NOTE: Each link in this release to a book loads the entire text of the book, which, on some computers, may take considerable time.

ANN ARBOR—”First Principles of Popular Education and Public Instruction,” “Westward by Rail: The New Route to the East” and “The Ladies’ Hand-book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness” are just three of the thousands of books now available through the University Library’s Making of America (MoA) collection.

The collection, which contains about 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles published in the 19th century, is on the Web. It includes more than 3 million pages of digitized documents that focus on topics ranging from the life and death of Abraham Lincoln, to 19th-century household sciences to reflections on travel to the western United States.

“The digitization of the collection greatly facilitates use by a much broader community of users,” says William Gosling, University Library director. “In addition, electronic versions of these texts enable new avenues of access supporting innovative research, initiatives and projects. It is exciting to see heavy use made of this older historical material through the Digital Library access.”

Site visitors can conduct finely targeted searches or browse, working with individual volumes or getting a sense of the coverage within a time period on a particular subject.

“Book bag,” a new feature similar to the “shopping cart” on some Web sites, makes it possible for users to add markers and create bibliographies and searchable subsets of the collection.

Development of the first phase of the project began as a joint project between Cornell University and the U-M in the fall of 1995, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The two schools drew on the depth of their primary materials, creating the thematically related digital library.

Approximately 2,500 (1,500 from the University Library) books and journals with imprints, primarily from 1850 to 1877, were selected, scanned and made available electronically. Librarians, researchers and instructors worked together to determine the content for the beginnings of this digital library.

The selection of materials for the first phase focused on monographs on education, psychology, American history, sociology, science and technology, and religion, and periodicals of literary and general interest. Subject-specialist librarians worked with faculty in a variety of disciplines to identify materials that will be most readily applicable to research and teaching needs.

Beginning in
“The Making of America collection provides a rich pool of resources documenting our America heritage,” says Wendy Lougee, Library associate director. “By digitizing the original print publications, many of which were brittle and disintegrating, we have brought new life and a new audience to these resources and been able to share our methods with the broader scholarly community.”

The Library is hosting a celebration of the expansion at 7:30 p.m. March 12 in the Chemistry Building auditorium that will feature Pulitzer Prize-winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.

[Central Campus map, Chemistry Building near center]

Goodwin, well-known for her expertise on the nation’s presidents, will present “Shared Memories: The Lessons of History,” based on her experiences in writing three presidential biographies and her memoir on growing up in the 1950s in love with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Other participants in the free, public program are William Gosling; Donald Waters, program officer from the Mellon Foundation; and Sidney Fine, the Andrew Dickson White Professor of History.

Access MoA on the Web at moa.umdl.umich.edu/. For information about the celebration or the project, contact Pat Hodges, (734) 764-8016 or [email protected].

First Principles of Popular Education and Public Instruction8,500 booksWilliam GoslingAndrew W. Mellon FoundationDoris Kearns GoodwinCentral Campus mapSidney Fine