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log in or sign upAmerican Indian Histories and Cultures, scheduled for release in fall 2013, will present material from the Newberry Library’s Edward E. Ayer Collection, an extensive archival collection on American Indian history. The content ranges from early contacts with European settlers through the expanded occupation of the American west, up through the Indian political movements of the mid-20th century. The collection covers a wide geographic area with a primary focus on North America and Mexico. This digital resource will complement The American West, an earlier digital collection from Adam Matthew compiled from the Newberry Library’s Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana.
American Indian Histories and Cultures, scheduled for release in fall 2013, will present material from the Newberry Library’s Edward E. Ayer Collection, an extensive archival collection on American Indian history. The content ranges from early contacts with European settlers through the expanded occupation of the American west, up through the Indian political movements of the mid-20th century. The collection covers a wide geographic area with a primary focus on North America and Mexico. This digital resource will complement The American West, an earlier digital collection from Adam Matthew compiled from the Newberry’s Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana.
The digital collection is planned to encompass:
The publishers note the specfic extent of materials to be included from the Ayer collection:
Ayer Manuscripts
Ayer Art
Ayer Maps
Ayer Modern Manuscripts
Ayer Photographs
Ayer Printed Books
American Indian Newspapers from the Ayer collection
This collection complements and will be fully cross-searchable with The American West, as noted above. Additionally, there will be some overlap with selections the Newberry Library has digitized and made available in a standard open access digital collections interface. (See Digital Resources from the Newberry Library.) However, the publishers note that there will be less than one percent overlap between this digital collection and the approximately one thousand images mounted by the Newberry.
The publishers have developed an updated platform for this collection, and report that they will upgrade the delivery of The American West site to be fully compatible in 2014.
The Newberry Library supplied metadata for the images and manuscript material. The publishers have expanded the metadata and applied it to special presentation formats such as interactive maps and population charts. The site will link from individual metadata entries to the Newberry catalog as well.
Trial access was not available at the time this review was posted.
This important collection of material covers an extensive range of topics and time periods related to the American Indian. It will be valuable to have cross-searching capability with the earlier digitzed Newberry content on the American West. It also will be beneficial to promote discoverability through links to the Newberry catalog and exposure of this collection's metadata in the major web discovery services. Adam Matthew also shows great flexibility in allowing local hosting. Nevertheless, as more materials on the topic of American Indian are digitized and made available through myriad sources including many open access national and regional collections, it will be an increasing challenge for researchers to find and integrate relevant items from a rich bounty of collections.
Center for Research Libraries