The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica documents an astonishingly broad range of commercial, social, religious, political, and cultural ties that connected Jews and the general public from the early colonial era through the onset of mass migration at the end of the nineteenth century. The collection includes records of everyday lives, families, businesses, communal institutions, religious organizations, voluntary associations, and political circumstances of Jewish life. It provides a unique window into the changing character of colonial life and culture around the Atlantic world and within the United States and it documents changing perceptions and experiences of new worlds of space and time, not only from the perspective of its Jewish colonists and citizens but also in the context of the larger societies in which they have lived.
How did Christians in the Americas learn to read Hebrew? The Bibliotheca Hebraica Atlantica includes datasets of the specific library editions w/ online access to help visualize patterns of learning found in the colonial libraries of the Atlantic World.
Colenda is a system for long-term preservation and access to digital assets stewarded by Penn Libraries. Complete sets of images of digitized manuscripts and printed works are available on Colenda along with associated metadata. Colenda is a project of the Libraries, developed using the Samvera software framework. At this time, content accessible to the public in this application is in the public domain and is therefore available for public use, or where indicated, is of undetermined copyright.
Explore the past twenty years of the Kislak Center’s exhibitions and events, including gallery and event photos and links to related online resources. Content is actively updated.
This page links to collection descriptions and online resources related to all of the collections within the Kislak Center. Links and descriptions are actively updated.
Digital collections and projects feature unique, primary-source materials for teaching, research, and discovery drawn from the Penn Libraries’ signature collections or from our collaborations with the Penn community and with cultural heritage institutions. It provides access to important rare books, manuscripts, photographs and multimedia sources represented by images, texts, audio files, bibliographic databases, catalogs, and archival finding aids for the study of a wide array of subjects ranging from Philadelphia neighborhoods and the life of Marian Anderson to medieval manuscripts and Shakespeare’s plays. In addition, this site gathers together Penn Libraries’ pre-1923 materials publicly available through the Internet Archive as well as Penn-produced scholarship accessible in the ScholarlyCommons.
This website lists and provides access to online exhibits from the Penn Libraries collections created over the past two decades, including collections at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, the Fisher Fine Arts Library, the Library at the Katz Center for Advanced Juadaic Studies, and the Otto E. Albrecht Music Library and Eugene Ormandy Music & Media Center.
Print at Penn is the online repository for digitized facsimiles of materials from the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ print collections. The site includes bibliographic information for each digitized work as well as faceted and keyword searches across and within collections. Among the facets are those which allow users to limit their queries to a specific collection or to a specific location within the Penn Libraries system. This functionality will allow users to discover materials more quickly and easily.
The Provenance Online Project (POP) makes digital images of provenance evidence contained in books—bookplates, inscriptions, labels, bindings, and other physical attributes indicating ownership—openly available alongside bibliographic and descriptive metadata. The images, currently totaling over 18,000, come not only from Penn’s collections but also from Library Company of Philadelphia, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Princeton University Library with images coming soon from the Newberry Library, the Clark Library at UCLA, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Getty Research Institute, the Huntington Library, and the Library of Congress.
Over 2,000,000 images from various collections of rare books, manuscripts, papyri, photographs and sheet music are available for your viewing. Each collection has its own web site that is unrestricted in the interests of knowledge and learning.
The Special Collections Processing Center (SCPC) of the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts is responsible for cataloging rare books, manuscripts, and archival collections for use by the general public. The blog is our opportunity to talk about what we love, what surprises us, and what we learn from the treasures within our collections! Check back frequently for the most recent SCPC finds.
The Zucker Holy Land Travel Manuscript takes users on a tour through the Holy Land as it was known, geographically, both in Biblical times and at the end of the 17th century. View over 500 pages of text, maps, and illustrations (with transcriptions when possible).