Humanities: Harry Ransom Center Launches Online Digital Image Collection

From the Harry Ransom Center (U. of Texas at Austin):

The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has launched a new platform of freely available digitized images of collection materials on its website.
The new site [powered by CONTENTdm from OCLC], contains more than 8,000 items and will continue to grow as newly digitized images are added on a regular basis.
Presently the collection includes photographs by Lewis Carroll, manuscripts by Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Harry Houdini’s scrapbooks, works by artist Frank Reaugh and items from the Ransom Center’s extensive circus collection, which includes materials related to showmen such as P. T. Barnum, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey.
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“The mission of cultural institutions such as the Ransom Center is to advance scholarship,” said Ransom Center Digital Collections Librarian Elizabeth Gushee. “By providing collections of rare materials online, the Ransom Center is fostering further opportunities for scholars to interact with these materials, facilitating new and potentially transformative uses of the Center’s unique collections.”
Visitors to the Ransom Center’s website can search within collections or across collections, often revealing related materials.  Additional tools provide users with the ability to virtually flip through books, enlarge images and compare page images with accompanying transcripts, which are text-searchable.
Collections are being added on an ongoing basis, and planned digitization projects include the photographs of 19^th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and photographs and ephemera from the Fred Fehl dance collection.

Direct to Harry Ransom Center Digital Collections
See Also: Additional Online Research Tools from the Ransom Center

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