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 Middlebury Special Collections at the Internet Archive. 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 program for the inauguration of the Statue of Liberty on October 28, 1886
- The 2001 Middlebury Commencement address, given by Fred Rogers
- A portrait of alumnus Timothy Clark Smith, 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.
Find your next favorite archival collection and join the millions of people around the world discovering photos, videos, audio, newspapers, manuscripts, and more. Need help getting started? Check out our guide to searching the Internet Archive.