Many museums, libraries, universities, and other institutions have digitized historically and culturally significant archival documents to promote exploration and research. Many of these collections emphasize images, text, oral histories, maps, or other media; some offer a mix of all types. All of these are free to search, no authentication, membership, or login required.

• dp.la the Digital Public Library of America facilitates searching across several digitized collections with a single search
• NYPL digital collections consists of over 800,000 digitized objects from the NYPL’s vast collection
• Africana Age from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture documents African & African Diaspora transformations throughout the 20th century; essays, images, video, & maps
• African-American History collections manuscripts, images, and oral histories from the archives of the Library of Congress
• Historic Brooklyn Photographs from the Brooklyn Public Library
• African-American Migration Experience images, texts, and maps that document the African-American migration experience from the 1500s to the present
• Brooklyn Eagle, Brooklyn’s daily newspaper from 1841-1955
• NYPL map warper is an interactive tool that permits users to browse all digitized maps in the NYPL collection as well as invites citizen cartographers to georectify historic maps onto the NYC contemporary street grid
• The Black World: Research Tools is a list of links to other collections compiled by NYPL
• The Internet Archive provides free access to digitized historical collections of texts, images, and other media