Digital PUL

A Guide for Curators and the Curious

Digital PUL (DPUL) is a collections showcase, that provides a user-friendly interface for our ever-growing number of thematic digital collections and exhibitions. This guide will teach you how to build a collection in DPUL with content drawn from our Digital Repository (Figgy) by utilizing a variety of features to customize metadata display, highlight and organize specific items, and build rich informational pages.

Photographs by Elizabeth Menzies

Shakespeare to Morrison

At Princeton University

The Freedom Rides and Selma to Montgomery Marches: Selections from the John Doar Papers

Alchemy and the Ripley Scrolls 1400-1700

Milberg Gallery Exhibition, October 8th, 2021 - December 5th, 2021

Piranesi on the Page tells the story of the book as the centerpiece of Piranesi’s artistic production. What did these volumes mean to him, who did they bring into his world, and how can the process of making them be understood throughout his career? As the central thread that connects all spheres of his enormous ambition, Piranesi’s books reveal how the artist became the foremost printmaker in eighteenth-century Europe.

British Color Plate Books 1776-1868 from the collection of Leonard L. Milberg, Class of 1953

Showcasing selected items from the collection of Leonard L. Milberg, In Pursuit of the Picturesque includes nearly 40 large books with colorful, detailed imagery from the British Empire at the turn of the 19th century. The exhibition will open at the Ellen and Leonard Milberg Gallery, located in the Firestone Library lobby, on Jan. 22, 2020.

Documenting Global Activism, 1933 to 2021

Milberg Gallery Exhibition, September 12th, 2019 - December 15th, 2019

Gutenberg’s invention of typography eventually revolutionized the world of text production and distribution. But the printing craft did not produce an immediate explosion. The first two decades of European printing have a pace of their own, and these years contain long overlooked mysteries, which stood in the shadow of such famous monuments as the Gutenberg Bible and the 1457 Mainz Psalter.

Milberg Gallery Exhibition, March 6th, 2019 - June 23rd, 2019

Welcome Additions: Selected Acquisitions 2012-18 is our inaugural exhibition in the new Ellen and Leonard Milberg exhibition gallery. It is a retrospective of recent additions to our special collections within the Cotsen Children’s Library, East Asian Library, Graphic Arts, Manuscripts, Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Numismatics, Public Policy Papers, Rare Books, Scheide Library, University Archives, and Western Americana Collection.

Codices, Papyri and Pots from the Collections of Princeton University Library and Its Collaborators.

Digitized Rare Printed Books from Princeton University Library and Its Collaborators

A selection of digitized rarities

Collected over the years for a variety of reasons, the Library's annotated books today provide evidence not only for historians of reading but also for anyone interested in how and why the mentalité of an era was formed. "Annotated printed books in Firestone Library ... show just how richly rewarding it can be to examine the sparks that texts struck off from early readers. The study of printed books cannot be limited to their printed contents." -- Prof. Anthony Grafton.

This exhibition highlights research projects completed by the students of Archiving the American West (HIS 431), an experimental course offered at Princeton in Spring 2021 and Spring 2022. Each student researched an under-catalogued item within Princeton's Collections of the American West and wrote a capstone essay exploring its provenance, historical significance, and further research potential.

Transforming rare texts into accessible digital resources

The Badakhshan Manuscript Digitization Project consists of roughly 65 original, privately held genealogical histories (nasab-namahs) from Badakhshan in Tajikistan and Afghanistan dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries. It is the first effort to make available the history of genealogical documentation in the Ismaili community.

Early Explorations of Psychology and Neurology in Princeton’s Collections

A Princeton Collaboration with the Jewish Theological Seminary

The Geniza Collection represents a substantial portion of some 300,000 items "discovered" in the late 19th century in the Cairo Geniza (a Hebrew word meaning "storeroom") of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in the old city of Cairo (Al-Fusṭāṭ). The Cairo Geniza fragments — which span more than a millennium — were consigned to the storeroom because damaged or worn-out religious texts and unneeded old documents could not be thrown away if they contained the name of God."

A Digital Collection of Bird Imagery

"Capturing Feathers" is an online exhibition, focusing on bird imagery found throughout the Digital Repository at Princeton University Library. Created by the Digital Imaging Studio Team at Princeton University Library and inspired by the recently digitized personal journals of ornithologist Charles H. Rogers (1888-1977).

