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Overview
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 Library’s Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana.
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Details
Subject Areas
Resource Types
CRL Review
Collection Content
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.
Content
The digital collection is planned to encompass:
- Manuscripts (treaties, speeches, petitions, diaries, travel journals, ledger books, correspondence, legal documents)
- Artwork (illustrations, sketches, watercolors, oil paintings, American Indian art, including rare ledger books)
- American Indian Newspapers covering the 1960s to 1990s
- Rare printed books
- Photographs
- Maps
The publishers note the specfic extent of materials to be included from the Ayer collection:
Ayer Manuscripts
- No. of documents: c. 800
- No. of pages: c. 100,000
Ayer Art
- No. of items: c. 2,400
Ayer Maps
- No. of pages: c. 300
Ayer Modern Manuscripts
- No. of documents: c. 7
- No. of pages: c. 6,000
- Example Collections: Bureau of Indian Affairs relocation records [manuscript] 1936-1975; Carlos Montezuma papers [manuscript] 1888-1936; Thomas Lee Ballenger papers [manuscript] 1730-1968
Ayer Photographs
- No. of collections: c.55
- No. of images: c. 4,665
- Types of images: American Indian portraits; American Indian life; group sittings
Ayer Printed Books
- No. of titles: c. 250
- No. of pages: c. 20,000
- Rare Books
American Indian Newspapers from the Ayer collection
- Nine titles (c. 250 issues) covering the 1960s to 1990s: Akwesasne Notes; The Oglala War Cry; Shannon County News; The Indian; Crazy Horse News
Subject areas
- American Indians and the European Powers
- American Indians and the US Government
- Indigenous Peoples of Mexico
- Military encounters
- Cultural encounters
- Missionaries and education
- Trade
- Civil Rights Movement and political activism
Relation to other Digital Collections
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.
Delivery
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.
Strengths and Weaknesses
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.
Reviewers
Center for Research Libraries
- Virginia Kerr - Digital Program Manager
- Gretchen Rings - Communications Staff Writer
Community Ratings
Content scope and completeness
Cost and price-structure
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