Art and Literary Studies Archives and Databases.

  • Children’s Historical Collection: “The Children’s Historical Collection contains children’s books of historical note or value including rare, out-of-print, and autographed books; books by award-winning/notable authors or illustrators; books by Texas authors or illustrators; or books set in Texas past or present.”
  • Chinese Rubbings Collection: “Harvard is home to over 5,000 East Asian rubbings, the majority of which are from China. This joint collection contains some 2,700 rubbings from the Fine Arts Library and some 2,300 from Harvard-Yenching.”
  • Daguerreotypes at Harvard: “The collections represent the work of pioneering daguerreotypists Mathew Brady, Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, John Adams Whipple, and others. Portraits, which constitute the majority of the plates, include Horatio Alger, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Jenny Lind, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and James McNeill Whistler. The portraits in the collection also feature people associated with Harvard and those who distinguished themselves in particular areas of the University’s collecting interests.”
  • Digital Scores and Libretti: “This digital collection includes manuscripts, first editions, and early editions of music from the 17th to the early 20th century. Many items, such as variant editions and annotated proofs of 19th-century operas and related libretti, are meant to be seen and used together. As a group, they give scholars a window into the study of historical performance practice.”
  • The Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus Online (AAT): “AAT is a thesaurus containing generic terms, dates, relationships, sources, and notes for work types, roles, materials, styles, cultures, techniques, and other concepts related to art, architecture, and other cultural heritage.”
  • The Getty Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA): “CONA compiles titles/names and other metadata for works of art, architecture, and other cultural works, current and historical, documented as items or in groups, whether works are extant, destroyed, or never built; in development, may be used to record works depicted in visual surrogates and for other purposes.”
  • The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN): “TGN focuses on places relevant to art, architecture, and related disciplines, recording names, relationships, place types, dates, notes, and coordinates for current and historical cities, nations, empires, archaeological sites, lost settlements, and physical features.”
  • The Getty Union List of Artist Names (ULAN): “ULAN contains names, relationships, notes, sources, and biographical information for artists, architects, firms, studios, repositories, patrons, and other individuals and corporate bodies, both named and anonymous.”
  • Harrison D. Horblit Collection of Early Photography: “The images in the collection show us the evolution of the photograph from something slightly imprecise and sometimes fleeting to something more efficient, detailed, and long lasting. Nearly all (if not all) photographic processes from the 19th century are represented in the collection, including: daguerreotypes, salted paper prints, paper negatives, albumen prints, ambrotypes, and more.”
  • Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts: “Assembled through gifts and purchase over the past two centuries, this collection includes works in Latin, Greek, and most of the vernacular languages of Europe that are the primary sources for the study of the literature, art, history, music, philosophy, and theology of the periods.”
  • Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature: “In addition to being one of the world’s most comprehensive archives of South Slavic oral traditions, the Parry Collection also contains uniquely important subsidiary collections documenting numerous other Balkan oral traditions.”
  • Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History: “This digital collection explores the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard’s libraries.”