Nineteenth-Century American Trade Cards is a project to catalog, digitize, and display through VIA 1,000 advertising trade cards selected from the Historical Collections at the Baker Library. As an indicator of consumer habits, social values, and marketing techniques, trade cards are of interest to scholars of business history, American studies, graphic design and printing history, and social and cultural history.
Trade cards play a unique role in American social and cultural history.
A selection of trade cards from the project is currently on display in A New and Wonderful Invention - The Nineteenth Century American Trade Card , an exhibition organized by the Historical Collections Department of Baker Library. The Hedda Morrison Photographs of China is a project to provide access through VIA to a photographic collection from Harvard Yenching Library. Nearly 4,800 photographs made by German photographer Hedda Morrison are now being catalogued and digitized for teaching and research in the areas of East Asian studies, history, architecture, fine arts, sociology, religion and pop culture. Taken between 1933 and 1946, the collection documents the architecture, streetscapes, clothing, religious practices and crafts that in many cases have all but disappeared from modern China. Geodesy is a collaborative project among the Harvard Map Collection, the HCL Environmental Information Center, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and LDI to create a system for the discovery, analysis, and mapping of geospatial data.