The Newberry Library is home to a world-class collection of over one and a half million books, five million manuscript pages, and five hundred thousand maps—a wealth of primary sources for English and history teachers. Yet finding the time to research the collections can be a challenge for busy educators. To facilitate access to this archive, the Newberry teacher programs staff has collaborated with scholars and university faculty to develop a digital education resource that is free and accessible to all over a dynamic new website.
Newberry Digital Collections for the Classroom are thematic collections of primary-source documents selected from the Newberry’s extensive holdings and developed in conjunction with our professional development seminars. They are designed to be easily incorporated into classroom teaching and support the development of skills emphasized in the Common Core State Standards. Each collection includes high-resolution digital images of documents representing a variety of genres from maps, photographs, and cartoons to poems, speeches, and travel narratives. Newberry staff researches and organizes the documents and provides contextual introductions, discussion questions, and bibliographic information for each collection. Staff continually creates new collections throughout each program year. These sources are available over the new wbesite, where visitors can search and download individual items or entire collections, and will soon be able to create and share their own document collections.
Newberry Digital Collections for the Classroom offer teachers an easy way to incorporate primary sources into the humanities classroom and engage their students in the exciting, challenging process of interdisciplinary historical research.
Visit the Digital Collections for the Classroom website or access the documents in PDF format.
For questions or more information contact Hana Layson, Digital Collections Manager, at laysonh@newberry.org.