Advanced networks are making it possible for libraries to expand access and outreach opportunities in never-before imagined ways.

The Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image at The University of Pennsylvania

Re-envisioning scholarly research through digitization

The University of Pennsylvania Libraries have made over 12,000 images from various collections of rare books, manuscripts, papyri, photographs and sheet music are available over the network through the Schoenberg  Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI). Since 1996, SCETI has been enhancing the research and scholarly use of rare books, manuscripts and other primary source materials by making them easily accessible to the worldwide community. They create archive-quality digital facsimiles and make them available online through web sites tailored to the each individual collection. Several of their projects are collaborations between the University of Pennsylvania Library and other libraries, museums and private collections.

USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive via Internet2

The Institute’s Visual History Archive at the University of Southern California (USC) contains nearly 52,000 video testimonies collected in 32 languages and 56 countries. 105,000 hours of video occupy 135 terabytes of storage on servers at USC. The Institute interviewed Jewish survivors, homosexual survivors, Jehovah’s Witness survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, rescuers and aid providers, Roma and Sinti survivors (Gypsy), survivors of Eugenics policies, and war crimes trials participants. Institutions connected to Internet2, or an equivalent network in the country in which they are located, may collaborate with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute to access the entire Visual History Archive. Students, educators, and researchers will be able to search more than 50,000 experiential and geographic indexing terms to find relevant video in the archive.