LibGuides: VIS 179: Intermediate Projects in Media: Find Primary Sources in the Arts

Links to collections

African American Song
Vintage jazz, blues, ragtime, stage, gospel and other forms of African American musical expression, with links to texts and images from the original recording releases.
Alexander Street Press
Several distinct audio and video collections, including: American History in Video; Audio Drama-The L.A. Theatre Works Collection; Dance in Video; Ethnographic Video Online; LGBT Studies in Video; LGBT Thought and Culture; Meet the Press; Music Online (American Song; Classical Music Library; Classical Music in Video; Classical Scores Library; Contemporary World Music; Jazz Music Library; Opera in Video; Popular Music Library; Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries); Silent Film; The March of Time; Theatre in Video; World History in Video; World Newsreels Online (1929–1966)
American Song
A growing database that will contain 50,000 tracks of music from America's past. Included in the database are the songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests and more.
American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment
"A multimedia anthology selected from various Library of Congress holdings ... This collection illustrates the vibrant and diverse forms of popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, that thrived from 1870-1920."
AP Newsroom (aka AP Images)
With millions of images dating back more than 150 years, this is one of the world's largest archives of historical & current imagery. Includes news, entertainment, arts, business, and sports coverage from AP and selected partners. Updated every minute.
Archives of American Art
Includes "papers of artists, dealers, critics and curators, comprising thousands of letters, photographs, diaries, sketches, writings, rare published materials, and other documents." From the Smithsonian Institution.
Asian American Drama
Asian American Drama contains 186 plays by 35 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.

Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection
Important dramatic works in streaming audio from the curated archive of the nation's premiere radio theatre company.
Black Drama, third edition
Contains the full text of more than 1,700 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard to find, or out of print. More than 40 percent of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays.

Center for Music Experiment Recordings Archives
Audio recordings from the Center for Music Experiment Archive. Includes conferences, computer music, and performances.
Cities and Buildings Database
A collection of digitized images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and throughout the world.
Database of Recorded American Music
A wide spectrum of American (USA) music, from 19th century to contemporary compositions, electronic music, folk, jazz, Native American music, opera and musical theater. The audio tracks are linked to related scholarly texts.
Department of Music Concert Archive
UCSD Department of Music recordings from 1967-2006 of degree-required concerts, faculty concerts, most class concerts, and other selected events.
Digital South Asia Library
The images fall into the broad categories of architecture, sculpture, terracotta, painting and numismatics.
Discover Islamic Art
With support of the European Union, this "Biggest Islamic Art Museum of the World" contains digitized images from more than 40 museums in 14 countries.

Ethnographic Video Online: Festivals and Archives
This collection provides a space for visual anthropologists of today to showcase and disseminate their most compelling work. With a focus on curating award-winning titles from contemporary ethnographic film festivals, this content will capture students’ attention by connecting them with topics familiar to their own time and place.
Ethnographic Video Online: Foundational Films
Database of anthropological documentary films, covering every region of the world, featuring the work of many influential documentary filmmakers of the 20th century. Includes transcripts, interviews, previously unreleased raw footage, field notes, study guides, etc. As of August 2015, has 1,844 videos (1,319 hours). Individual films are also cataloged in UC Library Search - as "Alexander Street Press. Ethnographic online videos"
Ethnographic Video Online: Indigenous Voices
The role of the traditional ethnographer is changing as the perspectives and epistemologies of indigenous peoples have taken on central significance in the discipline, challenging earlier representations and implicit “us versus them” constructs. In order to create a platform for indigenous voices to address issues from indigenous perspectives, we have dedicated the third volume of the ethnographic film series to indigenous filmmakers.

Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939
This site presents primary source documents of theatrical productions sponsored under the Works Project Administration's (WPA) Federal Theatre Project (FTP) from 1935 to 1939. Approximately 13,000 images are presented.
Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project
Digital images of the largest collection of material on professional theatre and dramatic performance in the age of Shakespeare. Includes letters, bills of sale, court orders, poems and other material dated 1544-1662.
Library of Congress Digital Collections: Performing Arts
Large collection of material that details the history of music, dance and theatre in the U.S.

Music Online: Classical Music in Video
Over 52,000 audio tracks of classical music from the Medieval to the contemporary, with chamber music, symphonies, choral music, solo vocal and instrumental, and other forms.
Music Online: Smithsonian Global Sound
A virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions. Produced in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Naxos Music Library
Primarily classical music with over 100,000 tracks from 6,500 CDs. Includes the complete collections for Naxos and several smaller labels. New titles added monthly. Also includes jazz, pop and rock, and music from around the world.

