D-Scribe Digital Publishing is an open access electronic publishing program of the University Library System (ULS) of the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...

. It comprises over 100 thematic collections that together contain over 100,000 digital objects. This content, most of which is available through

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

, includes both digitized versions of materials from the collections of the University of Pittsburgh and other local institutions as well as original 'born-electronic' content actively contributed by scholars worldwide. D-Scribe includes such items as photographs, maps, books, journal articles, dissertations, government documents, and technical reports, along with over 745 previously out-of-print titles published by the

University of Pittsburgh Press The University of Pittsburgh Press is a scholarly publishing house and a major American university press, part of the University of Pittsburgh. The university and the press are located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States. The press ...

. The digital publishing efforts of the University Library System began in 1998 and have won praise for their innovation from the leadership at the

Association of Research Libraries The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research library at comprehensive, research institutions in Canada and the United States. ARL member libraries make up a large portion of the academic and research li ...

and peer institutions.

Major digitized collections

The University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh has created various digital collections through its D-Scribe Digital Publishing program and has made them available to the public via the Internet. The following is a selection of the more prominent or larger collections available online.

19th-century schoolbooks

A full-text digitized presentation of over 140 historic books in the 16,000 volume Neitz Old Textbook Collection. The textbooks date from the 19th century and are fully searchable.

Archive of European Integration

A digitized repository and archive of material dealing with

European integration European integration is the process of political, legal, social, regional and economic integration of states wholly or partially in Europe, or nearby. European integration has primarily but not exclusively come about through the European Union ...

that focuses on the normalization of relations of Eastern and Western Europe following the

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

and the integration movements in West Europe that resulted in the

European Community The European Economic Community (EEC) was a regional organisation created by the Treaty of Rome of 1957,Today the largely rewritten treaty continues in force as the ''Treaty on the functioning of the European Union'', as renamed by the Lisbo ...

. Nearly 30 universities throughout Europe and America contribute content to the AEI. The AEI collects both independently produced research materials and official European Community/

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...

documents. Many of the digitized documents in the AEI are drawn from the University Library System's collection of EU documents received in 2007 when the library of the Delegation of the European Commission to the US in Washington, D.C. was donated to the University of Pittsburgh.

Audubon's Birds of America

The University's complete double elephant folio set of

John James Audubon John James Audubon (born Jean-Jacques Rabin, April 26, 1785 – January 27, 1851) was a French-American Autodidacticism, self-trained artist, natural history, naturalist, and ornithology, ornithologist. His combined interests in art and ornitho ...

's ''

The Birds of America ''The Birds of America'' is a book by naturalist and painter John James Audubon, containing illustrations of a wide variety of birds of the United States. It was first published as a series in sections between 1827 and 1838, in Edinburgh and L ...

'', one of only 120 complete sets of all 435 plates in existence, was preserved and restored over a five-month process in 2000. In 2007, along with the five volume set of Audubon's ''Ornithological Biography,'' the plates were digitized at high resolution and made available in one complete online collection.

Darlington Digital Library

The Darlington Digital Library contains digitized materials from the Darlington Memorial Library. The Library is a major collection related to American history, particularly colonial American history in Western Pennsylvania. Digitized items included vintage atlases, books, broadsides, images, manuscripts, and maps.

Dick Thornburgh Papers

Former Pennsylvania governor and

United States Attorney General The United States attorney general is the head of the United States Department of Justice and serves as the chief law enforcement officer of the Federal government of the United States, federal government. The attorney general acts as the princi ...

Dick Thornburgh Richard Lewis Thornburgh (July 16, 1932 – December 31, 2020) was an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as the 76th United States attorney general from 1988 to 1991 under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. A ...

donated his personal papers to the University of Pittsburgh in 1998. Portions of the collection are digitized and arranged in twenty-one chronological sections, representing Thornburgh's life and career, each with introductory information about the point in time, the position held, and items of importance.

George Washington Manuscripts

A digitized collection of broadsides manuscripts, maps, images, and personal communications that depict

George Washington George Washington (, 1799) was a Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father and the first president of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797. As commander of the Continental Army, Washington led Patriot (American Revoluti ...

's time in Western Pennsylvania at various points in his career.

