+ RRVM Resources

The RRVM's collection expands beyond what is on display! Feel free to schedule a time to talk with one of our staff members so they can pull primary sources, photos, annuals, and artifacts out for your research. Call or email us at 940-553-1848 or info@rrvmuseum.org to set up a meeting.

Fees:

• $10.00 per visit will be charged if you require materials to be pulled from the museums archives.
• Museum Member = FREE
• Copies: $1 per page

+ Texas Focused Resources

Bexar Archives: The Bexar Archives are the official Spanish documents that preserve the political, military, economic, and social life of the Spanish province of Texas and the Mexican state of Coahuila y Texas.

Handbook of Texas: A digital state encyclopedia developed by the Texas State Historical Association that is free and accessible on the Internet for students, teachers, scholars, and the general public.

Texas Data Repository: A platform for publishing and archiving datasets (and other data products) created by faculty, staff, and students at Texas higher education institutions.

Texas Digital Archives: The Texas Digital Archive manages, preserves, and facilitates access to the electronic records collections of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, including those transferred by state agencies or digitized by the State Archives. All records visible in this portal are unrestricted and available for public use.

Texas Historical Commission YouTube: THC has many short-form historical videos available that make education fun and accessible for classrooms.

Texas State Library & Archives Commission: Preserves and documents the shared heritage and culture of Texas by identifying, collecting, and making available the official archival records of Texas government.

The Portal to Texas History: A gateway to rare, historical, and primary source materials from or about Texas.

+ History Resources

Chronicling America: Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1777-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.

Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery: A mass collaboration project that brings together the findings, field notes, site maps, and other information of archaeological fieldwork on slaves and slavery throughout the Atlantic World.

Digital Library on American Slavery: The Digital Library on American Slavery (DLAS) brings together digital projects focused on race and slavery in the American South.

Documenting the American South: Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital library that provides digitized images of various primary sources related to southern history, literature, and culture.

Early American Sources: Early American Sources makes researching easier than ever in this digital age. Our mission is to connect scholars of all levels to primary sources of the Americas from 1500 to 1900. We offer information on archives and research libraries that hold collections of early American materials and provide links to online resources that specialize in the early Americas.

Founders Online: A collaborative project between the National Archives and Records Administration and various university presses, Founders Online provides text-searchable transcriptions of over 185,000 documents. Most of these records come from the papers of America’s leading early statesmen, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. Each document is annotated to provide the reader with historical context, as well as further reading suggestions.

Google News Archive: A list of U.S. and foreign digitized newspapers, arranged alphabetically by title. Coverage varies widely.

Historic Indentures: An online database that describes and digitizes thousands of indentures, deeds, and other early American documents related to land, property, and financial investments. The items in this collection stem mostly from the Philadelphia region, but much of early America is well represented.

Indigenous Digital Archive: The Indigenous Digital Archive (IDA) has collected and annotated over 500,000 documents from the 19th and 20th centuries related to Indian Boarding Schools in the United States.

Indigenous Digital Archive Treaty Explorer: The Indigenous Digital Archive Treaty Explorer provides free online access to the 374 ratified Indian treaties made between the United States and various indigenous peoples held at the National Archives and Records Administration.

Magazine of Early American Datasets: an online repository of datasets compiled by historians of early North America.

Massachusetts Historical Society: Several of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s collections have been digitized and made freely available online. Subject strengths include the American Revolution, slavery and abolition, and the American Civil War.

Native Northeast Portal: The Native Northeast Portal is a digitization project that re-inscribes indigeneity into the historical record. It provides access to primary source materials about or created by indigenous peoples of the northeastern United States. Thousands of records are available and are presented with historical context.

New-York Historical Society - Digital Collections: This site presents selections from the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library’s holdings, featuring highlights from the collections of paintings, drawings, photographs, manuscripts, broadsides, maps, and other materials that reveal the depth and breadth of over two centuries of collecting.

Race & Slavery Petition Project: A searchable database of detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color. Designed as a tool for scholars, historians, teachers, students, genealogists, and interested citizens, the site provides access to information gathered and analyzed over an eighteen-year period from petitions to southern legislatures and country courts filed between 1775 and 1867 in the fifteen slaveholding states in the United States and the District of Columbia.

