The Special Collections & Archives Division actively participates in digital projects and engages in the digitization of collections materials.
We currently offer digitized material from our Signature Collections, University Collections, and Local & Regional History Collections with more in process.
All Master's Theses and Projects completed from 2013 to the present can be searched via Reed Library's ReedSearch and are also available in digital format through Fredonia's portal to the SUNY Open Access Repository (SOAR).
For information on Master's Theses and Projects completed between 1967 and 2012, please contact Special Collections & Archives Staff. Most of these materials have not been cataloged and are non-circulating, though some may be available in digital format.
Previously, the Special Collections department had made accessible only those Master's Theses and Master's Projects that were submitted to the archives through the appropriate department or office. The Coordinator of Special Collections & Archives is currently working with the department of Graduate Studies and graduate departments to enable all future Master's Theses, Creative Projects, and Creative Works to be included in the Fredonia SOAR repository, and to fill in any gaps from all graduate degree-granting departments between 2012 and 2019.
For more information, or if you have any questions, please contact the Coordinator for Special Collections & Archives.
This collection of digitized audio recordings of Sigurd Rascher's performances, album recordings, demos, rare bootlegs, and radio broadcasts is currently available for in-house use only. To use the Rascher Listening Station, please make a request for a research appointment.
Anna Clift Smith (1878-1946) spent much of her life on Lake Erie. She traveled widely in the United States. Although she was not a native of the area, and left for several years to see the West, she loved the locale so much that she repeatedly found her way back to this sometimes wild, always beautiful, spot in Western New York. During a few months in the winter of 1904, Anna composed and illustrated a charming literary work that seems to be at times a letter, a diary, or even an adventure or romance. This handwritten manuscript, composed in colored pencil and accompanied by watercolor illustrations, is held in the Archives & Special Collections at Fredonia. Conveying the sometimes wistful, sometimes hale and hearty, world view of this paradoxical young woman, the work, Van Buren Life, is the account of Anna's daily experiences during a harsh winter on the Lake at the then tiny summer community of Van Buren Point.
As part of a digital humanities project, the work was digitized and can be viewed in its entirety here. Reed Library also holds copies of the physical book in its circulating collection.
Image: Illustration from Chapter XI of Van Buren Life by Anna Clift Smith, circa 1904-1905. LRH003.02 - John S. Lambert Papers, Special Collections & Archives Division, Daniel A. Reed Library, the State University of New York at Fredonia.
Researchers may now access many records of the Archives of the Holland Land Company in digital format. Housed on the New York Heritage Digital Collections website, these records include maps, land transactions and other materials digitized from the microfilm holdings of Reed Library.
With the support of 2007 and 2008 Regional Bibliographic Databases and Resource Sharing (RBDB) Program Grants through the Western New York Library Resources Council, Reed Library staff digitized 1,363 color maps from the Archives of the Holland Land Company, featuring maps from the state of New York and the Western New York region as well as from other Holland Land Company holdings at repositories throughout the eastern United States. The Holland Land Company Maps can be viewed here.
In 2016 an additional RBDB grant was awarded to Reed Library to digitize 20 select reels from the 202-reel collection, including the following reels (numbering based on the Pieterse Inventory; see below): 109-113, 123-128, 144-146, 175-180. This effort included those reels containing the Western New York land transactions referenced in Karen Livsey's Western New York Land Transactions (1804-1824 and 1825-1835). The Archives of the Holland Land Company collection can be viewed here.
The Daniel A. Reed Library of the State University of New York at Fredonia remains grateful to the Gemeentelijke Archiefdienst van Amsterdam (Municipal Archives of Amsterdam) and the Nederlandse Document Reproductie B.V. for their collaborative roles in the original microfilming project of the Holland Land Company Archives completed many years ago.
This collection of over 300 images is derived from several atlases found in the Local History Collection at SUNY Fredonia's Reed Library. The atlases cover the following counties: Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Genesee, and Wyoming for the time period 1866-1881. The atlases, produced by S.N. and D.G. Beers and Assistants (known as "Beers Atlases") include a wide range of information about the demographic and geographic features of the counties, their towns and villages, including travel distances between points, town histories, geographic landmarks, images of well-known citizens as well as images and locations of farms, mills, schools, businesses, religious establishments, private residences and more. This collection was digitized subsequent to the digitization of the earlier Holland Land Company Maps also held by Reed Library. When brought together, these two collections contextualize the rapid growth and expansion of communities, wealth, and infrastructure in Western New York, from the earliest European land settlements beginning in the 1790s through the post-Civil War industrialization that characterized the region in the late nineteenth century.
The Normal Leader is the student newspaper of the State University of New York at Fredonia, first published in 1893. Originally published by the all-female Agonian literary society, after its very first issue it became the publication of both the Agonian and the Zetesian (all-male) literary societies. The newspaper shortened its official name to simply The Leader in 1936, which is the title under which it is still published today. Heavily focused on literary content in its earliest years, the newspaper remains one of the most frequently requested and accessed published titles within the Archives & Special Collections of the Daniel A. Reed Library at Fredonia, which underscores its importance in supporting both college and regional history, as it provides a unique look into the history of higher learning in Western New York.
In 2018, thanks to a Regional Bibliographic Databases Grant from the Western New York Library Resources Council, 20 bound volumes and several loose issues covering the years 1893 - 1922 (191 issues total) were digitized by Backstage Library Works. The originals can still be accessed in the Reading Room, and digitized issues can be found on the New York Heritage website.
Image: The Normal Leader, Volume 1, Issue 1, 1893. UC006.01 - The Normal Leader & Leader Archives, Special Collections & Archives Division, Daniel A. Reed Library, the State University of New York at Fredonia.
