Организация: Columbia University Libraries

The Tibet Mirror (Tib. Yul phyogs so so'i gsar 'gyur me long) was published from 1925 to 1963 in Kalimpong, and chronicles the most dramatic social and political transformation in Tibet during a time when vernacular writing was relatively scarce and a Tibetan media practically non-existent. The paper also relayed information about World War II, the independence of India, and other global news to Tibetan readers in Lhasa, Gyantse, Kham, etc., and to traders and aristocrats who frequently traveled from Lhasa via the Chumbi Valley to Kalimpong, Darjeeling and Calcutta.

The Real Estate Record is a weekly report of building activity in New York City and its environs. This website contains fully digitized volumes, ranging from Volume 1 (published in 1868) to Volume 110 (published in 1922).

The New York Real Estate Brochure Collection was donated to Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library by Yale Robbins, Henry Robbins, and David Magier in 1986. The collection consists of over 9,200 advertising brochures, floor plans, price lists, and related materials that document residential and commercial real estate development in the five boroughs of New York and outlying vicinities from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Ling long women's magazine, published in Shanghai from 1931 to 1937, was popular during a time of dramatic material, social, and political change in China. Today, the magazine offers researchers a unique glimpse into women's lives in Republican-era (1911-49) Shanghai. This site features Columbia University's collection of Ling long magazine, one of the most complete holdings outside China.

The Columbia University Libraries has scanned and made available here electronically the Special Correspondence Files of Herbert Lehman. More than 37,000 documents are included. Typed documents have also been OCRed, permitting full-text searching.

The Special Correspondence Files of the Herbert Lehman Papers contain correspondence with nearly 1,000 individuals from 1895 through 1963. Beginning with letters from Lehman's family in the late nineteenth century, the series documents the range and scope of Lehman's long career in public service. Lehman started the series in an attempt to isolate materials he wanted for his own personal use. The series expanded over the years to include exchanges with the many of the most important people of his day. Thus, in addition to family letters, the Special Correspondence Files contain letters from every President of the U. S. from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, as well as from notables such as Dean Acheson, Benjamin Cardozo, Paul Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, W. Averill Harriman, Harold Ickes, Robert F. Kennedy, Fiorello LaGuardia, Henry Morgenthau, Alfred E. Smith, Adlai Stevenson, and Robert Wagner, among many others.

Note on citing documents in the Lehman Special Correspondence Files

The Lehman Special Correspondence Files provides a citation on each document page. This citation follows the Chicago Manual of Style. The Manual recommends citation of this archive in the following format:

Identification of specific item, Item type, Date of specific item, Document ID, Herbert H. Lehman Papers, Special Correspondence Files, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library, URL (date accessed).

The Papers of John Jay is an image database and indexing tool comprising some 13,000 documents (more than 30,000 page images) scanned chiefly from photocopies of the originals.  Most of the source material was assembled by Columbia University's John Jay publication project staff during the 1960s and 1970s under the direction of the late Professor Richard B. Morris.  These photocopies were originally intended to be used as source texts for documents to be included in a planned four-volume letterpress series entitled The Selected Unpublished Papers of John Jay.

Unfortunately only two volumes of the series appeared before Morris’s death in 1989, John Jay: The Making of a Revolutionary, Unpublished Papers 1745-1780 (New York: Harper & Row, 1975)and John Jay: The Winning of the Peace, Unpublished Papers, 1780-1784  (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). 

When the project closed in 1996, the photocopied documents were transferred to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.   Shortly thereafter Elaine Sloan, then University Librarian, established an Advisory Board, consisting of Barbara Black, George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History at Columbia; Patricia Bonomi, Professor of History Emerita at New York University;  Barbara Oberg, then editor of the Benjamin Franklin Papers at Yale University; and Herbert Sloan, Professor of History at Barnard College, and convened by Gouverneur Morris Professor of History Richard L. Bushman, to make recommendations about the future of the project.

Letterpress Edition and Database.  The Advisory Board recommended that Columbia continue to pursue plans for the letterpress edition under a new editor.  Funding was secured in 2004 from the National Historical Publication and Records Commission for a revised and updated selective letterpress edition that would include seven volumes and be completed by 2012.   The Advisory Board also recommended, however, that the Libraries address the more immediate need for scholars to have access to the still-unpublished material collected for the original project by seeking funding to digitize and mount those documents on the Web.

