Archives
The ARTFL Project | Art History's Visual Resources Collection | Black Metropolis Research Consortium | Electronic Text Services | Film Studies Center | Special Collections Research Center | Uncovering New Chicago Archives Project | Digital Media Archives
The ARTFL Project
The Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) is a cooperative enterprise of Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française (ATILF) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Division of the Humanities, the Division of the Social Sciences, and Electronic Text Services (ETS) of the University of Chicago. It was created in 1981 to provide access to FRANTEXT, a corpus of some 2,000 texts representing a broad range of written French from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. The ARTFL Project has since expanded to include numerous other databases in French and many other languages. ARTFL is also recognized for its open-source full-text retrieval and analysis search engine PhiloLogic. In addition to its main databases (the Encyclopédie, FRANTEXT, French Women Writers, etc). an ARTFL subscription also includes access to the full-text of its considerable French dictionary and reference collection—Dictionnaires d'autrefois—as well as collections of Provençal Poetry and Old French literary texts. Currently, over three hundred North American institutions subscribe to the ARTFL Project.
Art History's Visual Resources Collection
Established in 1902 along with the department of Art History, the collection began with an extensive lantern slide collection and has grown into holdings of more than 350,000 35mm slides. Digitization of images has produced more than 14,000 digital images available to the campus community through the University Web site. In 2005 the direction of the digital collection changed and production of archival quality images began along with extensive metadata to provide improved search and retrieval.
Black Metropolis Research Consortium
The Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) is a Chicago-based consortium of libraries, universities, and other archival institutions with major holdings of material that document African-American and African diasporic culture, history, and politics, with a specific focus in materials relating to Chicago. The BMRC is dedicated to making these nationally significant collections broadly accessible. Holdings in these collections provide researchers with access to materials relevant to the following topics: the relationships between major economic and political forces in the region and racial experience; urban social and progressive movements; African-American literature, art, and culture; the development of the Chicago styles of gospel, blues, and jazz; the place of religious communities in the region; the Great Migration; social realism; the Chicago Renaissance; the Black Arts Movement; and African-American radicalism. The BMRC represents one of the top archival resources in the United States for the study of African-American culture and history. It is also the largest multi-institutional project currently being undertaken by the Division of the Humanities. There are seventeen charter members of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago History Museum, Chicago Public Library System (including the Harsh Collection), Chicago State University, Chicago Sun-Times, Columbia College, Chicago Defender, DePaul University, DuSable Museum of African American History, HistoryMakers, Illinois Institute of Technology, Loyola University, Newberry Library, Northwestern University, Roosevelt University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois-Chicago.
Electronic Text Services
Sponsored by the University of Chicago Library and ARTFL, Electronic Text Services offers access to full-text scholarly resources and digital facsimiles of texts. Examples of full-texts include American Film Scripts Online, Diderot's Encyclopédie, Goethes Werke, Italian Women Writers, the Patrologia Latina Database, North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, and the William Blake Archive, among others. Digital facsimiles include early editions of Chopin scores, five editions of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française, and the Abraham Lincoln Songster.
Film Studies Center
The Film Studies Center provides facilities, film, and video collections for on-site research and study. The center also houses the Gerald Mast Film Archive, an expanding collection of over 10,000 titles, includes experimental cinema, silent film, classic Hollywood cinema, documentary, European art cinema, video art, international cinema, etc. The facilities are open to University students, faculty, and staff. Outside researchers must apply in writing to the assistant director.
Special Collections Research Center
As the principal repository for and custodian of the University of Chicago Library's rare books and manuscripts and the University archives, Special Collections acquires, provides for discovery and use, preserves, and publicizes distinctive and unique collections in all formats. Special Collections makes its resources available to a broad research constituency, in support of the University's engagement with the larger scholarly community.
Uncovering New Chicago Archives Project
Uncovering New Chicago Archives Project aims to improve access to University collections and Chicago-area archives, with a special focus on those related to African American history. At the University, the project will organize and describe the archives of contemporary poetry and the Chicago Jazz Archives located in the Special Collections Research Center of the University Library. On Chicago's South Side, three archives will be surveyed: the DuSable Museum of African American History, the Chicago Defender, and the Vivian G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American History and Literature located in the Woodson Regional Library. The project is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is directed by Alice Schreyer, Director of the Special Collections Research Center, Regenstein Library. Jacqueline Goldsby, Associate Professor of English, is directing the work related to the African American material. It will produce an online database open to students, researchers, and scholars around the world in 2009.
Digital Media Archives
The University's Digital Media Archive is a research facility managed by Humanities Research Computing. The archives primary purpose is the preservation, restoration, and dissemination of audio materials drawn from the linguistic, anthropological and ethnomusicology research and fieldwork of University faculty, students, and staff. Its audio holdings consist of over 7,000 hours of recordings in circa 180 languages. The archives' best known collections are field recordings made in Central and Latin America in a variety of indigenous Mesoamerican languages.