Making of America

Making of America
Title	Making of America
Established	1960s–1990s
Scope	19th-century American social history
Language	English
Location	United States
Type	Digital library project
Affiliated	University of Michigan, Cornell University, Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation

Contents

Making of America Making of America is a long-term digital library initiative documenting nineteenth-century United States social, cultural, and political life through digitized monographs and periodicals. Originating from collaboration among research libraries and federal agencies, the project linked archival collections from institutions such as the University of Michigan and Cornell University to federal programs including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation. It informed later efforts by the Library of Congress and influenced standards used by the Digital Public Library of America and the HathiTrust Digital Library.

Background and Origins

The project grew from preservation concerns voiced by curators at the American Antiquarian Society, scholars at the Newberry Library, and administrators at the Library of Congress during the 1960s and 1970s alongside initiatives like the National Historic Preservation Act era funding. Funders such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation supported pilot collaborations with the University of Michigan and Cornell University to create searchable digital surrogates of titles held by the Harvard University library system, the New York Public Library, and state institutions including the Ohio Historical Society. Influential librarians and historians from the Massachusetts Historical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, and Smithsonian Institution helped define collection priorities.

Collections emphasized nineteenth-century American monographs, serials, and pamphlets drawn from contributors such as the New York Public Library, the University of Chicago library, and the Princeton University Library. Major series included scanned runs of periodicals like The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Weekly, and The Liberator alongside monographs by figures housed in the Library of Congress manuscript collections and printed works associated with the Abolitionist movement, Reconstruction era pamphlets, and materials tied to the American Civil War and the Transcontinental Railroad. Contributors also provided rare items from the American Philosophical Society, Brown University, Yale University, and the Columbia University collections, ensuring representation of regional imprints from the Midwest, the Northeast, and the South.

Early technical choices were influenced by research at the University of Michigan and experimentation at the Cornell University Laboratory for Applied Mathematics using document imaging pilots similar to work at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and standards discussion with the Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives. Scanners and optical character recognition systems from vendors that worked with the National Institute of Standards and Technology were employed to capture pages, while metadata schemas were debated among staff from the Getty Research Institute, OCLC, and the Council on Library and Information Resources. Efforts to reconcile varying cataloging practices referenced manuals from the American Library Association and archival descriptions from the Society of American Archivists. The project adopted image formats compatible with later aggregators such as the Internet Archive.

Making of America collections were made available for scholarly research by faculty at institutions including Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the University of Michigan. Educators at the Teachers College, Columbia University, public historians at the Smithsonian Institution, and independent scholars used the corpus to study topics linked to the Women's Rights Convention, Temperance movement, Industrial Revolution in the United States, and the politics of the Gilded Age. The dataset supported computational analysis by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Stanford University Humanities Lab and fed into projects at the Digital Public Library of America and the HathiTrust Digital Library. Public access portals referenced interfaces designed by teams at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign and the University of Texas at Austin.

Long-term preservation raised questions addressed by preservationists at the Library of Congress, specialists at the National Archives and Records Administration, and conservators from the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts. Issues included fragile bindings from collections at the American Antiquarian Society and imprints requiring cold storage guidelines similar to those at the New York Public Library and the British Library (in comparative discussions). Technical challenges encompassed OCR error rates noted by analysts at the University of California, Berkeley and interoperability problems documented by the Open Archives Initiative and OCLC. Metadata harmonization drew on standards from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and practice notes from the Society of American Archivists.

Scholars in American studies at Yale University and historians associated with the Organization of American Historians praised access improvements while critiquing selection biases highlighted by researchers at the University of Chicago and the Newberry Library. The project inspired subsequent digitization programs at the Library of Congress and informed policies at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Its materials have been cited in monographs from presses like Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press and continue to serve as a resource for initiatives such as the Digital Public Library of America and the HathiTrust Digital Library.