The National Endowment for the Humanities agreed with this aim and provided a two-year grant for the project for the years 2000-2002. Additional funding was provided in 2001 by the Florence Gould Foundation.  The Papers of John Jay database was launched initially in December 2002.

Expansion & Enhancement Initiative.  From March 2003 to March 2006 Columbia University Libraries continued to expand the content and enhance the functionality of the database, drawing upon staff and funding provided by the new Columbia Libraries Digital Program initiative, which had been established in 2002.   At the time of its initial launch in December 2002 the database included Jay documents from about fifty institutions; by 2006 this number had risen to ninety.   During this period over 1,500 new documents ( ca. 12,000 page images) were also added, including 1,300 color scans from original documents in Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library.See additional statistics.

Future Prospects.  The Papers of John Jay Papers is designed to be a working tool for students, scholars and the interested public.  It remains a work in progress.  New documents can be added, corrections to existing information made, and identifications completed by using the comments form or by writing to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia.   We look forward to collaborating with our users in making this an effective and useful resource.

Rights and Permissions.   Intellectual property rights to the materials on this database remain with the owning repositories. People wishing to publish or otherwise use images found on this database must contact these institutions for  information and permission.  Please consult as well the Copyright & Use statement referenced on the John Jay Papers home page.

Image Quality.  Please note: the quality of some of the images is not ideal.  Because we were attempting to make available as soon as possible material that had been collected forty years ago, salvaging some of the hard work that had been done by various generations of project editors and assistants, we approached the project differently than we would have had we been starting from scratch with new scans and new photography.  Although digitization has in some cases made the documents far more legible than they are in the original, we are aware that in other cases they remain hard to read.  Scans, photocopies and microfilmed images of 18th-century manuscripts under the best of circumstances are not always clear, due to deterioration of ink or paper, bleed-through, and uneven surfaces. The quality of computer monitors also varies dramatically.  To assist readers, we have provided some capacity to enlarge and enhance the images.   Better images and information about the documents themselves may be found by contacting the owning repositories, using the contact information provided.  Messages indicating that images are not available at this time may occur for a variety of reasons, including the reluctance of an owning institution to allow its property to be included.  In the few cases where we have not been able to decipher a repository name and the source is listed as “Unknown,” questions may be directed to the Columbia University Libraries by using the “Comments” field.

In 2007 a project was undertaken to digitize a selection of corporate reports from the Columbia Business Library's extensive collection of historical corporate annual reports.

The selection targeted corporations that operated in and around New York City. Approximately 36 companies are represented with a total of approximately 770 individual reports (ca. 17,300 pages) ranging from the 1850s through the early 1960s.

The American architectural firm Greene & Greene was a partnership between the brothers Charles Sumner Greene (1868-1957) and Henry Mather Greene (1870-1954). The firm, established in 1894, was officially dissolved in 1922, after which the two practiced independently. They were active in Southern California and were part of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. During the years 1907-1909 the Greenes created some of their most renowned residences, including the Blacker, Gamble, Pratt, and Thorsen houses. They also designed interiors, creating furniture, lighting, carpets, and stained glass for their clients.

The Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers Collection spans the years ca. 1896 - ca. 1963. The collection chiefly consists of architectural drawings (approximately 5,000) and also includes photographs, personal papers, and other manuscript material. Access to digital images of all the architectural drawings and to selected photographs are provided in the finding aid and through seven indexes: Images, Genre/Form, Geographic, Persons, Subjects, Corporate Names, and Projects.

G.E.E. Lindquist Native American Photographs is an online presentation of the 1322 photographs, 124 postcards, 388 negatives, and 34 glass plate negatives/lantern slides, which derive from the G.E.E. Lindquist Papers archival collection at The Burke Library.

They depict the people, places, and practices of Native Americans and their communities from at least 34 States, plus Canada and Mexico in the period from 1909-1953. The majority of the images were taken by G. E. E. Lindquist (1886-1967), an itinerant representative of the ecumenical Home Missions Council of the Federal Council of Churches.

Columbia University Libraries has launched a program of selective digitization of pre-1923 books from our collections. Our objective with this initiative is to directly support the teaching and research programs of the University. In addition, we will use digitization as a means to increase access to certain fragile materials and rare and unique items.

At present our plan is to create image-based page turners for these books as well as parallel uncorrected OCR versions for indexing and viewing. In most cases we will provide PDF "e-book" versions of the material as well.

For special projects where a deeper level of indexing or integration is needed, we will also create TEI-lite / XML-encoded versions of the book.