During last month’s Winter Games, the Hesburgh Libraries shared a news story about the Olympic Movement: Sport, Global Politics and Identity database. It’s a collection of digitized historical sources, telling the story of the birth and development of the modern Olympic games. The database includes thousands of primary sources from a hundred-year period, starting with the first Olympic games in Athens in 1896, up through the 1990s. To illustrate the collection’s scope, a few examples might be useful:
- The poster for the 1928 games in Amsterdam.
- An official sightseeing guide from the 1936 Berlin games – along with a large collection of newspaper clippings about complaints and protests leading up to those games.
- A 1972 letter from the US Olympic Committee to the University of Notre Dame’s Director of Bands, expressing concern that Notre Dame’s proposed marching band tour might be using the “Olympic” branding without official permission.
You might wonder why we would make such a big deal about this collection. Aren’t these sources just freely available online somewhere? Absolutely not.
This collection is the result of hundreds of hours of intentional curation and is brought to you courtesy of the Libraries. A publisher named AM Digital created this collection by collaborating with the libraries that own these archival materials (for example, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). AM Digital carefully digitized those thousands of items. They also created summaries and tags for each entry, and transcripts as appropriate. The end product is a sleek, user-friendly website. Without this project to digitize these materials, you would need to travel to Urbana-Champaign, Colorado Springs, or the other locations where these materials are housed in archives. Thanks to AM Digital creating this collection – and Hesburgh Libraries purchasing it –, you can unpack the history of the Olympic Games from the comfort of your kitchen table.
This collection is not a one-off. The Libraries have purchased hundreds of such primary source databases over the years, including many others from AM Digital, Gale, ProQuest, and other vendors whose names might sound familiar. For example, Gale’s Making the Modern World collection tells the story of Western commerce from the 15th through 20th centuries, including sources pertaining to the Industrial Revolution, technological innovation, colonialism, slavery, abolition, international trade, financial systems, and more. This is an example of a more sprawling collection, offering tens of thousands of books and journals from multiple source libraries. At the other end of the spectrum is the much more limited collection, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. This database includes just a few thousand records from US federal immigration agents, covering the 1880 – 1930 period, all digitized from the National Archives.
The Hesburgh Libraries have purchased these types of historical databases for several decades – essentially, since the advent of electronic library resources. Although more primary source databases exist than the Libraries could ever reasonably acquire, we focus our efforts on collections that align with the University’s research and teaching needs. That’s why the largest share of these are collections of digitized newspapers, such as ProQuest Historical Newspapers, the Times of London Archive, and even the South Bend Tribune Digital Archive – we know just how important the newspaper record is to the historical research that many undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty conduct.
Some primary source collections available through the Libraries, like Sabin Americana and its story of Europeans in the Americas, have become absolutely essential to scholars working in this area and are available at most major research libraries. Other collections are newer and less commonly held among libraries. A good example is the recently-acquired African American Periodicals, by Readex, which provides access to 170 magazines and journals from 1825-1995, allowing our users to read articles from Black-owned publications during the many important eras of this period.
Where can you access these primary source databases? Most of them are listed individually on the Hesburgh Libraries’ Databases page: https://www.library.nd.edu/databases/ If you’re looking for a specific journal or newspaper title, you can search it directly in the catalog, and the resulting record will provide an access link. Of course, the subject librarians are familiar with the primary source databases within their purviews, so the subject pages guides are another good place to start: https://www.library.nd.edu/subjects/
By providing access to digitized primary source collections, the Hesburgh Libraries hope to bring our users into contact with the past. Whether an essential source for a paper you are writing, or just an interesting sight as you fall down a rabbit hole, these materials provide vivid records of the past, replacing boring generalizations with exhilaratingly specific glimpses into history.