American Social History Online: One Place, Many Collections

This presentation will demonstrate American Social History Online, a project of the Digital Library Federation that provides scholars with access to distributed digital library collections pertaining to American culture and life. American Social History Online tools and services are designed to make it easy to find, organize, use and share items from diverse collections.

The American Social History Online website is designed for easy discovery of previously unknown collections and material as well as easy retrieval of known items. By using Zotero, a free easy-to-use research tool that works with the Firefox web browser, scholars can gather and organize resources as well as annotate and share them.

To support the use of images, Collectus and ImageViewer tools developed at the University of Virginia are integrated into American Social History Online. These tools not only support saving and organizing image collections but provide for slide show creation so the image material can be used easily in the classroom.

American Social History Online has been developed using open source software and is currently available without fees or restrictions through generous support from the Mellon Foundation. The American Social History Online team continues to add collections and is also developing integrations with the Sakai open source course management system and a federated search solution that will combine search results for American Social History Online content with commercially available content.