Jamaica’s documentary history can be explored through thousands of historical materials digitised by the National Library of Jamaica. Its online collections bring together photographs, prints, drawings, manuscripts, maps and publications, with the vast majority of the images freely available for public access.
The range extends beyond photographs of people and places. Pamphlets, programmes and rare books also form part of the digitisation effort, offering readers several kinds of evidence through which to explore the country’s history and heritage.
The library’s Digital Images Collection provides a catalogue of digitised photographs. Another collection, Picture Dis, highlights Jamaican people, places and products and is hosted on Flickr.
Other resources organise material around particular historical subjects. Riots and Rebellions brings together documents relating to the 1831 Sam Sharpe Rebellion, also known as the Baptist War, and the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion. The Slave Trade collection supplies a bibliography commemorating the abolition of the slave trade in the West Indies, with selected full-text items available alongside it.
Readers can also find a collection of copyright-free books about Jamaica digitised by Google. The library explains that these publications largely date from the 18th and 19th centuries and chiefly concern slavery, Emancipation and colonial rule.
The collections include people as well as events. Online biographical notes combine brief introductions with digitised newspaper clippings, programmes, pamphlets and other documents held in the library’s vertical files.
The library says it has also partnered with the Digital Library of the Caribbean since that initiative’s inception in 2008. Together, these resources provide several starting points for exploring Jamaican history: a photograph, a rare map, a historical publication or the surviving documents associated with an individual life.