Historic Pittsburgh Collection

This digital collection includes digitized historical resources on the history of

Western Pennsylvania Western Pennsylvania is a region in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Pennsylvania, officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the Unite ...

including texts, videos, maps, images, census records, and archival finding aids. Included are over 25,000 images from multiple photographic collections that originated from a digitization project funded by the

Institute of Museum and Library Services The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an Independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the United States federal government established in 1996. It is the main source of federal support for librar ...

and completed in 2004. The presentation represents a collaboration between Pittsburgh-area libraries, museums, and universities and includes historic material derived from those held by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh; the Library & Archives at the

Heinz History Center The Senator John Heinz History Center, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, is the largest history museum in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States. Named after U.S. Senator H. John Heinz III (1938–1991) from Pennsylvania, it i ...

;

Chatham University Chatham University is a private university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Originally founded as a women's college, it began enrolling men in undergraduate programs in 2015. It enrolls about 2,110 students, including 1,002 undergraduate students and ...

Archives;

Oakmont Oakmont is a borough in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, along the Allegheny River. The population was 6,758 at the 2020 census. It is a suburb in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. The borough is best known for the nearby Oakmont ...

Carnegie Library; Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation; and

Point Park University Point Park University is a private university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Formerly known as Point Park College, the school name was revised in 2004 to reflect the number of graduate programs being offered. In 2021, it had a total undergraduate ...

Archives.

University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions

The University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions is a collaboration between the

and the University Library System that has digitized over 745 monographs in order make them freely available to the public via the internet. Mostly out-of-print titles, the collection includes fully searchable titles from the Pitt Latin American Series; Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies; and Composition, Literacy, and Culture.

Stephen Foster Sketchbook

A digitized and searchable presentation of

Stephen Foster Stephen Collins Foster (July 4, 1826January 13, 1864), known as "the father of American music", was an American composer known primarily for his parlour music, parlour and Folk music, folk music during the Romantic music, Romantic period. He wr ...

's sketchbook that contains 113 leaves with hand-written drafts for 64 different songs, including some unpublished ones, as well as other notations and doodles. The full sketchbook was digitized in

Oxford Oxford () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and non-metropolitan district in Oxfordshire, England, of which it is the county town. The city is home to the University of Oxford, the List of oldest universities in continuou ...

in 2005, with the original stored in a vault at the University of Pittsburgh.

Other digitized collections

D-Scribe includes many other collections of materials and photographs. Major themes include Asian studies, labor and socialist movement, philosophy, atlases, the

Carnegie Museum of Art The Carnegie Museum of Art is an art museum in the Oakland (Pittsburgh), Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The museum was originally known as the Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute and was formerly located ...

Collection of Photographs, and historic Pittsburgh photo archives. Also included are photo archives from various conferences and industries.

Asian studies collections

:The ULS has digitized a variety of titles and artwork held in the university's East Asian Library. These include the Barry Rosensteel Japanese Print Collection;

Tsukioka Kōgyo Tsukioka may refer to: People: * Tsukioka Settei (1710–1787), Japanese ukiyo-e artist *Kōgyo Tsukioka (1869–1927), Japanese artist of the Meiji period * Yoshitoshi Tsukioka (1839–1892), Japanese artist * Yumeji Tsukioka (1922–2017), Japane ...

, The Art of Noh, 1869-1927; and Modern China Studies.

''Free at Last?'' exhibit

:''Free at Last?'' is an exhibit based on a collection of

Allegheny County, Pennsylvania Allegheny County ( ) is a County (United States), county in Pennsylvania, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 1,250,578, making it the List of counties in Pennsylvania, state's second-most populous county, after Philadelp ...

slavery

manumission Manumission, or enfranchisement, is the act of freeing slaves by their owners. Different approaches to manumission were developed, each specific to the time and place of a particular society. Historian Verene Shepherd states that the most wi ...

s discovered in 2007 by staff in the Allegheny County Recorder of Deeds Office that document the widespread existence of slavery in Western Pennsylvania up until the US Civil War period. Staged at the

in Pittsburgh, the exhibit focused on the original documentation coupled with interpretative panels and other artifacts to tell the story of African American slaves in Western Pennsylvania between 1792-1857. Shortly after the close of the exhibit in April 2009, the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh built a virtual exhibit with particular attention focused on the manumission documents.

Industry photo archives

:D-Scribe includes photographic archives from various Western Pennsylvania companies including

American Steel and Wire Company American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, p ...