The Cairo Geniza consists of an estimated 400,000 literary and documentary fragments that range in provenance from the tenth through the twentieth centuries. Over the course of a millennium, successive generations of the Jewish community in Cairo discarded these texts in sacred burial chambers (genizōt) so as to avoid improper disposal of the written names of God. Given its temporal breadth, the documentary Cairo Geniza references a plethora of monetary systems that once spanned the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. At the Princeton Geniza Lab we have begun to track these numismatic data due to their advantages in dating fragments via the production history of coinage. By cross-referencing such data it becomes possible to estimate the earliest or latest year(s) in which a text was recorded– even when a tattered paper fragment bears but a single word or monetary symbol. This exhibition will mark the culmination of our efforts toward building a public-facing glossary that enables researchers to implement this methodology. The eclectic range of coins and documents on display will underscores the explanatory potential of numismatics for historical inquiry and, in turn, the stakes of reconstructing the "material worlds" of the Cairo Geniza.

These photographs document the multiple forms of visual resistance that emerged during the early months of protest (roughly from October to December 2019), from graffiti to larger-scale interventions, many of which were subsequently modified or destroyed.

Digitized resources from the holdings

This site hosts digital surrogates of materials held in the Cotsen Children's Library, a research collection of illustrated children's books, manuscripts, original artwork, prints, and educational toys in over forty languages from the 15th century to the present day. The Cotsen Children's Library was a gift of Lloyd E. Cotsen '50, charter trustee emeritus.

Alternative Approaches to the Letter X in Alphabet Books

A Digital Repository of Jacques Derrida's Teaching Notes

This page links to digitizations of Derrida's seminar notes from 1958-2003. These little-studied documents trace Derrida's trajectory as a philosopher, but especially as a teacher of philosophy. In his seminars, Derrida transmits his thought otherwise than in his writings, with a concern to elucidate difficult concepts, to help students follow him, but also do experiment and trace new paths in the unfolding of deconstruction.

Step by Step: The March Towards Equal Employment Opportunity

Companion to the exhibition jointly developed by Princeton University Library and the Industrial Relations Section--showcasing efforts made by governments and organizations over the last 80 years.

"Dissidents and Activists in Sri Lanka, 1960s to 1990s" is a collection of ephemera curated by the American Institute for Lankan Studies, hosted by PUL, and federated for discovery by the South Asia Open Archives.

Over the past several years, Princeton University Library (PUL) has collected several ledger books and related materials that document free African-American communities in the early 19th century and post-emancipation African-American communities from the Reconstruction period and into the late 19th century.

A 2019 digital initiative, supplementing the digital Islamic Manuscripts collection that scholars can already access in DPUL.

Front and End Matter (Tables of contents, Indexes, etc.) from items in the East Asian Library

Beginning with the industrial revolution in Great Britain, engineering objects and systems have shaped our modern world. The works included in this collection support the teaching and research conducted by students enrolled in the course Engineering in the Modern World.

A Curated Collection that highlights Albert Einstein's relationships with the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and the Princeton University Press.

The Guatemala News and Information Bureau (GNIB) was an activist and solidarity group based in San Francisco, California, created in 1978 to support and inform the public about Guatemalan movements for peace and justice, indigenous rights, and labor rights.

Grounds and Buildings Series

The Grounds and Buildings Series of the Historical Photograph Collection contains photographs of the grounds and buildings owned by Princeton University. The photographs date from the late 1850s to the present, with the bulk of the photographs dating from the 1870s to the 1940s.

The Promise of the Public Park

Featuring a small subset of Princeton University Library items related to the rise of public parks, gardens and picnics in 19th century America, this collection aims to celebrate the utopian promise of the urban parks movement and encourages viewers to consider what more can be done to meet that promise.

The Indigenous Studies digital portal serves as a landing page for some 400 digitized manuscripts, books, prints, maps, and artifacts related to the Indigenous cultures of North America, including items related to the Lunaapeewak peoples on whose ancestral lands sits the campus of Princeton University.

This collection contains digital images of protest signs created in various cities across Spain during the Indignados/15M protest movement of 2011.

Subway Posters

Records of Resistance from the Princeton University Library

Photographs from the John Doar Papers