Multimedia Resources on the Internet

This page provides links to multimedia collections on the Internet. For information about multimedia available in the University of Delaware Library, consult the Instructional Media Collection page.

Collections

AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials
Thousands of vintage television commercials dating from the 1950s to the 1980s.

America in the 1930s
Rich multimedia content includes film, audio (including radio programs), and images.

American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920
A multimedia anthology selected from various Library of Congress holdings. Included are 334 English- and Yiddish-language playscripts, 146 theater playbills and programs, 61 motion pictures, 10 sound recordings and 143 photographs and 29 memorabilia items documenting the life and career of Harry Houdini.

Archival Sound Recordings (British Library)
Search all recordings on the site, listen to recordings where copyright permits, view notes and tags added by other users.

City Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago, 1870s-1930s
Hosted at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham in the UK, this electronic text offers excellent multimedia essays on American urbanism as represented by Chicago and New York from the 1870s to the 1930s. Music, photographs, illustrations, and text are used to explore the emergent urban life of these two great American hubs.

Collect Britain
“Putting history in place: over 90,000 images and sounds from the UK and beyond.”

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project (Department of Special Collections, University of California, Santa Barbara)
A digital collection of over 6,000 cylinder recordings. They can be freely downloaded or streamed online.

Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry
A selection of more than 400 items from the Emile Berliner Papers and 108 Berliner sound recordings from the Library of Congress's Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.

English Accents and Dialects
Listen to England's changing voice. Extracts from the Survey of English Dialects and the Millennium Memory Bank document how we spoke and lived in the 20th century.

Historic Audio Collections
From the Delaware Public Archives. Listen to historic audio clips of interviews and radio broadcasts concerning service in WWII, desegregation, recycling, and baseball.

History and Politics Out Loud
A collection of audio materials capturing significant political and historical events and personalities of the 20th century. Speakers include Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, and others.

JFK Video: The Dallas Tapes
Historic video from KDFW Dallas after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The video includes exclusive television coverage—most from the KRLD -TV/KDFW Collection at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza—that can’t be found anywhere else on the Web.

Lost and Found Sound: A Special Radio Series for the Millennium
National Public Radio presents this site to accompany its ongoing Lost and Found Sound series, radio programs which look at everyday life in last 100 years by showcasing “lost treasures” of recorded sound such as a cassette tape sent to a little boy by his grandfather and left in a closet, or the field recordings made by Tony Schwartz in his New York City neighborhood in the 1940s and 50s.

Memoryscape Audio Walks
“Voices from the hidden history of the Thames.” These soundwalks take oral history recordings out from the archive into the landscape. They are available to listen at the Web site or else to download to iPods/MP3 players.

NARA on Google Video
Short films from the National Archives. Collections include NASA History of Space Flight Motion Pictures, United Newsreel Motion Pictures (1942-1945), and Department of the Interior Motion Pictures.

NASA Multimedia Gallery
Images, videos, and interactive features from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“Now What a Time”: Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-1943
Approximately one hundred sound recordings, primarily blues and gospel songs, and related documentation from the folk festival at Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University), Fort Valley, Georgia.

Poets on Screen
843 clips of poets reading their own and other poets' work. You will need to have RealPlayer or Windows Media Player installed on your PC to view these clips. Part of the Literature Online database. (Authorized University of Delaware users only).

Sheet Music Collections
Comprehensive list of links from the Music Library, Duke University Libraries.

Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive
Over a five-year period approximately 100 films are being added annually until over 500 full films will be viewable over the Internet. It is the Archive’s hope that this pioneering effort will be of benefit to all users, whether for purposes of study, research or production. Over 300 films are curently available.

Vincent Voice Library (Michigan State University Libraries)
The online sampler of recorded utterances of over 50,000 individuals features RealAudio and MP3 recordings of Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Big Ben, Edwin Booth, Kenneth Landfrey, Florence Nightingale, and Will Rogers.

Virtual Vaudeville
Press “See the Show” to see a 3D performance of an actual vaudeville script.

The Virtual Vietnam Archive
This site from Texas Tech University features a huge amount of multimedia content on the Vietnam War, including images, audio records, and oral history interviews.

Wax Music Cylinder Audio Files
Provides access to digitized wax music cylinders.

www.tinfoil.com
Information about wax cylinder records, including complete and partial tracts from recordings as early as 1878.

Search Engines

Google Video Beta

Search for Multimedia (Lycos)