CONSOL Energy Consol Energy Inc. is an American energy company with interests in coal headquartered in the suburb of Cecil Township, in the Southpointe complex, just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It employs more than 1,600 people. In 2017, Consol form ...

Mining,

H. J. Heinz Company The Kraft Heinz Foods Company, formerly the H. J. Heinz Company and commonly known as Heinz (), is an American food processing company headquartered at One PPG Place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The company was founded by Henry J. Heinz in 186 ...

, Lyon Shorb & Company, Mesta Machine Company, Otto's Suburban Dairy,

Pittsburgh Railways Company Pittsburgh Railways was one of the predecessors of Pittsburgh Regional Transit. It had 666 PCC cars, the third largest fleet in North America (after Toronto (745) and Chicago (683)). It had 68 streetcar routes, of which only three (until April ...

, Rust Engineering Company, and Trimble Company.

Labor and socialist collections

:Digitized repositories of Pittsburgh labor and socialist movements include the A.E. Forbes Communist Collection, American Left Ephemera Collection, the Cartoons of Fred Wright, the ''

UE News ''UE News'' (1939–1952) is the tabloid newspaper of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), is an independent democratic rank-and-file labor union representin ...

'' Photograph Collection, the

Union Switch & Signal Union Switch & Signal (commonly referred to as US&S) was an American company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which focused on railway signaling equipment, systems and services. The company was acquired by Ansaldo STS (from 2015, Hitachi Rail ...

Strike Photograph Collection, Stalinka: the Digital Library of Staliniana, as well as the Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania Labor Legacy project.

Lillian Friedberg Postcard Collection

:A digitized collection of postcards dealing with the

1933 World's Fair A Century of Progress International Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair, was a world's fair held in the city of Chicago, Illinois, United States, from 1933 to 1934. The fair, registered under the Bureau International des Exposit ...

Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

Allied and Nazi leadership propaganda, and French cartoons parodying Nazi leadership.

Philosophy collections

:The ULS has digitized portions of the collected paper of prominent philosophers, including

Frank P. Ramsey Frank Plumpton Ramsey (; 22 February 1903 – 19 January 1930) was a British people, British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26. He was a close friend of ...

and

Wilfrid Sellars Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (; May 20, 1912 – July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States". His work has had a profou ...

Electronic archives and repositories

The D-Scribe Publishing Program has also developed several electronic archives and repositories. These repositories have been developed using Open Access principles, meaning that scholarly content is online, freely available, and immediately accessible to a global audience. Archive content includes both peer-reviewed and non-refereed content; unpublished and published articles (preprints or postprints); conference proceedings; other grey literature, such as white papers, policy papers, and technical reports; multimedia content including audio, video, and images; and primary research data. These online archives serve many needs, such as storing the scholarly works of university authors; preserving information from specific research disciplines; and disseminating new scholarly work quickly, without a lengthy publication process. The content for these archives is drawn from a variety of sources including digitization of ULS print collections and direct author contributions from the worldwide research community.

Metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

for each item published in the repository is searchable through search tools such as Google and Yahoo. Based on

EPrints EPrints is a free and open-source software package for building open access repositories that are compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). It shares many of the features commonly seen in document m ...

, free open source software developed at the

University of Southampton The University of Southampton (abbreviated as ''Soton'' in post-nominal letters) is a public university, public research university in Southampton, England. Southampton is a founding member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universit ...

, these subject-based repositories offer simple Web-based submission interfaces for authors and a variety of tools for readers including

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...

feeds, rich citation export options, and sharing on major social networking sites. Electronic archives created by the D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program include: *

Aphasiology Aphasiology is the study of language impairment usually resulting from brain damage, due to neurovascular accident—hemorrhage, stroke—or associated with a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, including different types of dementia. These spec ...

Archive *

Archive of European Integration The Archive of European Integration (AEI) is an electronic repository and archive for research materials on the topic of European integration and unification. The AEI contains two types of documents: *European Community publications intended for ...

D-Scholarship@Pitt, the Institutional Repository of the University of Pittsburgh
including Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) * Industry Studies Working Papers * Minority Health and Health Equity Archive * PhilSci-Archive, a

preprint In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset versi ...

repository for the field of

Philosophy of Science Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. Amongst its central questions are the difference between science and non-science, the reliability of scientific theories, ...

