Marriott Library, University of Utah

About: 

The J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah hosts more than 160 outstanding digital collections, containing 420,000 digital photographs, maps, books, audio recordings, and other items.  They can all be viewed by clicking on the “Digital Collections” link on the Library’s main web page: http://www.lib.utah.edu/portal/site/marriottlibrary/

Among the many fine collections we have are:

  • The Harmonia Macrocosmica, by Andreas Cellarius, printed in 1661, is an atlas of the heavens as seen by the astronomers of the time: Copernicus, Ptolemy, Brahe, and Aratus. Our collection has 30 hand-painted color plates plus an accompanying text in Latin.  
  • Western Soundscape Archive – thousands of animal and other natural sounds from the western U.S.  
  • Karl Bodmer created these 165 aquatints during the 1832-1834 expedition by Prince Maximilian zu Wied through the American west. Since then, these watercolors have been a major historical resource for Plains Indian culture. They were instrumental in creating the romantic perceptions of these peoples, which endure to this day in art, film, and literature.
  • Dard Hunter Books – his writings on papermaking, presented in elegant hand-made books.
  • Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps - large-scale, detailed maps from 1867 -1969 depicting the commercial, industrial, and residential sections of Utah cities.
  • Arabic Papyrus – the world’s third largest, a collection of over 1,500 Arabic documents on papyrus and paper.
  • Aztec Codices – 4 Mesoamerican manuscripts describing wars, famine, pestilence, religious events, and other elements of ancient Mesoamerican culture.

We host nationally renowned collaborations such as the Utah Digital Newspapers (http://digitalnewspapers.org), the Mountain West Digital Library (http://mwdl.org), and the Western Waters Digital Library (http://westernwaters.org).  

We partner with several other UofU and State institutions, including the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library, the S. J. Quinney College of Law Library, the Utah State Historical Society, and the Utah State Library. We also work closely with many public libraries across Utah, such as the Uintah County Library, the Park City Library and Historical Society, the Delta City Library, the Topaz Library, to name only a few.

Utah Digital Newspapers
The J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah has launched a pioneering program that is changing the face of newspaper research. Our program, the Utah Digital Newspapers (UDN), makes historic Utah newspapers available to the general public over the Internet. We create a database of digital images and searchable text from old newspapers and make it accessible from our website. The result is that these newspapers can be searched by keyword, title and date from the comfort of a PC. For anyone interested in their family history, Utah or national history, it's a marvelous, easy-to-use improvement over reading microfilm.   

Since its inception in 2002, UDN quickly became a leader in newspaper digitization within the public sector and a model for other academic libraries across the country. Our success has led the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress to launch a national digital newspapers program, in which the Marriott Library and 20+ other institutions participate.

As of early 2011, we have digitized over 1 million pages from more than sixty newspapers, covering 27 of the 29 Utah counties. All this is available on our website:http://digitalnewspapers.org.

Our collection includes the first issue of the Deseret News in 1850, which is the first newspaper issue of any kind published in the Utah Territory. We have the first issue of the Salt Lake Tribune in 1871 and the early years of the Salt Lake Herald. Among other papers are the Topaz Times, the newsletter from the Japanese internment camp during World War II, and the Broad Ax, an early African American paper from Salt Lake City

Contact: 

Contact: John Herbert, Head of Digital Ventures, john.herbert@utah.edu