Landesgeschichtliche Monographien in Deutschland 2019/2020: so gut wie kein Open Access – Archivalia

From Google’s English:  “Open Access (OA) is no longer just a topic in the field of journal publication. In the field of historical studies, there are almost no open access publications in Germany for monographs. The publication activity in the field of national history represents an important sub-area. Here things look very bad in terms of OA.

Using the websites of the historical commissions, regional archives, traditional regional historical associations, regional historical institutes, etc., I compiled the monographs published in 2019 or 2020 and at the same time looked for open access offers (for monographs). Only in exceptional cases have I researched the KVK or library catalogs. Corrections and additions are always welcome. A number of gaps are to be expected, especially since in many cases it was tedious to research the publications….”

Library of Congress Completes Digitization of 23 Early Presidential Collections | Library of Congress

“The Library of Congress has completed a more than two decade-long initiative to digitize the papers of nearly two dozen early presidents. The Library holds the papers of 23 presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge, all of which have been digitized and are now available online.

The Library plans to highlight each presidential collection on social media in the weeks leading up to the next presidential inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021….

With the digitization of papers from Presidents Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Grover Cleveland and Coolidge, the Library’s complete set of presidential collections is now available online for the first time….”

Who Were America’s Enslaved? A New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers | History | Smithsonian Magazine

“Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade, a newly launched digital database featuring 613,458 entries (and counting), seeks to streamline the research process by placing dozens of complex datasets in conservation with each other. If, for instance, a user searches for a woman whose transport to the Americas is documented in one database but whose later life is recorded in another, the portal can connect these details and synthesize them….”

Princeton’s Global History Lab receives grant to expand open-access virtual classroom for students worldwide, including refugee and migrant learners

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, Princeton’s Global History Lab (GHL) is continuing to partner with a worldwide network of universities and NGOs to teach history in these challenging times. Through a series of courses taught in conjunction with these partner institutions, as well as a vibrant program of workshops, conferences and research projects, GHL aims to foster truly global conversations, not only among academics, but also among learners hailing from diverse backgrounds….”

Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access | MIT Press Open Access

Table of contents:

 

Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon – Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou
Scholarly Communications and Social Justice – Charlotte Roh, Harrison W. Inefuku, and Emily Drabinski
Social Justice and Inclusivity: Drivers for the Dissemination of African Scholarship – Reggie Raju, Jill Claassen, Namhla Madini, and Tamzyn Suliaman
Can Open Scholarly Practices Redress Epistemic Injustice? – Denisse Albornoz, Angela Okune, and Leslie Chan
When the Law Advances Access to Learning: Locke and the Origins of Modern Copyright – John Willinsky
How Does a Format Make a Public? – Robin de Mourat, Donato Ricci, and Bruno Latour
Peer Review: Readers in the Making of Scholarly Knowledge – David Pontille and Didier Torny
The Making of Empirical Knowledge: Recipes, Craft, and Scholarly Communication – Pamela H. Smith, Tianna Helena Uchacz, Naomi Rosenkranz, and Claire Conklin Sabel
The Royal Society and the Noncommercial Circulation of Knowledge – Aileen Fyfe
The Political Histories of UK Public Libraries and Access to Knowledge – Stuart Lawson
Libraries and Their Publics in the United States – Maura A. Smale
Open Access, “Publicity,” and Democratic Knowledge – John Holmwood
Libraries, Museums, and Archives as Speculative Knowledge Infrastructure – Bethany Nowviskie
Preserving the Past for the Future: Whose Past? Everyone’s Future – April M. Hathcock
Is There a Text in These Data? The Digital Humanities and Preserving the Evidence – Dorothea Salo
Accessing the Past, or Should Archives Provide Open Access? – István Rév
Infrastructural Experiments and the Politics of Open Access – Jonathan Gray
The Platformization of Open – Penny C. S. Andrews
Reading Scholarship Digitally – Martin Paul Eve
Toward Linked Open Data for Latin America – Arianna Becerril-García and Eduardo Aguado-López
The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of SciELO – Abel L. Packer
Not Self-Indulgence, but Self-Preservation: Open Access and the Ethics of Care – Eileen A. Joy
Toward a Global Open-Access Scholarly Communications System: A Developing Region Perspective – Dominique Babini
Learned Societies, Humanities Publishing, and Scholarly Communication

ASU collection of rare, historically significant books made accessible to the public online | ASU Now: Access, Excellence, Impact

““The Federalist Papers,” a collection of short essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in 1788, is one of the most well-known pro-Constitution writings. A first edition printing of this book, along with 23 other rare books and manuscripts related to significant figures, moments, ideas, debates and movements from American history, can be explored through Arizona State University’s Civic Classics Collection.

The collection, maintained by the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, the Center for Political Thought and Leadership and ASU Library, covers a range of topics including the founding of America, political economy, race and America, civil rights history and activism, and first peoples….”

