Louisiana

If you hunt and peck through the website of the offical state archives, you'll find a number of digital collections and databases scattered about, including:

• Multimedia Archives, such as snippets from television broadcasts, oral histories, Louisiana politicians and politics, and the archive's black history collection.
• Baton Rouge Art League paintings
• 1947 Freedom Train (key documents of American history)

You can search several types of Louisiana vital records: death records, along with Orlean Parish birth and marriage records (it's not clear what dates are covered).

A site with a promising name, Louisiana Digital Archives, contains only one set of records, death records from the Social Security Death Index (which can be searched more comprehensively at the main SSDI site).

All in all, rather slim pickins. Happily, the Louisiana State Library comes to the rescue with a large set of collections at the Louisiana Digital Library. There are several hundred individual collections here, organized into topics:

• Arts and Architecture
• Business and Industry
• Community and Culture
• Education
• Government and Politics
• Health and Medicine
• Institutional Repository
• Land and Resources
• Military and War
• People and Cultures
• Race and Ethnicity
• Religion and Philosophy
• Science and Technology
• Textile Design Drawings
• Theses and Dissertations
• Transportation
• Work and Labor