Using Materials Online
Small portions of our collections have been made accessible online as “Online Content”. Some of this material originated on a computer (usually called “born-digital” materials) whereas others were digitized from physical materials for research use. The archive provides an image rendering of both types of materials that you can see on its corresponding webpage.
Why are only some materials available online?
Most of our records will never be digitized and will only be available for in-person viewing. This is because we hold tens of thousands of boxes of records. While we try to digitize our most heavily-used materials, it’s actually much easier and more affordable to maintain records on paper. If we spent all of our resources digitizing, we would not be able to preserve as many materials and many records would be lost.
The archives exists for you to use it, so feel free to download, link, or embed directly from over 67,000 online items in our Digital Selections.
With almost a thousand collections and hundreds of thousands of individual items within those collections, it can be difficult to keep track of the resources and materials that you wish to use for your research.
That’s why we offer the bookmark feature! It allows users to save materials at the collection, series, and item level. These saved materials appear in a “Bookmarks” tab that you can refer back to, ask questions about, and even request to see in-person or have digitized.
- Select item(s) and check the box next to the bookmark icon.
- Once the selected materials have been checked, they are now available in your Bookmarks.
- Within your Bookmarks Selections page, you can choose how you would like to interact with your selected materials:
- Ask a general question or book a virtual consultation for more in-depth assistance
- Schedule a Visit to review your selections in-person in the Marcia Brown Reading Room
- Make a Request for the selection to be digitally reproduced and made available online
- Please be mindful that we are unable to digitize large volumes of material or fragile items that risk becoming damaged during scannings. Read more about our policies of digitization here.
- By Scheduling a Visit or Requesting Materials you can add your personal details and see that all your bookmarked selections have been automatically included in your “Request these Materials” box.
- If you do not want all of your bookmarks to be included in your requests, you will need to unselect them (which will remove them from your saved bookmarks), refresh the page, and then click on the form you would like to submit. Or you will need to manually remove the links from the form box.
For a collection, this looks like:
For a series, this looks like:
For an item, this looks like:
You have several options of downloading these materials from the “Online Content” feature. You can download individual images or files a.k.a the rendered copies that have been provided for your interaction. Or, if the item was not originally an image or contains more than one page, download the entire item as a PDF through an “Alternate formats” option. If the item was born-digitally and exists in another format (like a Microsoft Word Document, a PowerPoint file, etc.) then you can download the original file through a different “Alternate formats” option. Also, every item that contains text will be accompanied by a text transcript, which can be downloaded and searched for easier discovery.
- Click the three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner of the "Online Content” box.
- A smaller screen will appear with different size options.
- Clicking any of the download links will open an external window that will allow you to right-click to download the image.
Note: this option allows you to download the image on your screen, it will not include all of the pages of a multipage object. If you wish to download all of the pages, utilize the other download option.
- Click the three horizontal lines in the upper left-hand corner of the panel.
- Scroll to the bottom of the sidebar, to the “Related Links” section to see “Alternate formats”.
- Click the link that ends with “.pdf”.
- Clicking the “.pdf” link will open an external window that will allow you to download the entire item by clicking the download button in the upper right-hand corner.
Note: Most of the time, this link will say “binder.pdf”, but not always!
- If there is an original version of the item, the link will appear below the PDF rendering..
- Clicking the “(Original)” link will automatically download the file. It will appear in your browser’s download area or the “Downloads” folder on your computer.
Note: the link will end with the different file format (in this case “.doc”) and then “(Original)”
- Below the item box, there is a “Download Transcript” button which allows you to open a computer-generated transcription of the contents of the item.
- Right clicking anywhere on the screen will present you with the “Save as…” option which will allow you to download the transcript as a .txt file.
- Click the three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner of the "Online Content” box
- Select the “Share” option.
- A box will appear with share options.
The options are:
- Share Link: a link to a webpage just containing a full screen of the item, not the link found on the finding aid.
- Embed: the embedding options allow you to include the item as a feature on another site via a iframe code block
- Select viewer size: toggling the viewer sizes changes the code in the box below. It will also change the size of the iframe that you embed on your website.
- 560 x 420
- 640 x 480
- 800 x 600
- 1024 x 768
- Add to another viewer: there are also two options to add the item to a different IIIF viewer, either by dragging the small IIIF icon (which contains the link to the item) or by copying the manifest of the item.