Digital Collections at the University of Maryland Libraries supports the teaching and research mission of the university by facilitating access to digital collections, information, and knowledge. This is accomplished through enhancing access to selected library resources through the development, maintenance, and preservation of digital collections; by serving as a knowledge resource within the university for digital library issues and development; by participating in national and international initiatives which further the development of new forms of scholarly communication, tools, standards, and applications; and by providing training and support in digital library standards and formats.
The University of Maryland Libraries has recently digitized a full run of the Maryland House and Senate Documents series from 1840 through 1920. The Maryland House and Senate Documents series is a frequently overlooked, but essential research source for understanding many of the issues that concerned Marylanders in the 19th century. In essence, these were the reports of key state officials and government agencies submitted to the Governor and General Assembly at its biennial and special sessions. They range in subject matter from the prosaic (budget reports) to the critical (negotiations with southern states concerning secession).
Digitization was carried out by the Internet Archive; the University of Maryland Libraries are a member of Lyrasis’s Mass Digitization Collaborative, which offers competitive pricing on mass digitization projects.
Links to all the digitized volumes are on the University of Maryland Libraries’ website: http://www.lib.umd.edu/RARE/MarylandCollection/MDResourceGuide/MDhouseandsenate.html. Hyperlinks to the volumes also appear in our online catalog, and in OCLC.
Report of the State Librarian Llewellyn Boyle, 1860 (http://www.archive.org/details/reportofstatelib1860boyl). Note that library funding was an issue 150 years ago, and the Internet was not to blame! “The office is sadly deficient in all the standard books of Science, Art, Literature, History, and in fact, in all the more important publications since 1851. Few or no miscellaneous books have been added to the Library since that date, the chief cause being, the Library augmentation fund not being adequate for the purchase of such books.”
The Report of the Board of Police of the City of Baltimore, 1861 (http://www.archive.org/details/reportofboardofp1861boar). In this volume, Charles Howard, president of the Baltimore Board of Police, reports on the famous Baltimore Riots of April 1861, when Union troops from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania arrived in Baltimore and attempted to change trains. Pro-South civilians in Baltimore attempted to stop the troops from reaching Washington: “obstructions were placed on the track in the City, which stopped the progress of the remainder… Missiles were nothwithstanding thrown at the troops, and some of them were injured, their assailants were fired upon, and in some instances, with fatal effect.”
The University of Maryland Libraries are delighted to announce that a digital version of the papers of Dadaist artist, performer, and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is available to be consulted on-line through the Libraries’ ArchivesUM gateway. Researchers can access the digital edition through the collection’s EAD finding aid: http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/1501. In Summer 2009, the Libraries took advantage of the “Reel Deal” offered by OCLC Preservation Resources to digitize the microfilm edition of the papers. Freytag-Loringhoven’s papers were part of a preservation microfilming project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and completed in 2004.
There is increasing interest in the life and work of Freytag-Loringhoven, commonly known as the Baroness. Described by The Little Review editor Margaret Anderson as “perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary,” (Anderson, My Thirty Years War 177) Freytag-Loringhoven published, between 1918 and 1929, approximately forty of her poems in little magazines such as Broom, Liberator, The Little Review, transatlantic review, transition, and the single issue of New York Dada. Born Else Hildegard Ploetz on July 12, 1874, in Swinemunde on the Baltic Sea, she ran away to Berlin in 1892, where she became involved in the Bohemian theatre circles. In 1910, she came to the United States to join Felix Paul Greve, then known as Frederick Phillip Grove, whom she had married in 1907. Subsequently abandoned by Grove, by 1913 she had moved to New York City, where she met and married the penniless Baron Leo von Freytag-Loringhoven. It was in New York, after the Baron had returned to Germany during the war and subsequently committed suicide, that Freytag-Loringhoven became entrenched in the Greenwich Village artist movement and began her brief and successful writing career as “the Baroness.”
The Libraries’ Digital Collections also feature two additional Freytag-Loringhoven resources, “Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Digital Library” and “In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.” The first of these was the work of University of Maryland graduate students in English and Library and Information Studies. The second began as part of Tanya Clement’s dissertation entitled The Makings of Digital Modernism, completed at the University of Maryland in 2009.
(Submitted by Dr. Ruth M. Alvarez, August 2010)
The Albert W. Hilberg Collection consists of 48 photographs of Hiroshima before and after the dropping of the atomic bomb, as well as 41 print publications by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC). Albert W. Hilberg, M.D., was a physician member of the ABCC. These photographs may also be held at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and/or other libraries such as the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The Collection was donated to the University of Maryland Libraries in October 2008 by Dr. Hilberg’s daughter, Kristin Henderson.
The University of Maryland Libraries have digitized the images, which are now available via Digital Collections@UM.
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Stone building with four large windows on the side in the snow-covered field, before or after the explosion(?), circa 1945 |
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The same building after explosion, with the roof collapsed and the windows broken, mountains in the background, August 1945 |
