A few neat archives and digitization projects

All worth a look:


Ration Coupons on the Home Front -- an archive of digitized WWII ration cards and other ephemera. From Duke University Libraries. They also have a bunch of other interesting digital collections including AdViews, which is an archive of advertisements from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Two literary ones-- Orwell Diaries and The Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collection.

Ethnologue - Languages of the World. A huge site, accessible to anyone, cataloging all of the world’s 6,909 known living languages.

The British Library's Archival Sound Recordings-- almost 24,000 items are available on here to the public including music, language and conversation, and wildlife recordings.

Actually the whole British Library online exhibitions site is incredible. Their virtual collections include historical maps of London, Victorian ephemera, and digitized manuscripts and sketchbooks, among other things.

Photo archive: LIFE

Google is now hosting the archive of images from LIFE Magazine. This archive would be great for historical research and is also fun to browse. Many of the images included were never even published in LIFE--they are available here for the first time.

You can search only this archive from the regular Google image search by adding "source:life" at the end of the search, for example: coffee source:life

Many of them are very high-resolution, although their copyright extends only to personal use.

User-generated content in the library

50 Tips and resources to implement user generated content in your library. Links to tons of online services and software, some library-specific and some not. LibGuides in particular looks interesting.

Canadian Necrology - Genealogy Resource

Canadian Necrology - a database from the University of Toronto libraries, featuring obituaries and death information from Canadian newspapers and other sources.

The Open Library

The Open Library - attempting to create a web page for every book ever published. Librarians are collaborating on the interface, the database infrastructure, and the bibliographic information.