Harvard's Open Collections

Harvard University has developed an Open Collections Program for a few select projects, starting in 2002, with funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The two main projects started in 2004 were Women Working, 1800-1930 and Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930. Subsequent funding from Arcadia went to form Contagion: Historical Views of Epidemics and Diseases and funding from Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud for the upcoming Islamic Heritage Project. The Program is geared mainly toward educators, students, and researchers.

Women Working and Immigration have similar setups, with browsing and searching options, along with Help, Related Links, and tools for Educators sections. One can browse by what they call "Genre" (books, photographs, diaries, manuscripts, etc.) or by "Subject" (topics, themes, people, dates and events, etc.) One can search through the digitized items or the Full Text versions, but unfortunately most of the digitized items are scanned images and not in full text, which limits searching abilities.
The search box, shown here, gives helpful hints for searching, and allows you to sort by title, creator, or date and by document type. For the few items that have been converted to Full Text using OCR, there is a search option to look for a particular word or phrase that occurs.

The Open Collections Program is an aggregation of digitized materials from Harvard University's libraries and Social Museum, and the images are viewable through Harvard's own Viewer device and are downloadable, provided they are used by educators or students in educational settings.

The FAQ and Help sections of the site are very useful for users, as the layout may be confusing for people trying to browse or search for specific material.


The Contagion part of the website is set up very differently, however, which would no doubt lead to confusion by users. Perhaps this is because of the variance in funding for the project, but the collection is mostly made up of specific subjects (i.e. Cholera Epidemics in the 19th Century or The Boston Smallpox Epidemic, 1721) with their own books, articles, manuscripts, and images separated from the others. This yields an unwieldy searching atmosphere, but if the researcher knows what is needed, can just click on the subject heading to find it.

Overall the Open Collections Program is a useful Digital Library for these subjects, and the digitized images come across nicely in the Harvard Viewer, but the site could definitely benefit from some better searching and browsing options and consistency throughout.