The Samuel J. May Anti‐slavery Collection provides free access to a collection of pamphlets covering the history of the American anti‐slavery movement. The Reverend Samuel J. May was an American abolitionist and a close friend of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell University's first president. May served as a general agent and secretary of the Massachusetts Anti‐Slavery Society and his house was a station on the Underground Railroad. In 1870 May donated his substantial collection of anti‐slavery materials to the Cornell University Library. The collection continued to grow as other abolitionists in the USA and Great Britain contributed their documents. It now resides in Cornell's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, and comprises over 10,000 pamphlets, leaflets, broadsides, newsletters of local and regional anti‐slavery societies, sermons, essays, and arguments for and against slavery. Funded by a grant in 1999 from the “Save America's Treasures” initiative, the pamphlets were digitized and made available for electronic searching on the internet.
The materials can be accessed through browsing or searching. Browsing presents a hyperlinked bibliography of all works organized by author, title, date, or image. The searching option presents a variety of ways to search the full‐text by keyword. The basic search allows a maximum of three words or phrases that can be combined to match in specific areas of the text. Multiple words are searched as phrases, though, so the Boolean search option provides more flexibility. Bibliographic searches can be performed on author, title, or date fields. A unique feature is the proximity search that looks for terms based on whether they occur within a specified distance of each other. Search histories are retained for the session, which is useful for heavy users.
Search results are returned in an alphabetized list, according to author. Options include checking the Results Detail page to see the page numbers where the term occurs, viewing the bibliographic record, viewing the first page, or adding the book to the Bookbag. All options provide hyperlinks to the item that can then be browsed page‐by‐page or searched for terms within that particular item. One can choose to view the page images of the book (the default) or to view the plain text in order to save it, cut and paste, and use the Find feature on web browsers to locate a word on a page. The text can be printed page‐by‐page, with print size being the same as view size. Some entries may not indicate proper diacritics, but a Unicode version scheduled for summer 2006 should fix this problem. Text can also be e‐mailed to an address or downloaded to a computer, but the item must first be placed in the Bookbag. A unique feature of the site, the Bookbag holds items for the duration of the search session and allows collective searches of its contents.
The documents, dated from 1704 to 1942, provide a wealth of information on the lives of slaves in the USA and the West Indies, the slave trade, slavery during the Civil War and the emancipation of slaves. Accompanying the electronic documents are links to similar anti‐slavery collections, and a visual record of the conservation process. The site is easily navigated, although the download speed for the page images will depend heavily on the individual internet connection. Many of the items are unavailable elsewhere making this a valuable resource for researchers. This site is highly recommended for all libraries.
