more than 50 million records that represent digital resources from more than 2,000 contributors.

A collection of over 60,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Prelinger Archives remains in existence, holding approximately 11,000 digitized and videotape titles (all originally derived from film) and a large collection of home movies, amateur and industrial films acquired since 2002.

The Smithsonian Institution Archives captures, preserves, and makes available the history of the Smithsonian.

SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) is a free, online resource that helps users discover biographical and historical information about persons, families, and organizations that created or are documented in historical resources (primary source documents) and their connections to one another. Users can locate archival collections and related resources held at cultural heritage institutions around the world.

The UNESCO Digital Library is the repository of UNESCO’s institutional memory and a source of high-quality information on UNESCO activities (in education, natural sciences, social and human sciences, culture, and communication and information), with more than 350,000 documents dating back to 1945. It includes the collections of the UNESCO Library and several documentation centres in UNESCO’s Field Offices and Institutes, as well as the UNESCO Archives. The essential purpose of the UNESCO Digital Library is to share knowledge and to transmit it to future generations..

The UN Archives ensures that historically significant records are made available for a variety of research uses, including teaching purposes, legal proceedings, building plans, publications, television and radio programs. The records in our archives are unique and irreplaceable. By their very nature, archival materials are fragile and vulnerable to damage.