The Harvard Library has an astounding number of resources, with new titles coming in every day! For help efficiently navigating it all, make an appointment to meet with a librarian or contact the Reference Desk.
Among our newest e-resources:
Note: “about” descriptions are taken from the resources themselves.
ABIA Online Index of South and Southeast Asian Art and Archeology
About: ABIA is the only specialist academic in-depth bibliography dedicated to South and Southeast Asian prehistory, archaeology of the historical period, art, crafts and architecture (from early down to contemporary), inscriptions and palaeography, coins and seals of these regions. Going back to 1928, this unique and up-to-date bibliographic reference source has become the standard of reference in the fields it covers for both specialists as well as students.
About: Chinese e-books on a variety of academic and general subjects.
American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection
About: Partnering with American Antiquarian Society (AAS), the premier library documenting the life of America’s people from the Colonial Era through the Civil War and Reconstruction, EBSCO provides digital access to the most comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1691 and 1877.
The fifty thematic collections from AAS Historical Periodicals include digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals not available from any other source and provide rich content detailing American history and culture from the mid-18th century through the late-19th century. These specialized collections cover advertising, health, women’s issues, science, the history of slavery, industry & professions, religious issues, culture and the arts, and more.
Apartheid South Africa, 1948-1980
About: Apartheid South Africa makes available British government files from the Foreign, Colonial, Dominion and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices spanning the period 1948 to 1980.
These previously restricted letters, diplomatic dispatches, reports, trial papers, activists’ biographies and first-hand accounts of events give unprecedented access to the history of South Africa’s apartheid regime. The files explore the relationship of the international community with South Africa and chart increasing civil unrest against a backdrop of waning colonialism in Africa and mounting world condemnation.
About: Balochistan is the largest of the four provinces of Pakistan and possesses a rich variety of languages, resources, civilization and culture. The province is located at the geographical intersection and cultural crossroads of South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. As a result, it is one of the richest areas in the country in terms of antiquities, archaeological sites, and historical archives.
Balochistan Archives is an executive agency of the Government of Balochistan which serves as the main repository for official records and documents of historical significance. Archivescontain evidence of financial and legal commitments, provide information about significant historical events, and help protect the civil and legal property rights of the citizens. In short, archives are the pillars on which the foundation of history stands and, therefore, require preservation and special care.We are the guardians of the most significant national and provincial level documents in Balochistan Province. Currently, we hold more than 20,000 files, printed papers, books, and manuscripts pertaining to the colonial and post-independence period in Balochistan. The Directorate of Archives is part of the Department of Culture, Tourism, and Archives. The Director, Balochistan Archives, reports to the Secretary, Culture, Tourism, and Archives Department.
About: Background: Digital imagery has offered us the opportunity to focus our passion for travel and exploration on helping to document the world’s biodiversity by developing this website as an adjunct to formal scientific collections. Along the way we are focusing on families and genera that have a biogeographical story to reveal and on pollination relationships when the opportunity arises.
Objectives:
- Develop and maintain a freely available and helpful website for botanically oriented users.
- Maintain and expand a content of digital images curated to generally accepted professional standards and supported by vouchered herbarium specimens whenever possible.
- Include a minimum of one genus per family and, with continued development, several to many genera.
- Accompany plant images with images of surrounding habitats.
- Attempt to record diagnostic characteristics of taxa.
The site currently includes all but 44 angiosperm families as recognized in APG III, about 3500 genera, and perhaps 14,000 species from all continents and 36 countries. Our focus has been on biodiversity hotspots (so far, California, northern Andes, SE Spain, Viet Nam, West Africa, Madagascar, Borneo), but not exclusively, and because we never find everything we look for the first time, it is usually necessary to make repeat trips. Metadata attached to each image is constantly updated or upgraded to keep names current and to provide GPS locations where these were initially missing on images published at the beginning of the website (2008). This is a work in progress and will essentially never be completed, but we do what we can to keep up with name changes. Our goal is to be maintained at a level comparable to a standard well-curated herbarium.
