Florida Memory Project

The Division of Library and Information Services of the Florida Department of State has expanded their online Florida Memory website. This website originally hosted only photographs and scanned documents from Florida history (see previous blog post).  Now this archive has expanded to include historical Florida videos, music, and folklore interviews.  Here are two pictures from this online archive:

                                  Engine 507 and crew 

        Dottie Schroeder of the All-American Girls 
                    Professional Baseball  League

                Here are two video excepts:




The full version of the 1917 inauguration for Sidney J. Catts can be seen here.



The full version of this video about the Everglades can be found here.

You can explore the complete Florida Memory Project here.

Happy Fourth of July!

We hope you have a wonderful Fourth of July.  In celebration of our country's founding, here are some interesting online historical exhibits:

The U.S. National Archive "Documented Rights" Exhibit states that "Since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, our rights as citizens of the United States have been debated, contested, amended, and documented."  You can view this exhibit online here. Also, there are related photographs in the U. S. National Archives' Flickr photo collections.  Two of these photos are shown below:

Photograph of Suffrage Parade 1913

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at a Civil Rights March -1963

You can find other historical collections online at the U. S. National Archives here. 

Other collections include:

•  Eyewitness - eyewitness accounts of dramatic moments in U. S. history.
• Treasures of Congress
• American Women - information about over 100 significant women in American History.
• A People at War - Americans who served their country in World War II.

State Archives of Florida Photos

An earlier blog post mentioned that Flickr had partnered with the Library of Congress to provide free access to their historical photographs. Now Flickr has added public photo collections from libraries and museums around the world. These collections include the Smithsonian Institution, the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Maritime Museum, and the Swedish National Heritage Board.

The folks at Flickr are asking people to describe these photos by "tagging" the photos and commenting on them. "Tags" are the text keywords or terms that people use to describe a particular item, such as a photograph. For example, someone could add the following tags to a picture of a seagull - bird; seabird; gull. This Flickr collection is called the "Commons". The State Archives of Florida have just added their own photographs to the Commons.

Here are some of the photos from the State Archives of Florida:

(You can click on the photos to get more information.)

The Florida State Archives collection is called "Florida Memory" can be found here.

Online LIFE Magazine Photo Archive

Google has partnered with LIFE Magazine to digitize the photos and etchings from their archive. A Google blog post mentioned that only a small percentage of these photos have previously been published. Google has begun to digitize the images from this archive of 10 million photos. Many historical and cultural photographs are already online - for example, there are many Civil War photographs with descriptions. One can also click on each picture to see a full size image. These photos can be used for personal, noncommercial use. One can find these images on the "Life Photo Archive" page.


Another way to access these photos is to do a search in Google images using the search term "source:life", along with your topic word. For example, to see pictures of the Olympic games from the LIFE archive, type in "olympics source:life" in the search box on the Google images search page. Click here to view this example.

Another large archive of historical photographs is now available on the Flickr website. Flickr has partnered with the Library of Congress to host a sampling of their digital photo collection. You can also search the full Library Of Congress Prints and Photographs Online catalog here. This archive includes approximately one million images. More information about this archive can be found here.