Update: The Collection of Collections at CONTENTdm has been replaced by  CONTENTdm in Action.

This site gathers digital collections from a host of libraries and archives that use CONTENTdm‘s software to deliver digital collections to researchers.

Lots of attention in the genealogical research world goes to commercial (for-profit) digital collection sites like Ancestry or MyHeritage.

But there are many, many non-profit libraries, archives, and museums that are working hard to digitize and deliver their collections directly to users, usually for free. In these collections are genealogically rich materials such as yearbooks and oral history transcripts.

The Collection of Collections at CONTENTdm section gives you a view of new additions to digital collections. Or you can perform specific searches.

Try searching Google using institution name +  archives + yearbooks. Clicking through should tell you pretty quickly whether your particular college of interest has digitized their yearbooks. The same search can work for postcards or local history photographs of specific locations.

So that’s a little tour behind the scenes of what your library and archives plus CONTENTdm is doing for your research. Happy searching!