Report: “Decade-Long Project to Digitize Every 17th- and 18th- Century Manuscript and Archive in Harvard’s Collections Relating to North America Will Be Finished This Semester”

From The Harvard Crimson:

A decade-long project to digitize every 17th- and 18th- century manuscript and archive in Harvard’s collections relating to North America will be finished this semester, according to University Archivist Megan Sniffin-Marinoff.

The project, called Colonial North America at Harvard Library, will make more than 600,000 photographs of the documents publicly available online for the first time. Part of the collection is already accessible to the public.

The materials are “enough to make it possible to rethink the origins of education in the U.S. and in fact the origins of the U.S. itself,” Robert C. Darnton ’60, the University Librarian when the project started, wrote in an email.

For the project, workers catalogued the documents from 14 different repositories across Harvard and brought them to an imaging center in Widener Library. While the manuscripts in the Houghton and Widener Libraries could be brought in through tunnels, those from the Business School and the Medical School had to cross the Charles River.

For the project, workers catalogued the documents from 14 different repositories across Harvard and brought them to an imaging center in Widener Library. While the manuscripts in the Houghton and Widener Libraries could be brought in through tunnels, those from the Business School and the Medical School had to cross the Charles River.

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Direct to Colonial North America at Harvard Library Project Website, Search All Materials

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