Slave Societies Digital Archive: Digitized access to endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies across the world, including the Americas. It encompasses more than 700,000 digital images of documents and volumes from the 16th to 20th centuries and documents the lives of millions of individuals. Although focused on the history of Africans in the Atlantic World, it provides insights into the indigenous, European, and Asian

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History: Database containing a portion of the museum’s 10,655,186 specimen records.

The Inclusive Historian’s Handbook: This dynamic reference source supports inclusive and equity-focused historical work in public settings by sharing a knowledge base that invites more people to engage in history projects. This handbook provides concrete examples of how to make history work more relevant. It centers on equity, inclusivity, diversity, and public service while offering accessible windows into the many ways public historians work.

Unknown No Longer: A project started by the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, Unknown No Longer makes accessible biographical details of enslaved Virginians from various unpublished historical records. Since 2019, Unknown No Longer has been hosted by the Virginia Untold portal operated by the Library of Virginia. World History Encyclopedia: A non-profit organization publishing the world's most-read history encyclopedia.

+ Digital Library Collections

Digital Public Library of America: Discover 44,255,644 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States.

Huntington Digital Library: The Huntington Digital Library is the online database of Huntington Library digitized materials. It aims to support the research needs of Huntington readers and staff and to share digitized resources with a broader community. New content is regularly added, yet only a fraction of the Huntington Library’s more than eleven million items is available in digitized form.

Library of Congress: The largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.

Met Publications: An online portal to The Metropolitan Museum of Art's comprehensive art publishing program. It features over 1700 titles, including books, guides, Bulletins and Journals from the last six decades. The full contents of over 1400 out-of-print titles may be read online, searched, or downloaded as a PDF for free. Publications still in-print may be previewed and fully searched online through a link to Google Books.

Newberry Library: Explore more than 1 million digitized items including manuscripts, maps, books, photographs, artworks, & other rare & unique materials from the collections of the Newberry, Chicago's independent research library since 1887.

New York Public Library Digital Collection: A living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.

Primeros Libros de Las Americas: A collaborate project that seeks to digitized all known publications printed in the Americas during the 16th century. A list of surviving titles is available here.

Project Gutenberg: An online library of free eBooks. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.

William L. Clements Library Digitized Collections: One of North America’s premier research libraries, the University of Michigan’s William L. Clements Library provides free digital access to some of its treasured early American sources.

+ Fine Art Resources

Artsy: Artsy is the world's largest online art marketplace. Browse over 1 million artworks by iconic and emerging artists from 4000+ galleries and top auction houses.

Bibliography of the History of Art: European and American visual arts material including articles from over 1,200 journals. These citation databases, searchable together, cover material published between 1975 and 2007.

Conservation & Art Materials Encyclopedia Online: A database that compiles, defines, and disseminates technical information on the distinct collection of terms, materials, and techniques used in the fields of art conservation and historic preservation.

The Fashion and Race Database: The goal for the database is to center and amplify the voices of those who have been racialized (and thus marginalized) in fashion, illuminate under-examined histories and address racism throughout the fashion system.

Free Music Archive: Your #1 resource for free music and royalty-free music.

Getty Research Portal: Access digitized art history publications, rare books, and related literature.

The Guggenheim Collection: Featuring over 1,700 artworks by more than 625 artists, the Collection Online presents a searchable database of selected artworks from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection of approximately 8,000 artworks.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Discover the story of art and global culture through The Met collection.

The Met Collection: The Met presents over 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy.

The MOMA Collection: Our evolving collection contains almost 200,000 works of modern and contemporary art. More than 91,000 works are currently available online.

National Gallery of Art Collection: Study the details of your favorite works or find something you’ve never seen before. Discover new artists—or new genres—and stay up to date on the nation’s collection.

National Portrait Gallery Collection Archive: The images of the National Portrait Gallery collection objects are part of Smithsonian Open Access. This means you are free to download, transform, and share thousands of portraits for any purpose, for free, without asking permission from the National Portrait Gallery. Smithsonian Open Access invites you to discover a world where you can learn, research, explore, and create in ways you couldn’t before.

Poetry Foundation: An independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.

+ Science Resources

Astrophysics Data System: A digital library portal for researchers in astronomy and physics.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library: The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research: ICPSR advances and expands social and behavioral research, acting as a global leader in data stewardship and providing rich data resources and responsive educational opportunities for present and future generations.

