Digital Archives

A list of free archives and databases (some may require a free account).

National/International

• Europeana, over 53,500,000 artworks, artifacts, books, videos and sounds from across Europe
• Archive.org the motherlode!
• HathiTrust
• US National Archives
• Smithsonian Institution
• Library of Congress Digital Collections
• National Park Service
• New York Public Library's digital collections include audio, video, color maps, and many photographs
• The European Library massive archive of materials from dozens of European libraries. Check out The Ryhiner Map Collection to find over 16,000 maps of the world from the 16th to the 18th centuries
• The People's Graphic Design Archive realtively new and crowd-sourced
• Old Book Illustration Archive

Local

• The Oklahoman archive. See also Birth and Death Rates for an overview of how to access it
• Tulsa Historical Society Images
• The Beryl Ford Collection at the Tulsa City-County Library is a collaboration between the Tulsa Historical Society and the Library.

Universities

• Boston University's OpenBU
• OSU's Digital Collections
• OU's Digital Collections
• TU's Digital Collections

Newspapers

• Chicago Tribune

Personal Histories

• Story Corps
• Mukurtu (MOOK-oo-too) is a grassroots project aiming to empower communities to manage, share, preserve, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways
• Personal record of London Jews in WWI

Topical Archives

• USC USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive allows users to search through and view more than 54,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. (Free login required)
• Bracero History Archive collects and makes available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964
• History Pin, an interesting user-generated archive of old photographs pinned to their geographical locations. Here is Tulsa!
• US Fish and Wildlife Digital Library
• Oklahoma's Digital Prairie, a collection of archives about Oklahoma history. Collections include photographs, and the Tulsa Race Riot
• American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later
• Digital Archive of American Architecture
• Oyez, audio from the Supreme Court proceedings, oral arguments
• The Antique Pattern Library contains a lifetime's worth of patterns for sewing, knitting, crocheting, cross-stitch, and more.
• Northwestern University's collection of posters from WWII

Literature

• Digital Public Library of America amazing resource of historic materials
• The British Library has digitized many historic texts and images
• The Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature is exactly what it sounds like. From the University of Florida
• Early Americas Digital Archive, a collection of electronic texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820

Comics

• Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum
• The Digital Comic Museum contains 'thousands' of Golden Age comics, including newspaper strips from Frank King and Winsor McCay.
• Comics Art Museum
• Acme Novelty Library
• William Blake's illuminations
• British Library's Tour of Illuminated Manuscripts
• Book of Kells
• The Cartoon Museum

Advertising

• Archive of advertisements, both television and print
• Ad*Access, Duke University's archive of advertisements from 1911-1955
• [AdAge], an online advertising magazine
• Vintage Ad Browser, over 100,000 categorized print ads

Documentaries and Videos

• Free Documentaries
• SnagFilms lots of free documentaries here, too, as well as low-budget short films to inspire
• TED—always worth your time
• Cinemetrics, an incredible database of cinema data: length, average shot length, number of shots. Also offers free software to measure your own videos

References

Lots more here

See Also

Online Tools