Beyond the Green Mountains: The reach of Special Collections' digital holdings
In the last year, Special Collections has welcomed almost 2,750 visitors to our reading room and hosted over 100 class visits. Impressive as those numbers are (and we’re proud of them!), they pale in comparison with the number of users who access our collections online.
In 2024 more than 461,000 (non-robot) users accessed objects in . To put that number in perspective, the average number of yearly views pre-Internet Archive more closely resembled our in-person visits – about 3,500 per year – representing a sharp and then steady increase since 2017.
It’s been almost 10 years since we started adding items to the Internet Archive, now totaling 47,052 items, with 2,850 (and counting) added just this year.
Our most-viewed items of all time include:
- The
- The
- A portrait of alumnus , class of 1842 (perhaps because of his unique interment of his own design to mitigate his fear of being buried alive).
In total, collection items have been viewed 2,858,370 times.
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