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.
Penn Libraries holds more than 3,000 manuscripts from South Asia, making it one of the largest collections of its kind in the Americas. Predominantly Indic in provenance, the manuscripts are chiefly Sanskrit works written in Devanāgarī script. Though generally informed by traditional Hindu learning, the collection nevertheless remains thematically comprehensive and contains significant Buddhist and Jain texts.
The churches and synagogues of Philadelphia were gathering places in the 18th and 19th centuries and their records reflect the changing political, social and cultural mores. More than 40,000 scanned images from vestry and trustee minutes, baptismal, birth, marriage and death records, pew rents, accounting records, sermons and correspondence will give researchers opportunities to explore these connections. Collaborating institutions include Christ Church Philadelphia, St. George’s Methodist Church, Gloria Dei Church, Mikveh Israel, African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania Archives, Presbyterian Historical Society, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, American Baptist Historical Society, and Athenaeum of Philadelphia.
This musical collection contains over 5,000 Judaic sound recordings, a key to Jewish life in Europe and American in the 20th century.
The Gershwind-Bennett Isaac Leeser Digital Repository brings together Isaac Leeser’s correspondence, the Occident, and various publications for full text search and discovery.
Over the course of many decades, Jay I. Kislak (1922-2018) built a collection of primary source material - rare books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and artifacts that convey the multifaceted history of the Americas, hemispheric cultural encounters, and global exploration beginning with Native American cultures and extending to modern times. In 2004, the Jay I. Kislak Foundation donated more than 3,000 items from this collection to the Library of Congress where they are available for scholarly research. Beginning in 2016 the Kislak Foundation, in partnership with the University of Miami and Miami Dade College, established a Kislak Center on each campus along with a gift of 2,500 books, manuscripts, and historic objects. The Kislak-MDC-UM partnership includes exhibitions, research, education, and public outreach programs that will serve MDC and UM students and faculty, the local communicty, and a global network of engaged scholars. The Jay I. Kislak Digital Library of the Americas aims to unite the materials from all of these institutions to tell a compelling story about early American history and culture.
Manuscripts of the Muslim World will include digital editions of more than 500 manuscripts and 827 paintings from the Islamicate world broadly construed. Together these holdings represent in great breadth the flourishing intellectual and cultural heritage of Muslim lands from 1000 to 1900, covering mathematics, astrology, history, law, literature, as well as the Qur’an and Hadith. The bulk of the collection consists of manuscripts in Arabic and Persian, along with examples of Coptic, Samaritan, Syriac, Turkish, and Berber. The primary partners are Columbia University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania with signifiant contributions from Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College. This collection is funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources.
OPenn contains complete sets of high-resolution archival images of cultural heritage material from the collections of its contributing institutions, along with machine-readable descriptive and technical metadata. All materials on OPenn are in the public domain or released under Creative Commons licenses as Free Cultural Works. Materials on OPenn are available at full resolution, with derivatives provided for easy re-use on the web. Downloading can be accomplished by following instructions in the Technical ReadMe on OPenn. The Curated Collections page provides access to documents grouped together for a specific purpose, like a grant or a project.
The PACSCL Diaries Project allows researchers an intimate view into a wide variety of personalities, largely from Philadelphia, as they went about their daily lives and commented on the world around them. The project provides an online archive of diaries drawn from 16 PACSCL member collections. OPenn currently hosts a pilot group of 63 diary volumes. Participating PACSCL member libraries are the Abraham Lincoln Foundation of The Union League of Philadelphia, the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of Nursing, Bryn Mawr College Library Special Collections, Drexel University Archives and Special Collections, Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, German Society of Pennsylvania, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, J. Welles Henderson Archives and Library of the Independence Seaport Museum, Legacy Center at Drexel University College of Medicine, Lutheran Archives Center at Philadelphia, Penn Museum Archives, Quaker and Special Collections at Haverford College, Rare Collections Library of the State Library of Pennsylvania, Special Collections at Lehigh University Library, The Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Kislak Center.
This Omeka site contains over 18,000 images from Penn Libraries’ special and general collection related to the Holy Land.
The site offers bibliographic information and digital facsimiles for selected collections of manuscript codices, texts, documents, papers, and leaves held by Penn’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Penn holds over 2,000 Western manuscripts produced before the 19th century; medieval and Renaissance manuscripts comprise approximately 900 items, the earliest dating from 1000 A.D. Its holdings of Indic manuscripts is the largest in the Western hemisphere with more than 3,000 items. The Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection emphasizes secular topics, especially science and mathematics, and includes tablets from the 21st to 18th centuries B.C.
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.