Calisphere
calisphere.org
California's digital collections portal with 1.5 million items from UC libraries, the California Historical Society, and hundreds of local archives.
Why it is useful
A model for state-level digital preservation — the breadth of California history covered is remarkable, from Gold Rush photographs to WWII Japanese internment records to Cold War aerospace documents. Clearly licensed for educational reuse.
More in Archives
Other archives you might not have heard of.
- British Newspaper ArchiveA vast searchable archive of digitized British and Irish newspapers spanning centuries, with free search and preview before a paid subscription.
- Internet ArcadeThe Internet Archive's collection of over 900 classic arcade games playable directly in the browser — including Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Space Invaders, and hundreds of more obscure titles.
- WikiArtA visual encyclopedia of art, with hundreds of thousands of works that you can browse by artist, movement, genre or period.
- Project GutenbergA volunteer-run digital library offering over 70,000 free eBooks — primarily classic literature and older works whose US copyright has expired — available to download or read online in multiple formats including EPUB, Kindle, and plain text.
- Wikimedia CommonsWikipedia's free media repository, holding tens of millions of freely licensed images, audio and video files with licence details for each.
- Old Maps OnlineA search engine for historical maps aggregated from major collections worldwide, allowing geographic and time-period filtering across hundreds of thousands of maps.