Research Guides: Gender Studies: Open Access Digital Collection Portals

Digital Collection Portals

These digitization projects are freely available online to researchers.

Discovering American Women's History Online
Brings together hundreds of primary source digital collections covering U.S. women’s history.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
From the Library of Congress, including many photographs and other visual elements documenting American history.

Calisphere This link opens in a new window
Over one million photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more from the collections digitized and contributed by all ten campuses of the University of California and other important libraries, archives, and museums throughout the state.

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
"The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science."

Digital Transgender Archive This link opens in a new window
International open access online hub focused on accessibility of transgender history. DTA is a collaboration among more than twenty institutions, including digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world.

Europeana
Includes digitized books, paintings, photographs, recordings and films from over 2,200 contributing cultural heritage organisations across Europe.
Cross-search DPLA and Europeana
Online app that allows users to simultaneously search the digital collections in the Digital Public Library of America and Europeana.
EUscreen
EUscreen offers free online access to videos, stills, texts and audio from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives. Explore selected content from early 1900s until today.
Gallica (Bibliotheque nationale de France)
More than one million digitized documents (books, periodicals, manuscripts, maps, images, scores, sound recordings, etc.) at the French National Library.
Getty Research Portal
Online search platform with access to digitized art history texts in the public domain (including art, architecture, material culture, and related fields).
HEARTH: Home Economics Archive
HEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines.
Human Rights Documentation Initiative
From the U. of Texas, this site makes available archived web resources related to human rights organizations and issues.

Independent Voices This link opens in a new window
Full text of more than 1000 open access alternative publications from the 1960s-1980s covering feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Latinos, LGBTQ+ activists, and more.

Internet Archive
"A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more."
Project Diana: An Online Human Rights Archive
An international archive of human rights legal documentation, provided by Yale Law School.
Salem Witch Trials Documentary Project
Contains court records, diaries, and other primary sources, in facsimile and transcribed versions.

UCLA Library Digital Collections This link opens in a new window
Rare and unique digital materials developed by the UCLA Library to support education, research, service, and creative expression, including the AIDS Poster Collection, the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive and more.

USC Libraries Digital Collections
Online collections from the University of Southern California, including digital images of drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, and audio and video recordings.
Women Working 1870-1930
Includes digitized books, manuscripts, and images from Harvard University Libraries and Museums on women in the U.S. economy from 1870-1930.
Women's and Gender Studies Web Archive (Library of Congress)
"[C]ollects and preserves online content on topics of importance to the interdisciplinary field of Women's and Gender Studies. Collection priorities include primary sources, first hand accounts, and records of social, cultural, and political movements for gender equality."