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Digital Collections Capture the Past
Although the Federal Documents Depository Library Program has been fairly successful in making publications of the many federal agencies available in libraries throughout the nation, most of the federal agencies have collections of their own publications that have been available only to their own employees and to the public only onsite. These publications may be brochures, reports, photos, etc that tell something about a time gone by. The general public or researchers would not see these unless they made a visit to the agency library.
Recent developments in technology may be changing the inaccessibility of agency publications, however. There are several federal agencies that are developing digital collections of their publications and are making them available at their websites. The publications usually present in pdf and, since they are images, are larger than text documents in another format. However, the resolutions are good and the information is unique. Some of the agencies with digital libraries include:
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History of Medicine Digital Collections (National Library of Medicine) NLM has several historical collections that include digitized material (prints, photographs, films and videos, exchibition material, manuscripts and books) covering a spectrum of centuries and cultures from medieval Islam to contemporary biomedical research. For instance, there is a collection on patent medicines; innovators in science, medicine and public health; Islamic medical manuscripts at the NLM, rare medical books, and historical anatomical illustrations. A Prints and Photographs collection of the history of medicine has about 100,000 images dating from the 15th century to the present covering pandemics, portraits, historical images of hospitals and institutions and procedures, drawings, wood cuts, caricatures, etc.
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Wirtz Labor Digital Library (Department of Labor) is a history of labor through trade union and labor history materials, labor leaders’ biographies, statistical abstracts and Department of Labor publications. The project is in its infancy, so only about 45 documents are available currently. However, more than 400 items have been scanned and are being added. The collection is interesting as it presents publications that reflect customs, laws, and policies of times gone by. A document, complete with drawings, on riding the trains during wartime urged women to be prepared for rough and crowded rides, as passengers often shared trains with military needs.
- Library of Congress Digital Collections (Library of Congress). LC is possibly the largest library and has developed several multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, motion pictures, and text from the American historical collections of the Library and other institutions. American Memory collections now offer more than 7.5 million digital items from more than 100 historical collections. For a special treat, choose something from the Performing Arts and Music collection and hear sea chanties and view dance steps to ragtime music.
- BEA Digital Library (Bureau of Economic Analysis, Department of Commerce) has begun its collection with reproductions of the Survey of Current Business publication 1930 to 1999. These can be browsed or searched by Optical Character Recognition. Highlighted articles include the introduction of the pollution abatement expenditures series and an explanation of the national income and product accounts from the 1970s. Other documents in the collection are the Survey of Current Business Annual Reviews (1937 - 1975), which cover economic trends in different sectors, and other documents such as a 1977 report on improving gross national product.
