DRL Projects

The Darlington Digital Library

The Darlington Digital Library comprises books, broadsides, manuscripts, atlases, maps, prints, lithographs and engravings digitized from the ULS Darlington Memorial Library. This multi-year project will result in the accessibility of a rich collection of material documenting colonial American history, especially as it relates to Western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley. Other topics include the exploration of the Trans-Mississippi, the Far West, and world history.

Documenting Pitt: Historical Publications and Images of the University of Pittsburgh

The University of Pittsburgh has a rich and colorful history, much of which is documented in publications and photographic images held by the University Archives. The Documenting Pitt website contains digitized materials that reflect portions of the university's documented history. More than 70,000 pages of text are searchable or browsable along with hundreds of images that visually depict some of the many people, buildings and events that comprise Pitt history.

Historic Pittsburgh

Historic Pittsburgh is a comprehensive collection of local resources that supports personal and scholarly research of the area. It consists of a visual image collection of over 9,500 photographs, a full-text collection of over 500 books, a collection of over 1,100 land ownership maps, finding aids describing over 700 archival collections, census schedules for the city of Pittsburgh (1850-1880) and Allegheny City (1850-1870), an online chronology of the city (1717-2004), and access to the library and archives catalog of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

19th Century Schoolbooks

The 19th Century Schoolbooks website includes a full-text collection of 140 schoolbooks, two surveys of historic schoolbooks by Dr. John A. Nietz, and a Web-accessible bibliographic catalog of the Nietz Old Textbook Collection maintained by Special Collections at the University Library System. The textbooks presented online represent grammars, spellers, readers, arithmetics, geographies, American histories, civics, physiologies, health and hygiene, music, penmanship, and letter-writing guides.

Image Collections

The Digital Research Library hosts 47 image collections (16,000+ images) containing a wide variety of content, including Medieval art and architecture, Pittsburgh history, George Washington manuscripts, broadsheets illustrated by Jack B. Yeats, Stephen Foster's sketchbook, Joseph Stalin, and illustrations to support foreign language instruction. The images comprise scanned photographs, slides, negatives, manuscripts, postcards, broadsheets, drawings, flyers, newsletters, posters, and artifacts.

View Image Collections

Dick Thornburgh Papers

The Dick Thornburgh Papers website encourages the investigation and exploration of material that document Thornburgh’s service as Governor of Pennsylvania, Attorney General of the United States, and Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, among other notable positions. The site provides access to selected digitized documents, photographs, and audio and video clips as well as to a comprehensive finding aid, which describes the physical collection housed at the Archives Service Center (ASC). This collaborative project involved the ULS Web Services Librarian and staff within ASC and Information Systems.

  © H.K. Barnett

The Parallax Project

The Parallax Project website provides online access to the Publications of the Allegheny Observatory of the University of Pittsburgh, a ten-volume set of historic star data and calculations collected and produced by researchers at the Allegheny Observatory. This website makes available over five decades of the Observatory’s valuable research, which represents one of the largest systematic, ground-based studies of star distances ever conducted.

Modern China Studies

Thirty-six titles (37 volumes) about Modern China published in the first half of the 20th century are available for viewing. The monographs include published works on history, law, literature, political science and social sciences as well as reference sources such as bibliographies, chronologies, directories, handbooks, statistics and yearbooks.

The Cleft Palate Journal Archive

Twenty-six volumes of The Cleft Palate Journal published between 1964 and 1989 are available for searching and viewing. The Digital Research Library hosts this archive as a service to the American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association (ACPA). The Cleft Palate Journal is an international, interdisciplinary journal reporting on clinical and research activities in cleft lip/palate and other craniofacial anomalies, together with research in related laboratory sciences.

Licensed Full-Text Collections

(only accessible to University of Pittsburgh community members)

The University Library System is a member of the Digital Library eXtension Service (DLXS) of the Digital Library Production Service at the University of Michigan which provides the interface between the Web and these full-text SGML encoded databases. Due to licensing agreements with the creators of these databases, these resources are provided for members of the University of Pittsburgh community only.

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