Primary Sources

A repository of over 14,000 streaming films to support research and teaching in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

American Film Scripts makes available accurate and authorized versions of copyrighted screenplays. Most of the scripts have never been published before, and nowhere else are they available online. Alexander Street Press has developed the collection through arrangements with Warner Bros., Sony, RKO, MGM, and other major film studios; rights holders such as Faber & Faber, Newmarket Press, Penguin Putnam, and Vintage Anchor; and the writers themselves, including Paul Schrader, Lawrence Kasdan, Gus Van Sant, Neil LaBute, Oliver Stone, and many others. The collection includes 1,000 film scripts, and extends back to the earliest silent films to the present. The collection’s powerful search structure includes searching by character, scene, race, nationality, age, subject, year of writing, and other elements.

Archive of 550,000 high-quality, digitized images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences. Images may be downloaded and manipulated in customized mini-collections. Also searches for images in JSTOR's collection of scholarly articles.

A repository of streaming films supporting research and teaching in the arts and humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, health sciences, and technical fields. Content includes documentaries, training videos, and foreign language material.

The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) contains catalog records and digital images representing a rich cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division and, in some cases, other units of the Library of Congress. Collections include photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings.

Browse more than 406,000 hi-res images of public-domain works in The Met collection that can be downloaded, shared, and remixed without restriction.

Enjoy instant access to more than 600 full-length Met performances with the online streaming database for college and university libraries. (Description from vendor) Access is available for up to five simultaneous users.

Classical Scores Library contains over 400,000 pages of the most important classical music scores, manuscripts, and previously unpublished material, allowing for the study and analysis of more than 25,000 musical scores.

Classical Scores Library Volume II is the follow-up to Alexander Street's critically acclaimed Classical Scores Library and will bring together 200,000 pages when complete. It's the first online score collection for libraries that's composed mostly of in-copyright classical scores from major composers and editions. When curating the collection, editors targeted individual composers and composer collectives directly to ensure a strong resource for contemporary and previously unpublished works.

2004-present. Listen to over 170,000 tracks (11,500 CDs) from the Naxos and Marco Polo catalogs, plus other independent labels. Selections are principally from the area of classical music, as well as from jazz, blues, world, and Chinese music. Browser must be set to allow cookies for access to this database.

The Picture Collection Online presents more than 30,000 digitized images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, mostly created before 1923.

Opera in Video will contain over 200 of the most important opera performances, captured on video through staged productions, interviews and documentaries. Selections represent the world's best performers, conductors and opera houses and are based on a work's importance to the operatic canon.

Fulltext and citations. Indexes more than 2,700 collections of Oral History in English from around the world. Contains almost 281,000 pages of full-text by close to 10,000 individuals from all walks of life. Also has pointers to 4,100 audio and video files.

Full-text. Major art reference resource, with more than 23,000 subject entries, 21,000 biographies, 500,000 bibliographic citations, 40,000 image links and 5,500 images, as well as access to more than 5,000 entries and 500 images from the Oxford Companion to Western Art, the Concise Dictionary of Art Terms, and Oxford’s Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.

Bibliographic records of music manuscripts written after 1600. The records include information in standard bibliographic categories as well as graphical images of over 780,000 music incipits.

Smithsonian Open Access: download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images. Nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items including images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

Full-text. More than 250 of the world’s most important plays, together with more than 100 video documentaries, online in streaming video. From the most important productions of Shakespeare to rare, in-depth footage focusing on the work of Samuel Beckett, with performances by leading actors and directors. Allows researchers to find the full text of a play, the history of its performance, the production background, reference materials and ephemera, and now the complete performance itself. Ability to bookmark specific scenes, monologues, and staging examples and then include those online links in papers and course reserves.

The World Digital Library (WDL) is a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world. The WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures and significant historical documents on one site, in a variety of ways. Content on the WDL includes books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, prints and photographs, sound recordings, and films.