OPAL Libri Antichi
Over 3900 pdf files for early Italian books and other printed materials, focusing on 17th Italian literature and 17th-18th century Italian theater.
Roger Reynolds Ping Collection
Ping is a 1968 multimedia work by Roger Reynolds on a text by Samuel Beckett. It involves slide projections, a film of a Butoh dancer made in Japan, pre-recorded electro-acoustic sound, live electronic processing, and a score for flute, percussion, and piano. This collection is an illustrative portion of the components and related documentation from the 1968 and 2011 performances at UCSD.
World Digital Library: Arts
Collection of print and visual resources. Use limiters in left column to focus search on a specific geography, date range, topic or type of resource.

Adam Matthew Explorer
Search across all of UC San Diego's Adam Matthew archival collections.
Search across all of UC San Diego's Adam Matthew archival collections. We also have text and data mining access to our licensed Adam Matthew databases.

Collections include:

African American Communities
Age of Exploration
America in World War Two:Oral Histories and Personal Accounts
American History, 1493-1945
American Indian Histories and Cultures
American Indian Newspapers
American West
Apartheid South Africa,1948-1980
China, America and the Pacific
China: Culture and Society
China: Trade, Politics and Culture, 1793-1980
Church Missionary Society Periodicals
Colonial America
Colonial Caribbean
Confidential Print: Africa, 1834-1966
Confidential Print: Latin America, 1833-1969
Confidential Print: Middle East
Confidential Print: North America
Defining Gender
East India Company
Eighteenth Century Drama
Eighteenth Century Journals
Empire Online
Ethnomusicology: Global Field Recordings
Everyday Life and Women in America
First World War Portal
Food and Drink in History
Foreign Office Files China 1919-1980
Foreign Office Files India, Pakistan and Afghanistan,1947-1980
Foreign Office Files Japan, 1919-1952
Foreign Office Files Middle East, 1971-1981
Foreign Office Files South East Asia, 1963-1980
Frontier Life
Gender: Identity and Social Change
Global Commodities
India, Raj and Empire
Interwar Culture
J. Walter Thompson:Advertising America
Jewish Life in America
Leisure Travel and Mass Culture
Life at Sea: Seafaring in the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1600-1900
Literary Manuscripts Berg
Literary Manuscripts Leeds
Literary Print Culture
London Low Life
Macmillan Cabinet Papers, 1957-1963
Market Research and American Business, 1935-1965
Mass Observation Online
Medical Services and Warfare
Medieval Family Life
Medieval Travel Writing
Meiji Japan
Migration to New Worlds
Perdita Manuscripts, 1500-1700
Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975
Popular Medicine in America, 1800-1900
Race Relations in America
Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape
Service Newspapers of World War Two
Sex and Sexuality
Shakespeare in Performance
Shakespeare's Globe Archive
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice
Socialism on Film
The Grand Tour
The Nixon Years, 1969-1974
Trade Catalogues and the American Home
Travel Writing, Spectacle and World History
Victorian Popular Culture
Victorians on Film. Entertainment, Innovation & Everyday Life
Virginia Company Archives
Women in the National Archives (UK)
World's Fairs
JSTOR Images (formerly ARTstor)
Library of over 2.5 million digital images and their corresponding metadata. Covers many time periods and cultures, and documents the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, anthropology, ethnographic and women's studies, as well as many other forms of visual culture
Berg Fashion Library
Includes 13,000 images, the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, free lesson plans, eBooks, reference works, an interactive timeline, a new exhibition archive, and more. Provides integrated text and image content on world dress and fashion throughout history. Browsable by time period and by place.
Our subscription does not include the Fairchild Books Library.
National Jukebox
The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives.
Theatre in Context Collection
O’Dell’s Annals of the New York Stage, the Oxford University Press Companion series, and Greenwood’s American Theatre Companies series are just a few of the many in-copyright sources included in the Theatre in Context Collection. Placed alongside thousands of playbills, posters, photographs, and related theatrical ephemera, users will be able to paint a more comprehensive picture of the life and evolution of dramatic works.
Gale Primary Sources
Gale Artemis unites Gale's digital archives, allowing researchers to uncover primary source documents in archives where they may not have thought to look. Includes term frequencies, term clusters, and basic visualizations.
Includes:
17th and 18th Century Burney Collection
Archives Unbound
Archives of Human Sexuality and Identity
The Economist Historical Archive, 1843-2011
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
The Financial Times Historical Archive, 1888-2010
The Making of Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926
The Making of the Modern World
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
The Sunday Times Digital Archive
The Times Digital Archive
U.S. Declassified Documents Online
Underground and Independent Comics
Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels is a scholarly, primary source database focusing on adult comic books and graphic novels.
Vogue Archive
Contains the entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition), from the first issue in 1892 to the current month, reproduced in high-resolution color page images. Every page, advertisement, cover, and fold-out has been included, with rich indexing enabling you to find images by garment type, designer, and brand names.