National Academies Press: The National Academies Press (NAP) publishes the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative, independently-researched information on important matters in science and health policy.

ResearchGate: With 135+ million publication pages, 20+ million researchers and 1+ million questions, this is where everyone can access science.

Science.gov: Science.gov searches over 60 databases and over 2,200 scientific websites to provide users with access to more than 200 million pages of authoritative federal science information including research and development results.

ScienceOpen: A freely accessible search and discovery platform that puts research in context.

UT Libraries' Map Collection: The PCL Map Collection includes more than 250,000 maps.

WorldWideScience.org: A global science gateway comprised of national and international scientific databases and portals. WWS accelerates scientific discovery and progress by providing one-stop searching of databases from around the world.

+ Social Science Resources

Human Rights Research Databases: A directory of publicly available databases and online platforms that HURIDOCS has supported in one way or another over the years. Each resource listed here is a reliable source of human rights information, such as evidence, reports, policy and law.

National Security Archive: Founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy, the National Security Archive combines a unique range of functions: investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents, leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, public interest law firm defending and expanding public access to government information, global advocate of open government, and indexer and publisher of former secrets.

PhilPapers: A comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophy maintained by the community of philosophers. Our index currently contains 2,601,622 entries categorized in 5,686 categories.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: SEP organizes scholars from around the world in philosophy and related disciplines to create and maintain an up-to-date reference work.

+ Multidisciplinary Databases

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine: One of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources, e.g. journal articles, preprints, digital collections, images/videos or research data.

CORE: 214,595,318 open access articles collected from 10,264 data providers around the world.

Directory of Open Access Journals: A community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed. All data is freely available.

Education Resources Information Center: A comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information.

Encyclopedia Britannica: The world standard in knowledge since 1768.

Europeana Collections: We transform the world with culture! We want to build on Europe’s rich heritage and make it easier for people to use, whether for work, for learning or just for fun.

Explore Smithsonian: We invite you to explore your interests, discover something new, or spark a memory. Our vast collections and the research surrounding them are available to you online on a kaleidoscope of topics—from art to zoology.

GETTY Library Catalogue: The Getty Library's resources across a broad range of physical and digital formats in a single search.

Google Scholar: A freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.

Harvard Digital Collection: Harvard Digital Collections provides free, public access to more than 6 million objects digitized from our collections - from ancient art to modern manuscripts and audio visual materials.

Independent Voices: An open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.

Intenet Archive: A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

JSTOR: Provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. Create a free account to have access to 100 articles a month.

Mark E. Mitchell Collection of African American History: The Mark E. Mitchell Collection of African American History is one of the nation’s largest private collections of African American artifacts, manuscripts, ephemera, and material objects. It consists of 5,000 unique items spanning 500 years.

Microsoft Academic: Microsoft Academic (MA) employs advances in machine learning, semantic inference and knowledge discovery to help you explore scholarly information in more powerful ways than ever before.

The National Archives: The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation's record keeper.

Oxford University Press Blog: Since 2005, the talented authors, staff, and friends of Oxford University Press provide daily commentary on nearly every subject under the sun, from philosophy to literature to economics. OUPblog is a source like no other on the blogosphere for learning, understanding and reflection, providing academic insights for the thinking world.

RefSeek.com: A web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches more than five billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.

Smithsonian Collections: Search over 17.1 million records of museum objects, archives and library materials including more than 6.5 million online images, audio & videos and blog posts.

The Smithsonian Institution Archives: Official records of the Smithsonian, as well as personal papers, special collections, records of professional societies, and oral/video histories relating to the history of the Smithsonian.

The University of Florida Digital Collections: More than 300 outstanding digital collections, containing over 14 million pages, covering over 78 thousand subjects in rare books, manuscripts, antique maps, children's literature, newspapers, theses and dissertations, data sets, photographs, oral histories, and more for permanent access and preservation.

Wikipedia: An online free content encyclopedia project helping create a world in which everyone can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

Yale University Digital Collections: A collection of multiple databases available through Yale’s libraries.

+ Genealogy Resources

African American Online Genealogy Records: These are genealogy links to African American online databases and indexes that may include birth records, marriage records, death records, biographies, cemeteries, censuses, histories, immigration records, land records, military records, newspapers, obituaries, or probate records.

