Subject and Course Guides: History of Science: Primary Sources

Primary Sources

General Collections

Hathi Trust Digital Library
The HathiTrust Digital Library catalog provides access to the immense collections of the over 50 partner institutions who have contributed their works to be accessible in digital form. Logging in is optional, but it allows for full text downloading.
The HathiTrust Digital Library catalog provides bibliographic access to approximately 8 million scanned volumes from libraries around the world. The full text for older titles out of copyright can accessed through the HathiTrust Interface.

Internet Archive
Provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, film, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Access the digital collections of the Library of Congress.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Provides full-text PDF articles from several major U.S. newspapers including: Atlanta Daily World, Chicago Defender, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Sentinel, Louisville Courier, New York Amsterdam News, New York Times, Pittsburgh Courier, and Washington Post.
The Times (London) Digital Archive
Complete digital archives of The Times (1785-1985). May not be compatible with Mozilla Firefox.
UIC users can search through the complete digital archives of The Times (London), using keyword searching and hit-term highlighting to retrieve full facsimile images of either a specific article or a complete page. The entire newspaper is captured, with all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photos divided into categories to facilitate searching.

History of Science / Technology / Computing

American Philosophical Society
Provides access to a wide variety of digitized items from the holdings of the American Philosophical Society. Digitized items include technical and scientific texts, images, etc. relating to cartography, eugenics, anthropology, physics.
Archival History of Computing at MIT, 1950-1962
Contains digitized and archived documents relating to the history of the MIT Computation Center from the 1950s and early 1960.
Association for Computer Machinery Digital Library
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library (DL) is a vast collection of citations from ACM journal and newsletter articles and conference proceedings. Searching is free; however one needs to have a subscription to access the online full text or the advanced searching option.
Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Reports
Annual Reports from 1897-1971. Founded to organize archival records from the Department of the Interior as part of the Smithsonian Institute's collections.
Chinese Public Health Campaign Lantern Slides (1950s-1970s)
Educational slides played an important role in the history of public health campaign in P.R. China. From the beginning of the 1950s, Chinese government's health policy put an emphasis on public hygiene and preventive treatment. Along with radio, posters, and movies, slides became a favored propaganda tool for educating the public. Slides were inexpensive to produce and disseminate. They were widely used in school teaching and various public health activities/campaigns in both rural and urban China. These health slides aimed at disseminating scientific and medical concepts and behaviors among a population with very different understanding of what constituted illness and well-being.
Classic Computer Magazine Archive
This volunteer site holds the digital full text of a growing number of computer hobbyist magazines from the late 1970s and 1980s, including Antic and Creative Computing.
Computer and Internet Use: U.S. Census Bureau
Contains links to U.S. Census publications on computer ownership from 1984 to present. Internet usage reports began in 1997.
Computer History Museum
Image gallery, oral histories, and personal accounts of computing.
Darwin Correspondence Project
Read and search the full texts of more than 15,000 of Charles Darwin’s letters. Discover complete transcripts of all known letters Darwin wrote and received.
Darwin Online
Largest Darwin resource/publication in the world—and probably the most comprehensive scholarly website on any historical person. It contains 230,000 searchable text pages, 226,725 page images, 101,524 scans of manuscripts, 3,857 PDFs, 10,000 illustrations in books, Darwin's writings in 29 languages, 5,388 bibliographical records and 76,142 manuscript and archive records.
Engineering and Technology History Wiki
Offers thousands of articles, first hand accounts, oral histories, milestones, archival documents and lesson plans related to the history of engineering and technology
Facial Recognition Datasets
Links to face databases often used by researchers; face recognition algorithms (image-based and video based) with a few most representative papers for each algorithm
Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments
Searchable catalog of the collection.
HCI Bibliography
Database of over 33,000 records covering human computer interaction, a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and their interaction with the field of computer science.
History of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford Libraries
The rich archival documentation available in the Stanford Libraries on the history of artificial intelligence includes important film, video and audio resources. These materials provide access to a variety of events and activities from Stanford, Silicon Valley, or the artificial intelligence community as a whole, including tours of labs and project, robots in action, and public lectures, to name only a few examples.

Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF) Archaeology
Cross-cultural database that contains information on the world's prehistory. Archeological writing from the late nineteenth century to the present
The eHRAF Collection of Archaeology is a cross-cultural database that currently contains nearly 60,000 pages of information on the world's prehistory. This unique, annually-growing eHRAF database is organized by archaeological traditions and the full-text sources are all subject-indexed to the paragraph level.
Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF) World Cultures
Cross-cultural database that contains information on all aspects of cultural and social life. Ethnographic and anthropological writing from the late nineteenth century to the present
This is a cross-cultural database that contains over 350,000 pages of information on all aspects of cultural and social life. The annually-growing eHRAF database is organized into cultures and ethnic groups, subject-indexed down to the paragraph level.

IBM Archives
Includes a catalog of their main archives. While most of the actual content is not on-line, they do appear to be working to add material - including a useful A-Z glossary and some materials concerning the PC and the 701, IBM's first big computer.
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing: IEEE Computer Society
The IEEE Computer Society provides selected articles from the Annals of the History of Computing. The digital archives go back to 1979. Researchers may purchase articles from the full collection.
MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
Free online resource containing biographies of more than 3000 mathematicians and over 2000 pages of essays and supporting materials.
Media History Digital Library
Digitized public domain media periodicals and online access to the histories of cinema, broadcasting, and recorded sound. [1905-1973].
Medical History of British India
Provides an entry into the history of disease and its prevention in 19th and 20th-century British India, including veterinary medicine and animal husbandry.
MS-DOS Games
The Internet Archive's browser-based emulation tool for playing MS-DOS games.
Museum of Endangered Sounds
Do you recall the startup sounds of a Windows 95 machine? Or the hum and churn of a floppy disk drive? So much of early technology use was a multi-sense experience. This "museum" saves the sounds of early technology so that all may experience a lost part of technology use.
National Software Reference Library
Based out of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Software Reference Library (NSLR) maintains a large collection of software packages to aid computer forensic examiners in their investigations of computer systems.
The Newton Project
Non-profit organization dedicated to publishing in full an online edition of all of Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) writings — whether they were printed or not. The edition presents a full (diplomatic) rendition featuring all the amendments Newton made to his own texts or a more readable (normalised) version. We also make available translations of his most important Latin religious texts.
Nuclear Proliferation International History Project
Explores the international history of nuclear weapons and their proliferation using archival documents and oral history interviews from countries such as Argentina, Brazil, China, Israel, India, South Africa, Sweden and more.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
One of the oldest scientific journals archived here from 1665 - 1886.
The Sarnoff Collection
The collection comprises more than 6,000 artifacts related to the major developments in communication during the 20th century.
Science History Institute Digital Collections
Includes over 8,000 digitized items relating to the history of science, technology, and engineering. Digitized artifacts include photographs, advertisements, letters, rare books, oral histories, and more.
Smithsonian Computer History Collection
Includes a guide to the Information Age exhibit formerly on display at the National Museum of American History, as well as on-line resources and oral histories.
Turing Digital Archive
Contains many of Turing's letters, transcriptions of talks, photographs and unpublished papers, as well as memoirs and obituaries written about him. It contains images of the original documents that are held in the Turing collection at King's College, Cambridge.
The Works of Francis Bacon
Transcriptions of 45 essays and books by Sir Francis Bacon
Historical Anatomies on the Web
Digital scans of anatomical atlases in the National Library of Medicine's collection, is linked to a brief Author & Title Description offering historical discussion of the work, its author, the artists, and the illustration technique.

University of Illinois Chicago

University
Library

Search UIC Library Collections

Search UIC Library Website

History of Science: Primary Sources

Primary Sources

Richard J. Daley Library

Library of the Health Sciences, Chicago

Library of the Health Sciences, Peoria

Crawford Library of the Health Sciences, Rockford

UIC Law Library