About: During the half century leading up to the Second World War, Franz Boas helped to define academic anthropology in the United States. Trained as a geographer at the University of Heidelberg, Boas worked initially on the Inuit of Baffin Island and subsequently on the cultures of the Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast, becoming a leading figure in American anthropology by the first decade of the twentieth century. As Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, Boas made significant theoretical contributions to ethnology, linguistics, and physical anthropology, helping to ingrain the four fields approach in his discipline and introducing the concept of cultural relativism into wide currency. He was, as well, a committed Socialist and an ardent opponent of both racism and fascism.
This collection includes correspondence that Boas carried on with his colleagues in anthropology, as well as with those in the other social sciences and sciences. This correspondence is rich as a source for twentieth-century historians interested in “radical” social causes, since Boas was a socialist and an outspoken voice for progressive social causes.
About: The Gilded Age brings primary documents and scholarly commentary together into a searchable collection that is the definitive electronic resource for students and scholars researching this important period in American history. In addition to an extensive selection of key treatises that reflect the social and cultural ferment of the late nineteenth century, The Gilded Age offers a wealth of rare materials, including songs, letters, photographs, cartoons, government documents, and ephemera. This primary content is enhanced by video interviews with scholars and numerous topical critical documentary essays specially commissioned for the project by Alexander Street Press. Covering such themes as race, labor, immigration, commerce, western expansion, and women’s suffrage, these essays illuminate the rapidly changing cultural landscape of America during the decades between the end of the Civil War and the election of Theodore Roosevelt. The collection currently has over 53,000 pages.
Global registry of biodiversity repositories
About: GRBio is the first-ever consolidated, comprehensive clearinghouse of information about biological collections in natural history museums, herbaria, and other biorepositories. This online-registry is a source for authoritative information about collections as well as validated, standardized data such as addresses, contacts, and values for the Darwin Core identifiers for institutions (institutionCode) and collections (collectionCode). Personal collections can also be registered here, whether they belong to private collectors or are research collections that haven’t yet been accessioned into an institutional collection.
Index of References Dealing with Talmudic Literature
About: The Index of References Dealing with Talmudic Literature provides bibliographical references to discussions on rabbinic literature and related fields and has been updated to include close to 1000 works. These works comprise modern Talmud scholarship and related fields, parallel references within the Talmudic-Midrashic literature and medieval Talmudic commentaries. The bibliography of Talmud scholarship and related fields spans various disciplines including but not limited to: ancient history, women in the Talmud, the relationship of Qumran texts to Talmudic literature and more. The database also includes classics of Talmud scholarship such as Saul Lieberman’s Tosefta ki-feshuta and Y.N. Epstein’s Mavo le-Nusach ha-Mishna. This update includes an input function for authors to add the passage indexes to rabbinic literature from their works. A benefit to all of scholarship, this function will allow for new works to be available on an ongoing basis. Any book with a passage index to rabbinic literature will be readily available to subscribers of the Index.
Taiwan Photo Gallery / GIS Database
About: With the project on “Taiwan Photo Gallery／GIS Database,” a total of 25,000 photos from 1895 to 1945, dated back to 70 to 100 years ago, were collected create a database. Many of these images are newly found contents. The two major sources are: first-hand photos obtained from individual collectors and a collection of images related to Taiwan history and culture collected by TBMC and AND Publishing Ltd over the years. A collection is made by renting old photos from individual collectors, with the total number of over 15000. The purpose of this project is not to acquire the originals, but to digitize them. After being digitalized, 25,000 photos have refreshed past historical events. An image is like an epitome of lifestyle in the earlier days. It is more touching and real than words. The work is presented by GIS, a creative technology. The interrelationship between space and time has enriched contents of the work and brought into modern creativity for Taiwanese cultural resources. It offers users the new references and different sides of thinking. It is a significant work of knowledge-based economy.
You can also view our list of recently activated e-journals.