About our digital collections
Founded by Herbert Hoover in 1919, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives (HILA) is dedicated to documenting war, revolution, and peace in the 20th and 21st centuries. With nearly one million volumes and more than 6,000 archival collections from 171 countries, Hoover supports a vibrant community of scholars and a broad public interested in the meaning and role of history.
The Hoover Institution Library & Archives has received funding to develop an ambitious new digitization program, with an emphasis on digitizing whole collections to uniform standards. The digital collections include born-digital materials as well as digitized images and sound and moving-image files. Objects already available via digitalcollections.hoover.org will be migrated to this site in order to ensure a consistent research experience. For more on this, see the Digital Collections page on the HILA website.
Using this site
Read the digital story
We've created a digital story highlighting the features of the new site. Take a look:
About the beta release
This site is in beta, which means we’re releasing a developing product in public for our users. It is a work in progress, and subject to change based on feedback and testing. While we continue to build out the site, please remember:
- We are in the process of migrating content from our existing digital collections platform to this site. Currently, this site contains only content digitized since March 2021. Until the migration process is complete, you may need to search both sites to find what you're looking for.
- If you are sharing a resource from this site, please use the permalink provided on each object page instead of copying the address from your browser URL bar.
- If you experience a problem with the site or would like to share feedback, please contact us by filling out the feedback form or sending us an email.
This site is part of HILA's project to build a new group of systems intended to unify description of digital and physical collection materials, allow researchers to request access to collection materials, and assist with long-term preservation of our digital collections. We thank you for your patience during this process.
Access restrictions
Online access to some of the objects in our collections is restricted due to copyright, contractual obligations, or privacy or ethical considerations. Within the search results on this site, these objects appear with the label “Restricted access.” There are several levels of access restriction:
- Accessible to all users (no restrictions)
- Accessible to users with Stanford credentials
- Accessible within the HILA onsite reading room
- Accessible to individual approved users
The access restriction status for each object is listed prominently on the object page. All objects are visible in search results by default, regardless of access restriction.
Some objects are accessible online but cannot be downloaded for reuse due to copyright or access restrictions. Where this is the case, the download buttons are disabled.
Rights and reusability
Researchers, publishers, and other users of any work from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives collections are responsible for compliance with copyright law. The Hoover Institution Library & Archives and Stanford University wish to receive notifications of alleged copyright infringement on this website. If you are a rights holder and believe that our inclusion of certain material on this website violates your rights, please contact Stanford University to report alleged copyright infringement.
Full-text transcription
Searchable transcriptions on this site are generated through automatic optical character recognition (OCR) or automatic speech recognition. They can be searched using the full-text option on the search page (enabled by default) or using the search-within option on the object pages. They can also be downloaded as text files from the object pages. These transcriptions may not be manually corrected prior to publication, and may vary in accuracy depending on the format, condition, language, script, font, and layout of the originals. They are intended to improve the discoverability of our collections and should not be used on their own in research. We do not currently have a mechanism for accepting transcription corrections.
Interoperability
Hoover Digital Collections complies with the standards of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). A IIIF manifest for each digital object can be accessed from the object page. Metadata from Hoover Digital Collections can also be harvested via OAI-PMH, according to our published schema.
Other resources
A number of HILA collections have been digitized through partnerships with private sector companies or cultural institutions. These collections are not available on Digital Collections or Digital Collections 2. A full listing of the collections and how to access them can be found on our Digital Collections page under "Special Digitization Projects".
Contact us
If your question isn't answered on this page, don't hesitate to contact us. If you are asking about a specific object, please include the URL of the object in your message, or use the contact form on the object page. For takedown requests, please follow the instructions for reporting an infringement.
Site credits
The enduring access of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives' Digital Collections site is supported in part by the Hoover Board of Overseers and the Digital First Initiative fund.