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Overview
American Pamphlets, Series 1, offers a collection of pamphlets ancipated ultimately to total more than 25,000 short works printed in every region of the United States between 1820 and 1922. Launched in 2013 with completion expected in 2016, this collection joins American Broadsides and Ephemera to form Readex's America's Historical Imprints platform.
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Collection Content
American Pamphlets, Series 1, offers a collection of pamphlets ancipated ultimately to total more than 25,000 short works printed in every region of the United States between 1820 and 1922. Launched in 2013 with completion expected in 2016, this collection joins American Broadsides and Ephemera to form Readex's America's Historical Imprints platform. While the collection comes from the New-York Historical Society, its geographic coverage is broad, as is the tremendous range of subjects. Pamphlets range from: political (such as debates in the New York House of Assembly on nullification and states rights issues in the 1830s prior to the Civil War); to corporate public relations (such as a 1919 document from Armour & Company entitled "Humanizing a Great Industry," on improving employee welfare); to a program of classes offered by the City History Club of New York in 1905.
Delivery
Metadata
As with the American Broadsides collection, cataloging is extremely detailed, provided here by the source institution the New-York Historical Society. Documents can be browsed by genre, subject, author, “history of printing” (e.g. imprint documentation for printers and printing companies), place of publication, and language. There are over 85 terms describing pamphlet genres--less than for the American Broadsides but still very specialized--ranging from "Anti-abolition literature" to "privately published books", to "White supremacist literature."
Interface
Through a cross-collection interface with the overal title America’s Historical Imprints, one can search American Pamphlets and American Broadsides together or separately.The search, browse, results, and image viewer have a similar appearance to other Readex products, demonstrating the same straightforward logic and low-key design. Multiple options offered for some functions should not lead to excessive confusion; for instance, the presence of a search term in a document can be discovered through picking out the rather subtle icons displayed next to page numbers in a full contents list of pages, or alternatively by re-executing the search within the document to narrow the page listings to just those containing the search term(s). Search terms are highlighted within the page image of the document (reflecting the full text OCR), but this display can be turned off if desired.The interface allows for easy reference to the full citation or a shorter version. And subject headings listed within the catalog entries are clickable, offering an additional method for expanding a subject browse.
Searches can be saved, as can document entries in a personalized "my collection" window.
The advanced search interface is very straightforward and allows flexible combinations of the various indexed fields.
Strengths and Weaknesses
This collection ultimately will offer a very rich resource for scholars. It may be best suited for an experienced researcher who will anticipate what treasures lie waiting to be unlocked through the application of specialized genre and subject terms, and is accustomed to the low-key, rational layout of a Readex interface. Less experienced researchers and students may be somewhat put off by Readex's typical muted color scheme and print-oriented layout, which lacks inviting, dynamic design and interactive features.
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