New Orleans Studies: Home

Digitized materials from Loyola University New Orleans’ Special Collections and Archives are available in the LOUISiana Digital Library.

The LOUISiana Digital Library (LDL) is an online library of Louisiana institutions that provides over 144,000 digital materials. Its purpose is to make unique historical treasures from the Louisiana institution's archives, libraries, museums, and other repositories in the state electronically accessible to Louisiana residents and to students, resear

The website for the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library contains a wealth of information on the history of New Orleans. In addition to information on the city's Archive sand Special Collections, the site can be searched for historic photographs, genealogical information, and property research.

Originally created for the use of insurance companies, Robinson’s Atlas consists of 30 maps. The maps indicate existing lots, buildings, and geographic landmarks. The color pink represents brick buildings, and yellow signifies wooden structures. Printed street names are contemporaneous to publication; hand-written name changes were added at a later undetermined date. Street addresses predate the current system, adopted by New Orleans in the early 1890s.

The Collins C. Diboll Vieux Carré Digital Survey is an electronic version of the Vieux Carré Survey, housed at The Historic New Orleans Collection since 1966. The survey is an extensive study of the properties within the French Quarter referencing essential historical, architectural, legal and sociological data on individual lots and structures from the French colonial period to the present.

Users of the Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy online search engine can locate individual slaves who lived in Louisiana between the years of 1718 and 1820 through this easy-to-use, free, public database. Find valuable historical data from over 100,000 descriptions of slaves found in documents in Louisiana between 1718 and 1821 by searching identifiers such as gender, racial designation, or plantation location. Users can even search the origin of the slaves brought to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries to work the New World.

Indexes for the Sanborn maps by street name can be found on the New Orleans Public Library website.

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collections are among the largest and most heavily used in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. The collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and landscape design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types, engineering technologies, and landscapes. This online presentation of the HABS/HAER/HALS collections includes digitized images of measured drawings, black-and-white photographs, color transparencies, photo captions, written history pages, and supplemental materials.

The Louisiana Digital Media Archive is the first project in the nation to combine the media collections of a public broadcaster and a state's archives. The ever-expanding archive contains a combined catalog of thousands of hours of media recorded over the past half-century. You'll have a front row seat to Louisiana history through video of historic events, interviews and remote and endangered Louisiana places and cultures.