The Johnson Publishing Company produced iconic magazines including Ebony and Jet and its archive is regarded as one of the most significant collections of 20th century Black American culture. The archive contains around 5,000 magazines, 200 boxes of business records, 10,000 audio and visual recordings, and 4.5 million prints and negatives that chronicle Black life from the 1940s until the present day.

Humankind was first created to grow into branches. However, the first branches decided that they knew better than the Creator by partaking in something that they were forbidden to do, and thus, tor…

“[A] river that carried all kinds of people and pulled them together in going the same direction. And it did it quickly, it did it efficiently, it did it without as much argument or friction.” — Jimmy Collier. By Will Bostwick. (Sept. 4, 2018)

A former journalist, equipped with an algorithm and the largest collection of murder records in the country, finds patterns in crime. By Alec Wilkinson.

The Europeana Collections has over 50 million pieces of European history in its digital archive from more than 3,000 institutions. The Europeana Photography collection, which has over 2 million photographs. Music, art, fashion, sport, natural history, and maps and geography are some of the other collections. More than 3 million of the archives are openly licensed, meaning you can use them for any purpose, and many of the images are available in high resolution.

The massive “We Wear Culture Project” includes 30,000 online artifacts from over 180 institutions. By Jason Daley.

Fearful of digital decay, a ceramicist wants to return data storage to a more lasting medium: clay. By Richard Kemeny.

While many have threatened to move to Canada in the wake of the election, the Internet Archive is actually raising money to do it.

The Library of Congress has over 160 million items in its collection, including 23 million books, and more than 1.1 million films, and telev...

The beginnings of the book are hard to pinpoint, but between about 150 and 450 CE writing slowly moved away from scrolls and toward the codex, an early forerunner of the modern book. A print book is now generally defined as a series of folded leaves of parchment or paper that has been stitched and bound together between covers. The books below, some of which date back well over a thousand years, are among the oldest known to have survived intact to modern times—and many of them are regularly on display.

Why infinite libraries are treated skeptically in the annals of science fiction and fantasy. By Adrienne LaFrance. (June 3, 2016)

Do me a favor while you read these opening lines. Pick up your phone, and open up your photos app. Scroll through the many pictures of you, your dumb friends, and your crazy family. Pick a photo—it can be any photo, really—and blow it up so it fills the whole screen. Still with me? Good.

With Freedom on the Move, historians hope to reveal patterns of escape and capture, while giving anyone the chance to learn about the individual heroism of runaway slaves.

Within the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is a geographer’s treasure trove: over a million artifacts from the American Geographical Society, one of the most incredible collections of maps, atlases and globes to be found anywhere in America.

A 177-year-old cemetery is preparing to digitize millions of records that shed light on New York City’s shifting demographics.

Libraries and archives have dealt with threats for centuries, but the growth of digital networks has created new hazards.

The Internet Archive's amazing Pulp Magazine Archive includes all 176 issues of If, a classic science fiction magazine that ran from 1952 to 1974.

For a thousand years, the societies of the Western world transmitted and preserved much of their written cultures on and between the skins of beasts. By Bruce Holsinger.

How one 1950s professor tried to build a gigantic database of thoughts and feelings. By Jeff Nunokawa.

After abandoning a much-criticized plan to move most of its research books to New Jersey, the library is creating a new storage and retrieval system under Bryant Park. By Tom Mashberg.