Bureau of Land Management General Land Office Records: Federal land conveyance records for the Public Land States, including image access to more than five million Federal land title records issued between 1788 and the present. The also has images of survey plats and field notes, land status records, and control document index records.

CASTLE GARDEN: America's First Immigration Center: A free database developed and funded by The Battery Conservancy. It contains and makes available eleven million records of immigrants who arrived at the Port of New York from 1820 - 1892.

Census Records: A list of resources to help you find census records pertaining to your family.

Contact Information for State Archives: Contact information for state archives and historical societies as of November, 2013

Cyndi’s List: A comprehensive, categorized & cross-referenced list of links that point you to genealogical research sites online.

Ellis Island Passenger Search: 65 million records of passengers arriving to the Port of New York from 1820 to 1957

FamilySearch.org: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provides FamilySearch free of charge to everyone, regardless of tradition, culture, or religious affiliation. FamilySearch resources help millions of people around the world discover their heritage and connect with family members.

Find a Grave: The world’s largest gravesite collection. Discover where your family has been laid to rest.

How to Preserve Family Papers and Photographs: List of sites with preservation tips for preserving family records.

Immigration Records: Immigration records are not available online. This site provides information on how to access immigration records on microfilm.

JewishGen: The global home for Jewish Genealogy.

List of Genealogy and Local History Acquisition Sources: Developed to serve as a resource for acquiring genealogy and local history publications and includes publishers and bookstores

Military Record Archive: Search records by branch, war/conflict, or by topic.

National Archives Genealogy Resource Page: A great starting point for beginning your genealogical journey.

Texas Gravestone Photography Project, Wilbarger County: Browse gravestone records by cemetery.

Texas Churches: Comprehensive list of Texas Christian churches and their contact information.

Where to Write for Vital Records: CDC provides a comprehensive list of where to access vital records for U.S. States and Territories

Wilbarger County Information: This site will help you in your search for records regarding family in Wilbarger County.

+ Artifact Identification

• Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act

• The Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979

• What should I do if I find an artifact?

• How Can I Get My Artifact Identified?

• Find Your State Archaeologist

• Find an archaeology graduate program near you

Historic Artifact Handbook: The intent of this handbook is to provide site recorders with little or no background in historic artifact identification sufficient information so that they can provide consistent descriptive information about the artifacts and site features they are observing.

HISTORIC ARTIFACT IDENTIFICATION GUIDE: Slideshow to help identify the following: Tin cans, glass bottles/containers, nails and fasteners, blasting cap tins, ceramic, spent firearm cartriddges, bricks, silver, lanterns and lamps

Historic Glass Bottle Identification & Information: Website Goals: To enable the user to answer two primary questions about most utilitarian bottles and jars produced in the United States (and Canada) between the late 1700s and 1950s.

Jim Rock Historic Can Collection: This collection contains images of historic cans assembled by Jim Rock (1942-2010) over his career as an archaeologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Yreka, CA. He compiled information and provided typologies and dating techniques, including examination of seams, closures, openings, materials composition, etc. that have enabled archaeologists and historians to better interpret historical archaeological sites.

Native American Art Apraisal: ISA Accredited and IRS Qualified art appraisers and advisers specializing in: artifacts, antiques, baskets, beadwork, blankets, bultos, carvings, ephemera, ex-votos, jewelry, kachinas / katsinas, paintings, photographs, pottery, prints, retablos, rugs, santos, sculptures, textiles, and weavings.

Native American Artifact Authentication: Comprehensive Indian Artifact Authentication Service for those wishing to determine the authenticity of their Native American Artifacts. The cost of this evaluation service is $25.00 per artifact plus $10.00 return shipping. An official IAGA Certificate of Authenticity will be issued for each artifact deemed authentic.

National Pipe Archive: a guide to our collections and to make some of the more significant elements of it available online. In particular, these pages are intended to help you with all your pipe related queries and to provide a 'one stop shop' for anyone trying to identify pipes or prepare a report on excavated material. Although the bulk of our holdings relate to the clay tobacco pipe industry, our extensive collections also include pipes made of all materials - briar, porcelain, metal etc. - as well as other tobacco and smoking related ephemera.

Projectile Point Identification Guide: Comprehensive online identification guide. In addition to all points general distributions shown, most points have detailed distribution descriptions, so you know where points are commonly found. Every point is searchable nationally, regionally, and by specific state which gives you the flexibility to identify points.