Digital Collection Portals
These digitization projects are freely available online to researchers, and contain a mix of historical documents (books, articles, manuscripts, images, etc.)
- Calisphere This link opens in a new windowOver 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."
- EuropeanaIncludes digitized books, paintings, photographs, recordings and films from over 2,200 contributing cultural heritage organisations across Europe.
- Cross-search DPLA and EuropeanaOnline app that allows users to simultaneously search the digital collections in the Digital Public Library of America and Europeana.
- EUscreenEUscreen offers free online access to videos, stills, texts and audio from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives. Explore selected content from early 1900s until today.
- UCLA Fowler Museum: Collections OnlineThe Fowler's collections comprise more than 120,000 art and ethnographic and 600,000 archaeological objects representing ancient, traditional, and contemporary cultures of Africa, Native and Latin America, and Asia and the Pacific.
- 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 PortalOnline search platform with access to digitized art history texts in the public domain (including art, architecture, material culture, and related fields).
- Internet Archive"A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more."
- Library of Congress Digital CollectionsOnline access to manuscripts, ephemera, images, maps, and more.
- Online Books PageFrom UPenn, this free site includes open access versions of classic literature in the public domain.
Major Cross-Search Portals of Digitized Materials
- AM Search This link opens in a new window
UCLA subscribes to selected AM (formerly Adam Matthew) databases comprised of digitized archival material and primary sources. You can use AM Search to search across all of them. UCLA has access to licensed AM content published through 2024. Formerly known as Adam Matthew Archive Explorer.
- Alexander Street Press This link opens in a new windowUCLA subscribes to several dozen distinct databases hosted by Alexander Street Press. This interface allows you to search across most of them. Click on "My Collections" to see the list of subscribed databases.
- Archive of Americana This link opens in a new windowThousands of newspapers, books, ephemera, broadsides, pamphlets, government publications, and more, detailing life in 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century America. Includes America's Historical Imprints; Early American Newspapers, 1690-1876; America's Historical Newspapers; Caribbean Newspapers, 1718-1876; American State Papers, 1789-1838; and U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1980.
- EBSCOhost This link opens in a new window
Search platform for over 50 databases, from Academic Search Complete to Women's Studies International.
- Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new windowA cross-search platform of 21 databases available from the Gale Group, including historical newspapers (formerly NewsVault), The Making of Modern Law, U.S. Declassified Documents Online, among others. They can be searched as a group or as a selected subset.
- ProQuest This link opens in a new window
Search platform for over 120 databases, from the AFI Catalog to Worldwide Political Science Abstracts. Includes scholarly articles, primarily in the humanities and social sciences, as well as newspapers and dissertations.
