Wilmington, Delaware – January 2014 – Hagley Museum and Library celebrates a record visitor count to its digital archives in 2013 with 131,144 visitors. Hagley’s Digital Archives is an online selection of images, documents and publications from the library’s collections. Since the digital archives’ launch in 2008, 2013 was the first year that had more than 100,000 visitors. Hagley Digital Archives is accessible at digital.hagley.org.
“Hagley is a leader among independent research libraries in North America committed to making digitization and access a central part of its strategic vision. This milestone is further evidence that the investment in digital is paying off,” said Erik Rau, Director of Library Services.
Hagley Digital Archives originated to allow researchers, students, and citizen historians to access digitized items from the library’s collections twenty-four hours a day via the internet. In 2008, it offered less than 10,000 photographs, but has grown to 330,000 items including photographs, historic publications, trade catalogs, correspondence, and documents. Since launching in 2008, the digital archives have had 435,397 visitors from every continent except Antarctica. Items from the Hagley Digital Archives have been used in National Geographic,Newsweek Magazine, Huffington Post, National Portrait Gallery, and National Constitution Center.
Hagley’s Library is the nation’s leading business history library, archives, and research center. Current holdings comprise 37,000 linear feet in the Manuscripts and Archives Department, 290,000 printed volumes in the Imprints Department, 2 million visual items in the Pictorial Department, and more than 330,000 digital images and pages in the Digital Archives Department.
Hagley Digital Archives
The Hagley Digital Archives allows online access to digitized versions of selections from our library collections. The Archives includes images, documents, and publications related to the history of business, technology, and society accessible online through Hagley’s web site.
The Digital Archives holds more than 330,000 digital images and pages from Hagley’s library collections. The archives adds material on an ongoing basis; new content is added weekly. The total content of the Archives is a small subset of our entire library holdings, but it provides an excellent representation of Hagley Library’s world-class research holdings on the history of business and industry
Topics and Content Overview
The Hagley Digital Archives cover a wide number of topics under the broad framework of business history. Items in the Digital Archives provide unique historical perspectives of industrial processes; commercial landscapes; business-state relations; marketing and advertising; transportation facilities and methods; development of information technology; consumer culture, and the social and cultural aspects of work and leisure. A list of the digitized collections is available on the Hagley Digitial Archives homepage at http://digital.hagley.org.
Highlights include:
- Avon Company Collection: advertisements, catalogs, representative’s sales tools, and corporate documents
- Civil War Collection: photographs, correspondence, and documents
- Dallin Aerial Survey Company: 7,800 aerial photographs of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast taken between 1924 and 1941.
- DuPont Company: DuPont Company Collection, DuPont Magazine 1913 - 2003, DuPont Product Information Photographs, DeMirjian Collection of DuPont Company Advertising
- United States Chamber of Commerce: Nation’s Business magazine, 1912 – 1999, and photographs
- Wawa, Inc. Collection: 275 images from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries
Statistics
Total Number of Visitors: 435,397
Total Number of Pages Viewed: 3,789,802
Most Visits on a Day: 1,441 on August 17, 2012
Largest Traffic Source: Google
Most Viewed Collection: Dallin Aerial Survey Company – 603,867 views
Most Viewed Item: Photograph of the USS Maine from the P.S. du Pont Longwood Photograph Collection – 2967 views
Accessibility
The online archives allow researchers, students, and citizen historians to access digitized items from the library’s collections twenty-four hours a day via the internet at http://digital.hagley.org.
Hagley Digital Archives includes guided browses to help researchers navigate the collection materials currently online. The content in the archives is accessible via Google and other search engines. High resolution versions of images in the archives are available for purchase.
About Hagley Museum and Library
At Hagley, we invite people of all ages to investigate and experience the unfolding history of American business, technology, and innovation, and its impact on the world, from our home at the historic DuPont powder yards on the banks of the Brandywine.
For more information, call (302) 658-2400 weekdays