Category: Uncategorized

The Illinois Digital Heritage Hub celebrates Halloween and the month of October with paintings from the International Collection of Child Art (ICCA) provided by one of our newest partners, Illinois State University. The ICCA features two-dimensional art in many different media created by children around the world. More information on the ICCA can be found here.

The images featured from this collection are from the 1960s but are so relatable that they could be contemporary and feature costumed kids trick-or-treating, a haunted house complete with ghosts, skeletons, and a graveyard, pumpkins, bats, and black cats, a costume party, and a witch on her broomstick.

As historical artifacts, the paintings demonstrate how old and enduring some of Halloween’s most iconic images and traditions are with perhaps only the hair and clothing styles of some of the children in the paintings hinting at the works’ ages. The artists range from ages 9 and 12 and would be in their 50s and 60s today.

The entire International Collection of Child Art can be found in the IDHH here. All of the Halloween-themed items contributed by Illinois Digital Heritage Hub institutions may be found here.

 

The Illinois Digital Heritage Hub welcomes our latest data provider, Northern Illinois University (NIU) and its fabulous collection of dime novels. NIU’s rich contribution comprises more than 4,600 digitized dime novels from about 1860 to 1930, many of which have not been widely available since their initial publication more than a hundred years ago.

Books in the collection are some of the earliest examples of familiar genres, like westerns, science fiction, romance novels, and mysteries. These would have been read by everyone from factory workers to children, providing unique insights into what a diverse group of Americans were thinking and feeling in the 19th century. This also means, however, that items in the collection sometimes have a darker side, using language or imagery that today would be considered sexist, racist, or otherwise problematic.

The collection is a valuable resource for studying the history of print culture, the origins of genre fiction, and 19th century attitudes about race, gender, and class, and is now widely available to researchers, educators, and students through the DPLA.

The items highlighted here represent some of the most striking cover illustrations of the fully digitized works that can be seen in their complete full-text glory in the NIU’s digital library.

All of Northern Illinois University’s items may be accessed in the IDHH here.

 

Editors Note 03/2021: Postcards-Illinois is no longer a collection in IDHH.
This Spring, the Illinois Digital Heritage Hub celebrated the addition of forty collections from the Illinois Digital Archives to the DPLA. These collections include Postcards-Illinois from the Newberry Library. The collection includes nearly five thousand postcards, many of which feature Illinois’ beautiful State Parks, rivers, and shorelines, and other Summertime destinations, past and present.
Postcards-Illinois is just a small subset of the Curt Teich Postcard Archives which comprises around 2.5 million items, probably the largest collection of postcards and related material in the United States. Originally donated by the Lake County Forest Preserve District, a large part of the Newberry’s collection is now searchable through the Digital Public Library of America’s interface which will provide even greater access to and awareness of the material than ever before.
The items highlighted here seem particularly relevant for the month of August, including outdoor destinations from around Illinois and serve as encouragement to experience the places that inspired such beautiful imagery.

You can access all of the above images and all other Newberry items in the IDHH.

Editors Note 03/2021: Voices of Extremism is no longer a collection in IDHH.

Illinois State University (ISU) is our newest contributor, with 13 exciting collections including Voices of Extremism, circus films, and the letters of Buffalo Bill. ISU is now the second largest contributor to the Illinois Digital Heritage Hub, contributing the metadata for nearly 20,000 objects.

One of these collections is the Passion for Circus collection of circus images, a collection of over 9400 photographs of the circus taken between the 1930s and the 1950s. The images come from the special collection of Sverre “Bex” and Faye Braathen, which came to the Milner Library in the mid-1970s after the Braathens passed away.

The Passion for Circus collection includes gorgeous color photographs of all things circus that Sverre shot on an Eastman Kodak Ektra F 1.9 camera using Kodachrome film. The photographs show the exciting and vibrant world of circus life and the spectators that flocked to these events. The images show the flashy costumes worn by the performers, the circus wagons used to transport the travelers and their animals around the country, and daring acts of acrobatics and contortionism.

Here is a sneak peak of some of the images from the collection.

For more on this collection, visit the Illinois State University Milner Library digital collections on their home site.

You can also access all these images through the IDHH.

This month the IDHH welcomes the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) into the hub. UIUC is no stranger to DPLA, and has been a contributing content hub to DPLA since 2013, so we are pleased to welcome a DPLA veteran aboard. UIUC comes to the IDHH with 19 collections ranging in subject from historical maps of Africa to theater and costume design, Irish political cartoons, and much more.

As part of the many collections that the University of Illinois is making available, the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music’s Music Instrument Digital Image and 3D Model Collection boasts 231 images of historical instruments (1810-1972) and includes both the familiar and the unfamiliar. The instruments chronicle the evolution of many of the instruments that we recognize today, as well as many instruments that are a product of their time and did not continue to be produced.

Check out this sneak peek of some of the instruments in this collection.

To see more of the images in the collection, please click here.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has many other collections as part of the IDHH here.

 

This new blog will highlight digital collections that have been contributed to the Illinois Digital Heritage Hub and will be updated biweekly.  These collections come from the rich and diverse group of institutions that contribute their metadata to the IDHH.  Contributors are made up of libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and many other great institutions from around the state of Illinois.

In these collections you will find diaries chronicling the first hand experience of residents of Illinois, photographs documenting the changing cities and towns, and newspapers that give a glimpse into everyday life of years gone by.   All of these and more can be found through the Illinois Digital Heritage Hub, as well as highlighted here on the IDHH Highlights blog.  Explore the rich cultural heritage of Illinois with us!