History of Science: Primary Sources

Provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, film, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books.

Access the digital collections of the Library of Congress.

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.

Contains digitized and archived documents relating to the history of the MIT Computation Center from the 1950s and early 1960.

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.

Annual Reports from 1897-1971. Founded to organize archival records from the Department of the Interior as part of the Smithsonian Institute's collections.

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.

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.

Contains links to U.S. Census publications on computer ownership from 1984 to present. Internet usage reports began in 1997.

Image gallery, oral histories, and personal accounts of computing.

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.

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.

Offers thousands of articles, first hand accounts, oral histories, milestones, archival documents and lesson plans related to the history of engineering and technology

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

Searchable catalog of the collection.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Free online resource containing biographies of more than 3000 mathematicians and over 2000 pages of essays and supporting materials.

Digitized public domain media periodicals and online access to the histories of cinema, broadcasting, and recorded sound. [1905-1973].

Provides an entry into the history of disease and its prevention in 19th and 20th-century British India, including veterinary medicine and animal husbandry.

The Internet Archive's browser-based emulation tool for playing MS-DOS games.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the oldest scientific journals archived here from 1665 - 1886.

The collection comprises more than 6,000 artifacts related to the major developments in communication during the 20th century.

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.

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.

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.

Transcriptions of 45 essays and books by Sir Francis Bacon

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.