Research Collections
Great Lakes
Collections including Great Lakes material
- Robert H. Smith, Maritime Museums of North America Including Canada: includes links to the museum web sites where significant additional content may be found.
- Lighthouse Depot features "Lighthouse Explorer" database and the archives of Lighthouse Digest. Both feature a substantial number of Lakes lights and images rarely seen online elsewhere.
National and Regional Digital collections
- Google Book Search
- HathiTrust Digital Library
- Internet Archive
- American Memory: a strong collection of American material including government documents, manuscripts, travel accounts, periodicals, maps, sound and still and moving images from throughout the history of the United States. Particularly relevant are the images of the Detroit Publishing Company and American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920.
- Making of America: nearly 13,000 books and 50,000 journal articles, some of which are also in the American Memory collection.
- Early Canadiana Online: nearly 80,000 volumes of pre-1900 Canadian printed material with a strong emphasis on government documents, literature, French Canada, women's history and native studies. The post-confederation Canadian government documents are restricted to member institutions but the balance is freely available.
- Library and Archives Canada: includes the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and Shipwreck Investigations (use the database to find individual ships.)
- Images Canada: a partnership of archives, libraries, museums and universities from across Canada
Digitized Newspaper Files
- Chronicling America: digitized newspapers from 1860 to 1920 from around the United States.
- Our Ontario newspapers: an experimental search of selected Ontario newspapers from Kingston to Thunder Bay. Some of the content is pure index, the balance are digitized papers, some from microfilm, some from originals.
- Google News: Google has announced they will not grow this collection but there is a wide range of papers from around the globe including a number of titles from both sides of the border in the Great Lakes region.
- Fulton History: New York State newspapers from New York to Ogdensburg to Buffalo. For a list of the papers see the title list
- Northern New York Library Network: online papers from Oswego to Ogdensburg
- Detroit Free Press Archive, 1831-1922 (pay-per-view) and Chicago Tribune Archive, 1852-1984 (pay-per-view)
- Genealogy Bank: (pay-per-view) includes extensive runs of papers from Cleveland, Sault Ste. Marie, MI, Duluth, Milwaukee and other communities.
- Door County Newspaper Archive: a strong collection of Door County, WI papers, 1862-1941
- Huron County Museum: Digitized Newspapers: a collection of county papers including those from Goderich, ON
Finding Aids: Museum and archival sites
National maritime services
Local Histories (some examples)
Specialized subjects
Other Maritime collections