Native American Treaties Now Online for the First Time | National Archives

“Hundreds of Native American treaties have been scanned and are freely available online, for the first time, through the National Archives Catalog. Also, in partnership with The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC), these treaties and extensive additional historical and contextual information are available through Treaties Explorer  (or DigiTreaties). …”

New: Open Artstor: Images from the History of Medicine (National Library of Medicine) – Artstor

“Artstor has published nearly 42,000 images from the U. S. National Library of Medicine’s Images from the History of Medicine, freely available to all for reuse under the Creative Commons Public Domain mark. Open Artstor: Images from the History of Medicine (National Library of Medicine) is part of an initiative to aggregate open museum, library, and archive collections across disciplines on the Artstor platform….”

Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME)

“The DALME project and team are based in the Department of History at Harvard University with collaborations extending across North America and Europe. Working in the interests of documentary archaeology, we transcribe and publish archival documents that identify ordinary household objects, tools, equipment, commodities, and other elements of material culture. Team members and collaborators include archaeologists, art historians, historians, and literary scholars. We are eager to extend our collaborations with all scholars interested in the material culture of late medieval Europe; please reach out to us.

Our work is currently sorted into two major research initiatives or documentary corpora. Households and Things in Medieval Europe features household or estate inventories from a number of regions of Europe. The Object as Commodity presents information relative to object values and the role that objects can serve as commodities or economic goods. Within each corpus, members of the DALME team and project associates have created individual collections defined either by geography or theme.

The existing collections include records in Latin and a number of vernaculars. These collections are fully searchable in their original languages; our Search page offers suggestions on how to search, filter, or browse the collection.”

Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME)

“The DALME project and team are based in the Department of History at Harvard University with collaborations extending across North America and Europe. Working in the interests of documentary archaeology, we transcribe and publish archival documents that identify ordinary household objects, tools, equipment, commodities, and other elements of material culture. Team members and collaborators include archaeologists, art historians, historians, and literary scholars. We are eager to extend our collaborations with all scholars interested in the material culture of late medieval Europe; please reach out to us.

Our work is currently sorted into two major research initiatives or documentary corpora. Households and Things in Medieval Europe features household or estate inventories from a number of regions of Europe. The Object as Commodity presents information relative to object values and the role that objects can serve as commodities or economic goods. Within each corpus, members of the DALME team and project associates have created individual collections defined either by geography or theme.

The existing collections include records in Latin and a number of vernaculars. These collections are fully searchable in their original languages; our Search page offers suggestions on how to search, filter, or browse the collection.”

University Libraries’ labor unions digitized collections project completed | Penn State University

“Following three years of digitization and preparation, Penn State University Libraries has made available a vast collection of archival materials documenting the 20th-century American working-class experience, including the largest and most significant record series within the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) archives….”

A New Archive Digitizes More Than a Century of Black American Funeral Programs – Atlas Obscura

“A FUNERAL IS, AMONG MANY highly emotional things, an opportunity to consecrate someone’s life as historical fact, and to commit that truth to the public record. But what happens once those records—and the memories of those who witnessed those rites—are themselves lost within history?

A new initiative by the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is attempting to address that problem. In May 2020, the DLG introduced a free digital archive of some 3,348 programs from funerals of Black Americans who died between 1886 and 2019. (The archive will continue to grow in years to come.) It is a compendium of photos, prayers, and guest signatures that span the pre–Civil War South to the present day. And it’s a “treasure trove” for genealogists, says Tammy Ozier, president of the Atlanta Chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS), which contributed to the archive….”

Sneak preview of new free history of science collection | Jisc

“The digital archive is still in development, but all Jisc HE, FE and affiliate members will be able to preview an initial proportion of the content that’s being digitised ahead of the full launch later this year….

On completion, the collection will consist of a million pages of documents drawn from the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) and complementary materials from UK libraries and archives. Collections from the universities of Leeds and Liverpool, University College London and Senate House Libraries have already been selected for inclusion and free digitisation following an open call for expression of interest, and more collections from other university libraries and archives will be included over the next few weeks….”

Seshat: Global History Databank

“Seshat: Global History Databank 

was founded in 2011 to bring together the most current and comprehensive body of knowledge about human history in one place. The huge potential of this knowledge for testing theories about political and economic development has been largely untapped.

Our unique Databank

systematically collects what is currently known about the social and political organization of human societies and how civilizations have evolved over time. This massive collection of historical information allows us and others to rigorously test different hypotheses about the rise and fall of large-scale societies across the globe and human history….”

Open Science: Key Resources for Medievalists – Mittelalter

“The following collection of online resources is part of our article “How to make your medieval research more visible with Open Scholarship Methods and Tools” to be published in Imago Temporis Medium Aevum 15 (2021) at Lleida University (Spain). We would like to thank the editors of Imago Temporis Medium Aevum to allow us to bring a so-called living version of the section “Key Resources” online before the final publication of the article (read more about the journal here). The living version may differ from the upcoming printed version (updates, additional resources).

In the following we would like to share a (commented) list of useful resources for medievalists in the digital age with a focus on Open Science (Communication). Within each section the items are ordered alphabetically. This list does by no means claim to be exhaustive and it contains mainly non-profit resources. Often your university or institutional library can provide you with more information about Open Access content, policies, initiatives, and services available at your institution and beyond. We recommend to check online guides provided by libraries and welcome suggestions for additions and changes….”