Political Collections Online

 

 

Congressional Collections at Archival Repositories

http://www.archives.gov/records_of_congress/repository_collections/index.html

National Archives site with links to Archival Repositories who hold Congressional Collections.  Can sort by archival institution, state, or member of Congress name.

 

Congressional Records Online

http://www.archives.gov/research_room/arc/topics/congressional.html

National Archives site with links to and directions for finding digitized congressional records.

 

George Mitchell

http://library.bowdoin.edu/arch/mitchell/

Senator from Maine.  Content of site is for the most part the finding aid to the Mitchell papers, although there is some digitized material including photographs, a few video clips, and the text of several speeches.  Very useful model for modern day political collections.

 

George Washington

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html

Collection available online in its entirety.  Includes educational content under Special Presentations section and at this Learning Page link

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/collections/gw/

 

Abraham Lincoln

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html

Very similar to Washington collection.

 

John Heinz

http://www.library.cmu.edu/Research/Archives/Heinz/

Nearly 800,000 digital images from Heinz Papers at Carnegie-Mellon.  Massive but awkward and slow.  No additional educational content that I could find.

 

William S. Cohen

http://www.library.umaine.edu/cohen/

Finding Aid with some digital images.

 

Silvio Conte

http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/umass/mu223_main.html

Finding Aid only, part of Five Colleges finding aids project.  Very good model for delivering EAD finding aids.

The finding aids included in this site are marked up in XML according to the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) standard. The site runs Cocoon publishing software that applies XSL stylesheets for displaying the finding aids as HTML in any standard web browser. Lucene is the site's search engine. Both Cocoon and Lucene are open source software projects of The Apache Software Foundation.

 

 

Carl Albert

http://www.ou.edu/special/albertctr/main.html

Papers of over 50 members of Congress.  Finding Aids to collections, some web exhibits, online journal for congressional topics, and information about outreach programs.

 

Dirksen Congressional Center

http://www.dirksencenter.org/

Three main collections and over 70 smaller collections.  Good educational material at Congress in the Classroom Online portion of the site.

http://www.congressclass.org/

 

Thomas J. Dodd Research Center

http://www.lib.uconn.edu/online/research/speclib/ASC/

Finding aids for political and other collections.

 

Albert Gore Research Center

http://janus.mtsu.edu/

Finding Aids and exhibits.

Tennessee political collections.

 

Richard Russell Library

http://www.libs.uga.edu/russell/

Finding aids and exhibits.

The Russell Library has over 100 collections of papers from politicians, political parties, public policy organizations, federal and state appointees, and political observers from modern Georgia (1900-present).

 

Stennis Center for Public Service

http://www.stennis.gov/

Promotes public service.  Congress to Campus program might be worth looking into at some point.

Stennis Papers are at:

http://library.msstate.edu/congressional/stennis.asp

 

 

 

IMLS funded political projects

 

Cornell University Collection of Political Americana (IMLS)

http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/political/

The central goal of the project is to preserve, digitize, and catalog all items in the Susan H. Douglas Collection of Political Americana. Acquired from an individual collector between 1957 and 1961, the Douglas collection includes approximately 5,500 items of American political campaign memorabilia and commemorative items dating to between 1789 and 1960.  Mrs. Douglas characterized them as: ballots, bric-a-brac (larger three-dimensional objects), broadsides, buttons, cartoons, maps and charts, pamphlets, paper miscellaneous, parade items, posters, prints, ribbons, sheet music, songbooks, textiles, trinkets, and wearing apparel.

In addition to the Douglas collection, Cornell University Library is conserving, digitizing, and cataloging approximately 1500 other similar items covering Presidential campaigns from 1960 to 1972.  These items are found in a dozen other collections in the Cornell Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, including the 1960-1966 public relations records of the Republican National Committee. We have also preserved, cataloged, and digitized 393 additional pieces of campaign literature dating from 1800 to 1964 found the Rare Books collection. We intend to digitize all Presidential campaign items in Cornell collections to the extent that current technologies allow. 

 

Getting the Message Out! National Campaign Materials, 1840-1860 (IMLS)

http://dig.lib.niu.edu/message/

Good educational content.

Getting the Message Out! National Political Campaign Materials, 1840-1860 presents an examination of national popular political culture in antebellum America. It includes histories of the presidential campaigns from 1840-1860, as well as primary source material, such as campaign biographies and campaign songbooks. Recordings of some of the songs are also available.

 

 

Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta, GA (IMLS)
2000 National Leadership Grants for Libraries - Preservation or Digitization
This two year project will create an electronic archive of State government documents, including Georgia’s House and Senate journals, executive council minutes, colonial government records, and other material. http://www.galileo.peachnet.edu/