1 June 2026
Built by the UChicago Library and the Division of the Arts and Humanities, UChicagoNode is designed to give researchers and the public a single hub to discover a wide range of digital collections through a unified, open-access platform.
At launch, UChicagoNode offers more than 4,000 digital files from five collections: the Mapping Chicagoland Collection; the Guerrilla Television Network; the Modern Bengali Song Collection; the Middle East Photograph Archive; and the Social Scientists Map Chicago Collection.
Over the next several years, UChicagoNode is expected to grow to support petabyte-scale data, including hundreds of thousands of files from more than 200 collections. It now features digitized photos, maps, videos and sheet music, and will soon add manuscripts, lithographs and audio recordings. UChicagoNode will continue to grow as researchers contribute new collections and will provide a long-term home for content created by UChicago faculty for research and teaching.
It will also offer records of collections from across campus, including those from the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, and content contributed by UChicago’s project partners.
“What makes UChicagoNode so powerful is how it facilitates exploration across multi-media content in ways that reward both the expert and the newcomer,” said Hoyt Long, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations.
“Every object is encoded with rich metadata that allows users to quickly navigate their way to specific items in a collection while also seeing how each item is related to the collection as a whole. UChicagoNode brings our digital collections to life in ways that will make it an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike, opening up new paths into the archive.”
Providing access to information about collections at scale also opens collections as data, making them newly available to quantitative methods of study.
To enable such research, the UChicago team has enriched maps in UChicagoNode with georeferencing data, so that researchers can overlay the historic maps they find in UChicagoNode on OpenStreetMap, a contemporary map of the same location. For example, students and scholars interested in the Great Chicago Fire can type “fire” into UChicagoNode’s single search box and discover maps of the area that was burned during this landmark historic event. They can then view the overlap of that map with a current map of Chicago using the Allmaps viewer embedded within UChicagoNode to see how the burned areas have developed.
Members of the public as well as scholars can make other fascinating discoveries about arts, culture and history using UChicagoNode. A single search for “Chicago politics” points visitors to 55 videos from the Guerrilla TV collection on topics such as activists’ efforts to keep Cook County Hospital open or life in the Cabrini Green housing project.
Schoolteachers and students can also browse 19th-century photos of the Middle East, discovering the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem; the Hagia Sophia; the Pyramids, Sphinx and Temple at Giza; and the White Mosque in Ramla.
Researchers on UChicagoNode will be able to use georeferencing to see how historic maps of the burned area of Chicago compare to the modern city. This map was digitized as part of the Mapping Chicagoland Project partnership between the UChicago Library, the Chicago History Museum and the Newberry Library.
UChicagoNode currently includes two map collections. This one from 1920 titled “Map of Chicago showing local communities with 1920 population” is from the Mapping Chicagoland Project, a partnership between UChicago Library, the Chicago History Museum and the Newberry Library.
“The University of Chicago Library is committed to opening its collections, to ensure persistent access to scholarship and to contribute to a global knowledge environment that is open, accessible and equitable,” said Torsten Reimer, University librarian and dean of the Library. “UChicagoNode now provides a robust and accessible infrastructure for Library collections and Arts and Humanities research outputs at UChicago, ensuring continuous access to a wealth of information.”
Library leaders chose to collaborate with the Forum for Digital Culture to create UChicagoNode by expanding on their successful OCHRE Data Service.
UChicagoNode gives future collection-builders extraordinary flexibility to add and update collections with relevant descriptions and will provide coherent data services for scholars alongside the OCHRE data service, and the online publication service, CORPUS.
“We expect UChicagoNode to be a powerful tool for current and future faculty,” said Rachael Kotarski, associate University librarian for digital strategy and services.
This 19th-century photograph of the Hagia Sophia from the Middle East Photograph Archive appears in UChicagoNode.
Launch collections in UChicagoNode
The Mapping Chicagoland Collection brings together cartographic works of Chicago from 1812-1940 on topics such as land use, urban planning, transportation, utilities, annexations, wards, industries, topography, cemeteries, world’s fairs and population.
While the print maps are held separately by three cultural institutions—the Newberry Library, the Chicago History Museum and the UChicago Library—thanks to their collaboration, nearly 2,000 Chicago maps are now united digitally in UChicagoNode for the first time, with more to come. The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for the Mapping Chicagoland project.
Also newly available to the public online is the Guerrilla Television Network. This collection includes videos made by diverse artists, activists and journalists from roughly 1968-1980 as part of a movement that amplified the voices of women, Black, Indigenous and people of color, immigrants and Appalachian miners. Activist documentaries, portraits of community members, abstract animations, poetic experiments, goofy skits, insightful journalism and observational footage are all featured in these independently produced videos.
Originally, videotapes in this collection were screened in galleries, lofts and at festivals, traded between collectives and media arts organizations, and occasionally broadcast on nascent cable television, local public television stations or pirate TV signals. To make them available today, the tapes were digitized through a project that began in 2021.
“These tapes are all crucial parts of our cultural heritage, stories told by people who never saw their voices reflected in mainstream corporate media,” said Cecilia Smith, the Library’s director of digital scholarship. “This is ‘the people’s television,’ a version of the media that encouraged active participation and that gave voice to the concerns and interests of ordinary citizens.”
Now available to all through UChicagoNode, many of these videos have not been seen in 50 years.
UChicagoNode includes a range of audiovisual material. The video “Festival De Mujeres” by Eleanor Boyer and Karen Peugh comes from the Guerrilla TV project, which digitized and created access to more than 1,000 tapes from the 1960s and ‘70s in collaboration with Media Burn.
The Modern Bengali Song Collection includes scores, lyrics, letters, periodical articles, recordings and personal papers documenting the history of modern Bengali song. This newly available collection was created through a partnership between the Library and the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata, supported by the UChicago Center in Delhi. Nearly 2,000 images and documents from the Manna Dey and Sudhin Dasgupta collections are available to the public.
Joining the century-old maps on UChicagoNode are more than 400 photographic prints in the Middle East Photograph Archive taken primarily in the 19th century. Islamic monuments built between the 9th and 15th centuries in and around Cairo feature prominently in these photographs.
Finally, 45 maps from the Social Scientists Map Chicago Collection have been added to UChicagoNode with new georeferencing data. Chicago School of Sociology researchers created maps in the 1920s-1930s that were considered the most wide-ranging cartographic portraits of an urban area ever compiled. A Social Base Map of Chicago, neighborhood maps, land use and land value maps connected with Homer Hoyt, maps from books by Frederic Thrasher on gangs, Walter Reckless on “vice” and Clifford Shaw on crime are included, along with geographer Harold Mayer’s railroad maps and anthropologist Sol Tax’s manuscript cartographic representation of blockbusting in the Hyde Park area.
An expanding future
“We are working on adding more nodes across different disciplines and academic fields, including records from the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures,” Reimer said of the hub’s future. “The ambition for UChicagoNode is to create a linked network that preserves and opens the field-defining research of UChicago scholars to the world.”
The National Endowment for the Humanities and individual benefactors provided generous support for UChicagoNode.