Library Stuff

Smithsonian Libraries Blog – “The Libraries, in a continuing partnership with Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, has converted select publications from the Smithsonian Contributions and Studies Series to digital formats for use on Kindles, Nooks and other e-readers.

The new electronic formats will bring unprecedented access to a vast research collection. These scholarly publications are offered at no cost, without taking up valuable physical space or facing the threat of becoming out of print.”

Press Release - The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Penn’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library a grant of $300,000 to digitize and make available on the World Wide Web a collection of approximately 1,000 European and American manuscripts from 1601 to 1800. This two-year project builds on and expands the work of a proposal funded by the NEH in 2009 to digitize Penn’s European manuscripts dated before 1601, which has produced the Web site, Penn in Hand: Selected Manuscripts. “The Penn Libraries are honored to be the recipients of this grant from the NEH, which will allow us to more than double the scope of Penn in Hand,” remarked H. Carton Rogers, Vice Provost and Director of Libraries. “Adding manuscripts to 1800 will greatly benefit scholars across disciplines as varied as art history, legal studies, music, religion, history, and literature in Western languages.”

AP – “Yale University officials announced yesterday that the school intends to be the first in the Ivy League to offer free online access to digital images of millions of objects housed in its museums, archives, and libraries.

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No license will be required for transmission of the images, and no limitations will be imposed on their use, which will allow scholars, artists and others around the world to use Yale collections for study, publication, teaching, and inspiration, Yale officials said.”

AP – “Paintings, jewelry, religious artifacts and other cultural treasures looted by the Nazis often passed through several pairs of hands in multiple countries once they were recovered by the Allies after World War II.

Meticulous records were kept, but those are spread among a variety of places that preserve archives. Now, they can all be accessed through a single website.”

NYT – “For years, Robert Scholes, a professor in the department of modern culture and media at Brown University, has led a project to put Modernist journals online, which means you can have access to many of the period’s wonderful journals without being a student at a university with great archival holdings. So far, Scholes and his team have digitized 18 magazines…”

JSTOR – “Four prominent academic publishers in the United States announced plans today to bring their scholarly books online at JSTOR, one of the most well-known and widely used scholarly research sites. This is the second wave of presses to join the Books at JSTOR initiative. The initial group included Chicago, Minnesota, North Carolina, Princeton, and Yale University Presses.”

NYT – “Prof. Katherine Rowe’s blue-haired avatar was flying across a grassy landscape to a virtual three-dimensional re-creation of the Globe Theater, where some students from her introductory Shakespeare class at Bryn Mawr College had already gathered online. Their assignment was to create characters on the Web site theatron.org and use them to block scenes from the gory revenge tragedy “Titus Andronicus,” to see how setting can heighten the drama.”

AP – “Caroline Kennedy unveiled the nation’s first online presidential archive Thursday, a $10 million project to digitize the most important papers, photographs and recordings of President John F. Kennedy’s days in office.

Users can sort through the drafts of Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you,” speech and see how he tinkered with the words of that most famous line from his inauguration. Or they can listen to his personal phone calls and read his letters.”

AP – “The public can now listen to stories of segregation, community life and other issues important to Springfields African-American community simply by logging onto a computer. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum has put the oral histories online through a partnership with the Springfield African American History Foundation.”

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NYTimes.com – “If I have my sister, San Francisco has Rick Prelinger, one of the country’s premier archivists and an outspoken advocate of open access to information. Mr. Prelinger is the founder of the Prelinger Archives, a celebrated collection of “ephemeral film” — industrial, educational, amateur and other film and video footage. The Library of Congress acquired the bulk of the archive in 2002, but Mr. Prelinger continues to collect footage, with a focus on home movies. With his wife, Megan Shaw Prelinger, he also runs the Prelinger Library in San Francisco — an eclectic collection of out-of-print books, periodicals, government publications and other printed matter.”