Coming Soon!
The Historical Popular Sheet Music Collection at Reed Library is an interesting and colorful collection of music, given to the library many years ago by an anonymous donor. The collection contains between 2,500 and 3,000 folios of sheet music, consisting mostly of popular songs and instrumental music from the late 19th-century through the 1950s, with the majority of the pieces being composed from the 1910s through the 1920s. Many of the items found in this collection are preserved by only a few libraries, and a fair number of the musical folios are unique to this library.
The collection is a window into the world of the early twentieth century, not only from the music itself but through the beautiful and creative cover art and advertisements contained within each folio. The depictions of people, costumes, and customs, along with the lyrics and music of each song, are a marvelous historical resource for analyzing and understanding the popular culture of those times.
Items in this collection are being processed, cataloged, and digitized. Bibliographic records found for each title are exported to the library’s consortial catalog from the OCLC database. For items that are unique to the collection, or items where there is not a full bibliographic description available, OCLC records are being enhanced and original cataloging is being contributed to the shared database. At the same time, the digital versions are being uploaded into the SUNY DSpace repository, with appropriate metadata being input for each piece. Items from the collection that are in the public domain are freely available through the DSpace repository as PDFs. The original musical folios for the entire collection will be kept and preserved in the library’s Special Collections and Archives division.
The Chautauqua County Directories digital collection was made possible through a 2020 Innovation & Access Grant from the Western New York Library Resources Council. Hosted by New York Heritage, this collection contains digitized facsimiles of 32 directories of various cities, towns, and villages across Chautauqua County with two directories also covering villages and towns in Cattaraugus County. Notable items in the Chautauqua County Directories collection include the Svensk Adresskalender, a 1909 Swedish-language residential and business directory with a fold-out map of the city of Jamestown, NY, and a pocket street directory of Jamestown, NY, with a large fold-out map, intended for tourists.
The original items, covering the years 1873-1966, were largely donated by C. Malcolm Nichols in a collection of ephemera related to the history of Chautauqua County. This collection was selected for digitization in order to make information about past residents of Chautauqua County more easily accessible to researchers and genealogists.
Image: Svensk Adresskalender, Vart Land, 1909. DC009.1 - Chautauqua County Directories, Special Collections & Archives Division, Daniel A. Reed Library, the State University of New York at Fredonia.
The Browder-Wallenberg Holocaust Oral Histories Collection consists of video and audio oral history interview recordings from Holocaust survivors and liberators, Jewish exiles and refugees, and diplomatic figures associated with Raoul Wallenberg. Many interviews include transcripts, most of which have been conducted by Dr. Andrea Zevenbergen. These interviews have also been shared with the National Holocaust Memorial Museum following the donor's wishes to add to the national documentation effort of Holocaust testimonies.
This collection of digitized primary source materials from libraries, museums, and archives all over the world preserves the history of the Holocaust in the following thematic divisions:
This collection consists of items originating from prisoners held in German concentration camps, internment and transit camps, Gestapo prisons, and POW camps, during and just prior to World War II.
This collection comprises 170 German-language titles of books and pamphlets. The collection presents anti-Semitism as an issue in politics, economics, religion, and education.
This collection provides unique documents on the investigation and prosecution of war crimes committed by Nazi concentration camp commandants and camp personnel.
This collection provides access to the documents of The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR), which was organized in London in August 1938 as a result of the Evian Conference of July 1938, which President Roosevelt had called to consider the problem of racial, religious, and political refugees from central Europe.
This collection consists of original documents collected by Diamant over a period of approximately 30 years dealing primarily with the Jewish segment of the French underground resistance.
This publication comprises two collections related to Holocaust Era Assets. The first includes Records Regarding Bank Investigations and Records Relating to Interrogations of Nazi Financiers, from the records of the Office of the Finance Division and Finance Advisor in the Office of Military Government, U.S. Zone(Germany) (OMGUS), during the period 1945-1949. The second comprises Records Regarding Intelligence and Financial Investigations, 1945-1949, from the Records of the Financial Intelligence Group, Office of the Finance Adviser.
This collection reproduces the Tagebuch or journal of Dr. Hans Frank (1900-1946), the Governor-General of German-occupied Poland from October 1939 until early 1945. The journal is in typed format, in chronological order, covering all aspect of Generalgouvernment (GG) administration from its seat in the royal Wawel castle in Krakau (Kraków). The entries reflect administrative matters, rather than the spontaneous thoughts or feelings usually found in a diary.
This collection consists of index cards listing the name, date and place of birth, occupation and last address of Jews whose German citizenship was revoked in accordance with the "Nuremberg Laws" of 1935, including Jews from Germany, Austria and Czech Bohemia.
This collection provides access to documents of SAFEHAVEN, which was the code name of a project of the Foreign Economic Administration, in cooperation with the State Department and the military services, to block the flow of German capital across neutral boundaries and to identify and observe all German overseas investments.
Testaments to the Holocaust is the online publication of the archives of the Wiener Library, London, the first archive to collect evidence of the Holocaust and the anti-semitic activities of the German Nazi Party.
This collection comprises documents from a wide variety of sources, including the Gestapo, local police and government offices, Reich ministries, businesses, etc., pertaining to Jewish communities.
This collection provides a wealth of unique correspondence, reports and analyses, memos of conversations, and personal interviews exploring such themes U.S.-Vatican relations, Vatican's role in World War II, Jewish refugees, Italian anti-Jewish laws during the papacy of Pius XII, and the pope's personal knowledge of the treatment of European Jews.
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