Special Collections at Asa H. Gordon Library has been established to appraise, collect, organize, describe, preserve, and make available University records of permanent institutional and historical value. The manuscripts collection contains papers of faculty, staff, and alumni related to the University’s growth and development.
A primary source is generally defined as document or physical object which was written or created during the time under study. These sources were present during an experience or time period and offer an inside view of a particular event. Depending on your research topic and perspective, primary sources can include:
American Memory
Comprising more than 9 million items that document U.S. history and culture, American Memory is organized into more than 100 thematic collections based on their original format, their subject matter, or who first created, assembled, or donated them to the Library. The original formats include manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music. Each online collection is accompanied by a set of explanatory features designed to make the materials easy to find, use, and understand.
Ancestry (Library Edition)
Offers unparalleled coverage of the United States and the United Kingdom, including census, vital, church, court, and immigration records, as well as record collections from Canada, Europe, Australia and other areas of the world! Video tutorials available here.
Civil Rights Digital Library (CRDL)
The CRDL links to primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. The CRDL features a collection of more than 30 hours of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries. These moving images - about 450 clips - cover a broad range of key civil rights events, including the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas (1957); the Atlanta Temple bombing (1958); Atlanta sit-ins (1960); Freedom Rides (1961); desegregation of the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech (1961); the Albany Movement (1961-1962); desegregation of Ole Miss (1962) and University of Alabama (1963); and Americus Movement (1963, 1965); Birmingham demonstrations (1963); among many other topics.
Digital Library of Georgia
The Digital Library of Georgia is a gateway to Georgia's history and culture found in digitized books, manuscripts, photographs, government documents, newspapers, maps, audio, video, and other resources.
Georgia Historic Newspapers
Since the early 1950s the UGA Libraries have made a systematic effort to identify and obtain copies of every newspaper ever published in Georgia and to preserve these valuable historical resources on microfilm. The goal of the Georgia Historic Newspapers database is to convert every Georgia newspaper to digital format and to make this resource available free of charge as a searchable text database.
Presidential Libraries are repositories for the papers, records and historical materials of the Presidents. The Presidential Libraries work to ensure that these irreplaceable items are preserved and made available for the widest possible use by researchers.
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