Featured Collection
Anthropologist Frank Speck used the medium of lantern slides to document
American Indian life in the first half of the 20th century.
Recently Digitized Images
Explore the most recently digitized images from the APS collections.
Featured Project
Revolutionary City: A Portal to the Nation's Founding is a one-stop-shop for students, teachers, scholars, and lovers of history to learn about diverse stories of the American Revolution.
Explore the full breadth of APS holdings, both digitized and undigitized, with additional context by using our Collections Search and viewing manuscript finding aids.
Investigating Indentured Servitude: Visualizing Experiences of Colonial America
Contained within over 5,000 indenture contracts registered between 1771 and 1773 are a wealth of information about working people and immigrants who came to Philadelphia in the lead-up to the American Revolution. An exhibit based on this data, which was released as part of the Society's Open Data Initiative, uses interactive visualizations to examine indentured servitude in Colonial British North America through three themes: distance, gender, and time. Included alongside them are personal stories of individuals who entered into contracts in the record to work as servants and apprentices. See the exhibit here.
Open Historic Data: Beyond Digitization
The APS Library has an active Open Data Initiative. Under this initiative, we (1) identify content in the APS Library that is conducive to being reconfigured as a dataset; (2) encourage the use and reuse of the data by opening the data to all, and by easing access to the data.These datasets we create are available for anyone to evaluate, share, reuse, and remix as they wish under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. They are ideal resources for use in college classrooms and digital humanities projects like mapping and text analysis to reveal new insights. Learn more about our Open Data Initiative.
Come Work With Us: Partners, Fellows, Interns
We partner with scholars, institutions and students to further the APS Library’s mission to promote the use of our collections. We offer two Digital Humanities Fellowships a year, open to scholars using the APS collections in new and engaging ways, and two Digital Library Interns, open to students and new graduates interested in digital librarianship and digital scholarship. Learn more about working with us.
