LibGuides: Teaching with primary sources: Online instruction with primary sources

Virtual sessions and guidance

If you're interested in incorporating a session, activity, or assignment into your remotely-taught class in fall 2020, our teaching staff can help! To request a class session, please complete this form, or contact Heather Cole, Head, Special Collections Instruction to talk through possibilities.

Resources for assignments and activities

Exploring ways to incorporate engagement with primary sources in your course while teaching remotely? This guide provides a selection of ideas and resources to inspire new modes of research and discovery.

Teaching materiality online
Guide to virtual primary source exploration from Duke University's Rubenstein Library.
What's a digital image?
From earlyprintedbooks.com; this exercise encourages students to look at digital images of books as images, rather than as transparent representations of a book.
A book's "horizon of expectations"
From earlyprintedbooks.com, this exercise encourages students to think about what sort of context might have shaped the reception of a book when it was published.
Omeka
Open-source web publishing platforms for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits. Easy-to-use tool for group and individual student projects.
Scalar
A free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources (including archival collections) and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required. A helpful intro to Scalar can be found here: https://scalar.usc.edu/works/intro-to-scalar-1/index
Scribe framework: crowdsourced transcription
Scribe is a highly configurable, open source framework for setting up community transcription projects around handwritten or OCR-resistant texts. Scribe is particularly geared toward digital humanities, library, and citizen science projects seeking to extract highly structured, normalizable data from a set of digitized materials (e.g. historical manuscripts, account ledgers, catalog cards, or maritime logbooks).
The Archaeology of Reading exercises
Using resources on the Archaeology of Reading site, these exercises (with related reading assignments) examine collectors and readers and the ways marginalia interacts with a printed text.
Smithsonian Digital Transcription Center
Join 14,674 "volunpeers" to add more to the total 515,472 pages of field notes, diaries, ledgers, logbooks, currency proof sheets, photo albums, manuscripts, biodiversity specimens labels that have been collaboratively transcribed and reviewed since June 2013.
National Archives Citizen Archivist program
Assist the U.S. National Archives in tagging and transcribing material from its collections.
History of the Book coursebook
The History of the Book is a networked resource focused on the production and reception of materials related to the history of the book and literacy technologies, broadly conceived. This ongoing project is being developed by Professor Johanna Drucker, working with staff and students based at UCLA to provide an online environment for research and learning.
TeachArchives.org
Resources and exercises on teaching with primary sources, from the Brooklyn Historical Society.

Freely-available online collections of rare books & manuscripts

This is not an exhaustive list, but a selection of easily-navigable online resources on a variety of topics. Contact Brown University Library staff for additional resources related to other topics, or browse our other research guides. A crowdsourced list of online collections can be found here, and another comprehensive list compiled by the Bibliographical Society of America can be found here.

North American Collections

Digitized material from the Brown University Library
Browse Brown's collections of music, poetry, military history, American history, the history of Brown University, and more.
John Carter Brown Library
Digitized materials focusing on the colonial Americas.
Digital Public Library of America
Online exhibitions, primary source sets for teaching, and other resources from collections across the U.S.
New York Public Library Digital Collections
Hundreds of thousands of items, on topics ranging from menus to LGBTQ+ history to dance, science, and much more.
Smithsonian Libraries: Digital Collections
Over 35,000 digitized books and manuscripts as well as digitized photo collections, ephemera, and seed catalogs.
Umbra Search
Over 730,000 items from U.S. libraries relating to all aspects of African American culture and history.
National Library of Medicine Digital Collections (Bethesda, MD)
History of Medicine worldwide, especially Historical Anatomies: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/historicalanatomies/home.html
Biodiversity Heritage Library
Global collection of works on natural history.

European Collections

British Library Digital Collections
Includes materials digitized from with the BL's collections, including maps from Britain and around the world, sound recordings, illuminated manuscripts, 19th century books using early photographs for illustration, and others.
Europeana
Interface available in English and 26 other European languages.
Cultural heritage from European museums, galleries, libraries and archives; includes material from research libraries throughout the European Union.
Plantin Moretus
Interface in English
Publications on bibliophilia, printing & publishing, and book history
25,000 printed books, 600+ manuscripts from this Dutch printing museum.
The Archaeology of Reading
A fully-digitized collection of early modern printed books with marginalia from John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.

Resources requiring a Brown login

Arte Publico Hispanic Historical Collections
Series 1 presents a digital collection of historical content pertaining to U.S. Hispanic history, literature and culture, while Series 2 presents manuscript, book, and newspaper content in the areas of Hispanic American civil rights, religion, and women’s rights ranging from the eighteenth through the twentieth century.
Early American Imprints
Full-text access to the 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides from 1639-1819
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
Includes books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more. It contains works published in the UK during the 18th century plus thousands from elsewhere. ECCO is primarily in English, but does include other languages.
Early English Books Online (EEBO)
From the first book published in English through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare, this collection contains about 100,000 titles on English literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics, and science.
Early European Books
Traces the history of printing in Europe from its origins through to the close of the seventeenth century, offering full-color, high-resolution facsimile images of rare and hard-to-access printed sources.
HathiTrust Digital Library
A partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of book and ejournal titles digitized from libraries around the world.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
Focusing on primary source collections of the long nineteenth century.

Digital Pedagogy

TPS Collective
The Teaching with Primary Sources Collective site, a project from the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association for Research Libraries, collects assignment ideas, discussions, and other resources for instructors and library staff.
TPS Collective Crowdsource for moving archival and special collections instruction online
Teaching with Primary Sources Collection community crowdsourced resource; a continuously-growing Google Doc
Early Printed Books
Resource for instructors and researchers working with books from the early modern period. Includes pedagogical exercises and tools.
Working with EEBO and ECCO
A how-to lesson on working with Early English Books Online and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, focusing both on the basics of searching and navigating interfaces
Teaching with rare materials in epidemics
Discussion with many helpful links.
Teaching digitally with primary sources
This white paper explores the opportunities and challenges of teaching with digital primary sources, including relevant literacies and issues in finding, evaluating, and citing digital primary sources, emphasizing ethical use and concluding with existing models for teaching.
Teaching the History of Cartography: A Case for the Marriage of Special Collections and Distance Learning
This paper discusses the ways in which special collections resources (maps, atlases and related materials) can be used in conjunction with existing distance learning technologies to expand access to educational opportunities in the field.

Crowdsourced & Community Digital Collections

Our Marathon
A crowdsourced archive of pictures, videos, stories, and social media related to the Boston Marathon; the bombing on April 15, 2013; the subsequent search, capture, and trial of the individuals who planted the bombs; and the city’s healing process.
Charlie Archive
Documenting the vigorous debate about fundamental political and ethical issues that followed the 2015 terrorist attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Digital Humanities Projects & Resources
Diversify your book history syllabus
A crowdsourced collection of books and articles relating to all aspects of book and printing history and material culture.
Archives & Social Justice Reading List
Reading list that includes curated resources of interest as well as an outline of selected readings by the reading group hosted at the University of Texas at Austin loosely facilitated throughout the years by LLILAS Benson and Harry Ransom Center staff.