It's easier than ever to explore the Penn Libraries' digital collections online

This fall, the Penn Libraries is making it easier than ever for anyone to discover, download, and use its digitized collections. With Digital Collections, people all over the world can search these digitized materials, browse by collection, topic, and time period, and download high resolution files for personal and research use. This ever-growing repository is not just available to Penn-affiliated researchers, either. It can be used by students, scholars, artists, teachers, designers, and curious individuals regardless of their institutional affiliation.

Digital Collections currently contains more than 90,000 individual original items, ranging from full medieval manuscripts, to 19th century trade cards, to audio recordings of classical concerts, to letters written by America’s Founding Fathers. Turning printed photographs, handwritten letters, and medieval manuscripts into images you can view on your computer screen requires the input and collaboration of staff from across the Penn Libraries. Librarians, curators, scholars, conservators, and digitization professionals must select materials, assess their copyright status and conservation needs, take photographs using specialized cameras, process images, and create the descriptions and metadata that make the items findable. At the Penn Libraries, digitization work is done by the staff of the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI), which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. They are assisted by a cross-departmental group of web developers, librarians, and catalogers who, together with SCETI, manage the full digitization process and maintain our digital collections repositories.

Here’s a look at just some of the compelling materials you might find when browsing the repository.

The Arthur Tress Collection of Japanese Illustrated Books

The Arthur Tress Collection of Japanese Illustrated Books consists of more than 1,100 titles, and we have digitized nearly half of them in the past year. It is one of the most comprehensive collections of its kind, with books of all types produced in Japan between the mid-17th century and the 1930s, including novels, poetry, travel guidebooks, painting study books, and more. The collection is one of the most visually striking in the Penn Libraries, full of woodblock prints and rare hand-painted manuscripts.

There is intense interest in this collection, both regionally and globally. Researchers from Japan have been traveling to Penn each summer to work with these materials, and they are now regularly studying the digital copies we have in our digital collections.

The Helen Kate Furness Free Library Collection

Helen Kate Furness was a Shakespearean scholar who frequently collaborated with her husband, Horace Howard Furness (also a Shakespearean scholar), and her brother, Fairman Rogers (a professor of civil engineering at Penn). The Penn Libraries houses the H.H. Furness Memorial Library, the Fairman Rogers Collection, and the personal papers of both men, which contain material concerning the life and work of Helen Kate, much of which is digitized.

Curator Alicia Meyer discovered a collection of 39 archival objects related to Helen Kate Furness held at the Helen Kate Furness Free Library in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, which were previously unknown to scholars. Meyer arranged with the Helen Kate Furness Free Library to have these archival materials come to SCETI for digitization. The one exception was a large portrait that could not be moved, so photographer Andrea Nunez traveled to Wallingford to photograph it in situ.

As Meyer noted, having these materials in Digital Collections connects these previously unknown materials of Helen Kate Furness “with the larger corpus of materials related to the Furness and Rogers families, which Penn Libraries have stewarded for the past century.”

The Gratz College-Erich Mandell Jewish Music Collection

The nearly two hundred manuscripts that make up the Gratz College-Erich Mandell Jewish Music Collection survived the Holocaust, despite being captured by Nazis during the German occupation of Holland. After the war, Erich Mandell, a German-American cantor, retrieved the collection and eventually donated it to Gratz College.

Gratz College transferred ownership of the collection to the Penn Libraries so that it could be digitized, preserved, and made more accessible for teaching and research. We completed digitization of the entire collection this past year and are proud to now make available in Digital Collections what curator Arthur Kiron describes as “one of the three most important collections of Judaica music manuscript material in existence.”

What’s next for Digital Collections

The Penn Libraries hopes to continue expanding the types of materials available to users. In the future, we plan to better integrate the repository with OPenn, another repository of digitized library collections. We are also exploring ways to add access controls for some materials with use or copyright restrictions, which would allow us to properly preserve and make available to the Penn community content that would otherwise have to remain undigitized.

Our digital collections are continuing to grow in other ways, too! We encourage you to check back regularly to discover new photographs, manuscripts, books, maps, posters, and more.

Learn more about SCETI

Explore Digital Collections

Featured image: Trade card from Eckstein Brush Co.; Proprietor: H. G. Eckstein; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica.