Module 4: Visiting with Experts

In just the last few years, there has been an explosion of activity in the world of digital collections. These growing online repositories are making available the rare, unique, and hidden items that were previously only available in physical repositories. But that's not to say that everything is online, or that those things that are online are inherently easy to discover. In Module 2, we looked at Ancestry.com, HeritageQuest.org, and FamilySearch.org. These sites contain federal census and other genealogy records that are owned by libraries and archives across the country. In this module, we’ll focus on the digital collections that libraries and archives are putting online themselves.

Advice from the Experts

Links mentioned

North Carolina Digital Collections Links to an external site.

Digital Public Library of America Links to an external site.

Main Takeaways:

• Digital collections may contain many formats, from photographs and audio recordings to maps, manuscripts, newspapers, yearbooks, and government documents.
• Genealogists may find things like ancestor charts and published family histories, but may also consider government documents useful due to their tendency to list names of employees, pensioners, etc.
• Like physical repositories, digital repositories usually focus on the history and culture of the host institution.
• While many collections are coming online, libraries and archives are limited in what they can put online due to factors such as budgets, staffing, and copyright. If you can't find it online, that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist!
• Many institutions are contributing their collections to the Digital Public Library of America Links to an external site., a centralized repository that allows researchers to search across institutions.

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