We are happy to announce that the Library Company of Philadelphia has published a new web portal to provide better access to our earliest institutional history, thanks to the NEH-funded Library Company Papers Project.

You can access newly digitized materials, find research tools, and read other contextual information at https://librarycompany.org/librarycompanypapersproject/

As you may recall, the Papers Project was a three-year effort to comprehensively review, process, and digitize the Library Company’s institutional records from its founding in 1731 through 1881 – our first 150 years.

Image: Order Book, Volume 117, Library Company of Philadelphia records (MSS00270).

As part of the project, we published a new finding aid for the Library Company records (MSS00270), and digitized tens of thousands of pages of records including board minutes, shareholder records, financial records, collection records, scrapbooks, and much more. These digitized materials are now available in the Library Company’s Digital Library and in the Internet Archive. The new portal also hosts essays about the Library Company’s first shareholders, first order of books in 1732, and other topics, too.

The NEH-funded project concludes just in time for this year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and the Library Company’s 300th anniversary in 2031.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this blog post do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.