SULAIR's Humanities Digital Information Service (HDIS) continues to offer a growing number of digital resources for humanities research and teaching. These resources include both commercially licensed databases and Stanford-produced digital collections, and cover a broad range of subject areas. Although boundaries are blurring somewhat between these categories, HDIS resources are still listed as primarily image collections and text collections. Described below are some notable recent examples of each category.
RLG Cultural Materials
RLG Cultural Materials is a collection of digitized manuscripts, photos, art, maps, historical documents, memorabilia and more, all brought together in a single search interface from libraries around the world.
At present, more than 230,000 items are available in a flexible web workspace developed with the materials' characteristics in mind. Users can discover, compare, interpret, and make connections between materials in ways that enrich teaching, learning, and scholarship. RLG Cultural Materials is a collaborative effort from an international alliance of libraries, archives, and museums, all members of the not-for-profit Research Libraries' Group.
North American Women's Drama
With this collection, digital publisher Alexander Street Press continues its tradition of richly annotated, almost infinitely searchable collections of primary sources, both published and previously unpublished. Like other Alexander Street collections, North American Women's Drama is a deep collection that benefits both from its narrow focus and its intense mark-up. What the publishers call "semantic indexing."
The Stanford Historical Photograph Collection
As of press time scheduled for public availability during Fall 2005, the Stanford Historical Photograph Collection is an exciting and important effort in the digitization of Stanford's own historical and archival treasures. In this collection one finds, for example, photographs of campus people and places not only "in the old days," but over a long period of vastly different "old days": from Memorial Church before the 1906 earthquake to Jim Plunkett at the 1971 Rose Bowl and beyond. Watch the HDIS space for news of this unique collection.