Electronic journal publishing program

D-Scribe also contains 40 scholarly journals published by the University Library System (ULS), University of Pittsburgh. Through this program, the ULS works with partners around the world to publish

peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

, international

Open Access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

electronic journal An academic journal (or scholarly journal or scientific journal) is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the dissemination, scr ...

s. Services offered include server and software hosting; graphic design services; consultation in editorial workflow management and best practices for electronic publishing; and

ISSN An International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is an eight-digit to uniquely identify a periodical publication (periodical), such as a magazine. The ISSN is especially helpful in distinguishing between serials with the same title. ISSNs a ...

and DOI registration. These services are offered free of charge in an effort to incentivize academic journal editors to publish their research results through free and

for researchers worldwide. The ULS also publishes several subscription-based journals under a delayed open access model. The publishing platform is based on

Open Journal Systems Open Journal Systems, also known as OJS, is an open source and free software for the management of peer-reviewed academic journals, created by the Public Knowledge Project, and released under the GNU General Public License. History Open Journa ...

, free open source software developed by the

Public Knowledge Project The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making thi ...

(PKP). As of 2016, 40 journals are published in this program, including: *''Bolivian Studies Journal'' *''CINEJ Cinema Journal'' *''Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture'' *''EMAJ Emerging Markets Journal'' *''Etudes Ricoeuriennes/ Ricoeur Studies (ERRS)'' *''Excellence in Higher Education'' *''Health, Culture and Society'' *''Hungarian Cultural Studies'' *''International Journal of

Telerehabilitation Telerehabilitation (or e-rehabilitation is the delivery of rehabilitation services over telecommunication networks and the internet. Telerehabilitation allows patients to interact with providers remotely and can be used both to assess patients ...

'' *''

Japanese Language and Literature ''Japanese Language and Literature'' is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal published by The Association of Teachers of Japanese. It was established in 1966 as the ''Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese'', obtaining its curre ...

'' *''Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy'' *'' Journal of Law and Commerce'' *''

Journal of World-Systems Research The ''Journal of World-Systems Research'' (''JWSR'') is a biannual, open access, peer-reviewed academic journal in the field of world-systems analysis, established in 1995 by founding editor Christopher Chase-Dunn at the Institute for World-Syste ...

'' *''

Ledger A ledger is a book or collection of accounts in which accounting transactions are recorded. Each account has: * an opening or brought-forward balance; *a list of transactions, each recorded as either a debit or credit in separate columns (usu ...

,'' a journal on

cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership record ...

and

blockchain The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...

technology, "the first peer-reviewed journal on Bitcoin" *''

Names A name is a term used for identification by an external observer. They can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. The entity identified by a name is called its referent. A person ...

'' *'' Pittsburgh Journal of Technology Law & Policy'' *''

Pittsburgh Tax Review The ''Pittsburgh Tax Review'' is a journal of legal scholarship published by an independent student group at University of Pittsburgh School of Law The University of Pittsburgh School of Law (Pitt Law) is the law school of the University of Pi ...

'' *''Pennsylvania Libraries: Research and Practice'' from the

Pennsylvania Library Association The Pennsylvania Library Association (PaLA) is the professional association for librarians in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania.Soden, Martina. 2022. “Archives.” ''Pennsylvania Library Association Bulletin'' 77 (1): 18. It represents about 2,000 ...

*''

Radical Teacher ''Radical Teacher'' is a socialist, feminist, and anti-racist peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to the theory and practice of education. The journal examines the root causes of inequality and promotes progressive social change in the field ...

'' *''Revista Iberoamericana'', a journal of the literature, literary theory, and literary criticism in

Latin American Spanish The different dialects of the Spanish language spoken in the Americas are distinct from each other, as well as from those varieties spoken in the Iberian Peninsula and the Spanish Mediterranean islands—collectively known as Peninsular Spanish� ...

and Portuguese *''The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies'' *''

University of Pittsburgh Law Review The ''University of Pittsburgh Law Review'' is a journal of legal scholarship edited by an independent student group at University of Pittsburgh School of Law The University of Pittsburgh School of Law (Pitt Law) is the law school of the Unive ...

''.

References

External links

University of Pittsburgh University Library System D-Scribe Digital CollectionHistoric Pittsburgh digital collection at the University of Pittsburgh
{{Authority control American digital libraries Mass digitization Open-access archives University and college academic libraries in the United States University of Pittsburgh Open access publishers Academic journal online publishing platforms Full-text scholarly online databases Library publishing