Northern Kentucky University

Many organizations, such as archives, historical societies, museums, universities, and libraries provide digital images of historical documents. These documents are often available to the public online.

Here are some major websites that contain primary document collections:

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has a collection of more than 147 million items. It includes more than 63 million manuscripts and the world’s largest collection of legal materials, films, maps, sheet music, and sound recordings. Primary document collections available through the Library of Congress include:

American Memory Project

"American Memory provides free and open access to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity."

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

This Library of Congress website provides access to digitized historic newspapers. Ohio and Kentucky newspapers from 1860-1922 are available to view. The site's goal is to eventually have every U.S. state and territory included. From this page, you can click on Topics in Chronicling America to find newspapers about subjects and people in American History.

National Union Catalog for Manuscript Collections

NUCMC allows researchers to search processed collections of primary documents throughout the United States.

National Archives and Records Administration

NARA is the nation's record keeper. Not only does it house the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but also more than 9 billion pages of text, maps, drawings, photos, film, and other documents pertaining to the business of the U.S. government. Browse a portion of the NARA collections at DocsTeach, a resource designed for teachers.

Smithsonian Institution

Search more than 6.4 million records for images, video, sound, journals, and other resources from the Smithsonian's museums, archives, and libraries.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

"Contains more than 60,000 documents detailing the political and social history of the United States. The collection's holdings include manuscript letters, diaries, maps, photographs, printed books, and pamphlets ranging from 1493 through modern times."

The New York Public Library

This website provides access to hundreds of thousands of images from the original and rare holdings of the New York Public Library. The images span a wide range of historical eras, geography, and include images of drawings, maps, posters, prints, and more.

EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History

"These links connect to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated. They shed light on key historical happenings within the respective countries and within the broadest sense of political, economic, social, and cultural history."

Internet Archive

This Internet library provides the public with access to historical collections in digital format. The library includes texts, audio, images, and archived web pages.

Kentucky Digital Library

The Kentucky Digital Library is a gateway to rare and unique digitized collections housed in Kentucky archives. Search more than one million images.

Kentucky Oral History Commission

This is the only state agency in the United States dedicated to oral history. Search or browse by collection. Not all materials are digitized, but collection locations are provided.

Greater Cincinnati Memory Project

This is a cooperative project of members of the Greater Cincinnati Library Consortium. It has made nearly 6,000 local history images available on the Web.

Pass the Word

A project of the Kentucky Oral History Commission. The site provides researchers with a database indexing more than 30,000 oral history recordings throughout Kentucky. The search results will point the researcher to the library/archive providing access to the recordings.

Online Finding Aid Repositories

Finding aids provide a researcher with a description of the primary documents held in a collection and they tell the researcher where that collection is held. Search these consortiums to find collections of primary documents. These resources won't link you directly to the document, but will tell you which institution owns the collection.

OhioLink Finding Aid Repository

This repository will show you the collections held in archives, libraries, and other institutions across the state of Ohio.

Kentuckiana

Similar to the OhioLink repository, except that it searches only the institutions in Kentucky.

Library of Congress

Browse the Library of Congress finding aids by collection.

Repositories of Primary Sources

"A listing of over 5,000 websites linking the researcher to descriptions of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar."

Google Searching Tip

To find credible websites with primary documents, do a Google search while limiting the website's domain to ".edu". This will search for colleges and universities that may have a page dedicated to a historical topic. You can limit your search by domain if you use the "Advanced Search" option in Google (located to the right of the search box) or type your domain directly into the search box, like this: site:.edu - notice there are no spaces.

To find more collections of primary documents, you can also do this search using ".org" or ".gov" in place of ".edu".