# Digital Archives Collection



## Catalyst (Jan 17, 2021)

To help our fellow researchers with gathering pieces of truth scattered all over the internet, I've compiled a list of digital libraries that I personally have come across during my research. Additionally, there are some useful tools listed below, which may help you while surfing the web.

If you know about other useful digital libraries, post them here, and I will add them to the list.

*Digital Archives:*

books.google.com – Needs no presentation.

gallica.bnf.fr – National library of France and its partners.

archive.org – One of the biggest digital libraries. Host of the Wayback Machine.

www.loc.gov – The Library of Congress is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the de facto national library of the United States.

www.wdl.org – an international digital library operated by UNESCO and the United States Library of Congress.

www.davidrumsey.com – David Rumsey map collection.

www.raremaps.com – Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps

manuscriptminiatures.com – A great collection of digitized manuscripts with tags.

bibliotheque-numerique.inha.fr – The Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (commonly abbreviated INHA).

digital.blb-karlsruhe.de – Digital collections of the Badische Landesbibliothek.

www.hathitrust.org – Hathi trust digital library.

www.rct.uk – The royal collection of the British royal family.

digitarq.arquivos.pt – Arquivo nacional da torre do tombo.

pastvu.com – One of the biggest digital archives of photos linked to map.

www.oldtokyo.com – Old Tokyo in photos.

www.altesdresden.de – Old Dresden in photos linked to map.

brasilianafotografica.bn.br – Brazilian digital photo archive.

montevideoantiguo.net – Photos of old Montevideo (the capital and largest city of Uruguay).



*Useful tools:*

books.google.com/ngrams – An awesome feature few people are aware of.

app.prntscr.com – Lightshot app for Windows and Mac. The best printscreen app available on the internet. Extremely useful when a website doesn’t allow downloading images directly.

imagecolorizer.com – The best free online tool (in my honest opinion) for enhancing images (particularly for black and white photos colorizing).

SingleFile Chrome Extension (open Chrome Extensions menu to find it) – Use it to download webpages as a single html file (instead of downloading it traditionally, in the form of html file + folder with images). Although, for downloading bulky webpages, I recommend using the traditional way (as the extension may crash or lag when downloading big files).

*Alternative search engines and browsers:*

Tor Browser - Use it as a free VPN alternative

images.yandex.ru – a surprisingly much better solution to use instead of Google Images, particularly the exact photo search (either by uploading it or linking to it). (This refers exclusively to images search. Can’t say the same about common info search.)

yippy.com

qwant.com


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## AthroposRex (Jan 17, 2021)

I'd add yippy.com as a search engine. The topic breakdown on the left is useful for sorting out invalid results. Also, not on the same engine as bing or google. It's IBM Watson.


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## dakotamoon (Jan 19, 2021)

Awesome resources, thanks.  Alternative search engines: Yandex (Russian, #1 for images), qwant.com,  

Great private money making extremely lightweight browser:  Brave.com


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## KeeperOfTheKnowledge (Jan 19, 2021)

Catalyst said:


> archive.org – One of the biggest digital libraries. Host of the Wayback Machine.



My favorite in terms of variety and automated downloading. They have a CLI that makes mirroring for a personal archive very easy.


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## iseidon (Feb 4, 2022)

When I was looking for old photos of Sydney, these sites were extremely helpful.

catalogue.nla.gov.au – National Library of Australia Catalogue.

sl.nsw.gov.au – State Library of New South Wales.


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