With the semester winding down, some of our readers might find time over the summer to travel and enjoy the company of people from different cultures. For those who don’t have that opportunity, several projects allow readers to experience other countries and life from a variety of perspectives without the need to leave their home or office.
Readers might be interested in learning about the experiences of British and American women who documented their own trips around the globe. Containing 162 digitized versions of diaries from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University and a small amount of associated material, the Women’s Travel Diaries project provides a glimpse into the past and how our predecessors experienced different cultures and the experience of travel.
For those who wish to learn about life in the past, the Victorian Women Writers Project offers material in a variety of genres by lesser-known authors. Part of the Indiana University Digital Library Program, the project paused in 2003 but has been restarted and now provides access to writings in English by women in the 19th century.
Finally, readers who prefer their travel with a dose of humor may wish to visit the Mark Twain Project Online and enjoy Roughing It or other works by Twain. The project offers not only many of Twain’s texts but includes exhaustive notes by scholars and letters and other documents.
As always, if you have questions about scholarly communication at any time of the year or would like to make your materials more readily available, it is often possible to place pre-prints or published articles and other materials in our institutional repository ISU ReD. If you wish to discuss this further, please contact Milner Library’s Scholarly Communication Team at isured@ilstu.edu.
