1st Week of May 2023
May 7th, 2023
Surveying LGBTQ+ collections and resources at the Library of Congress.
CBS Sunday Morning visits the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University.
RHS launches digital library of over 10,000 items, including rare treasures from their collections
The Royal Horticultural Society has launched a new Digital Collections platform, allowing anyone to access 10,000 library items and herbarium specimens online for free.
Looted Monastery Manuscripts Rediscovered During Office Renovation
A Manhattan auction house found and returned the 16th- and 17th-century texts, which are thought to have been looted from a Greek monastery during the turmoil of World War I.
Lost and found: in praise of Cardinal Wolsey
Multispectral imaging is making it possible to read the burned fragments that survived the infamous Cotton Collection fire of 1731 for the first time in three centuries.
Preserving Leaf Paintings in an Anglo-Indian Commonplace Book, 1822-1825
Creating secure mountings for paintings executed on the delicate leaves of the Bodhi tree.
5th Week of April 2023
April 30th, 2023
The new site Science in the Making digitizes 30,000 manuscripts from the collections of the Royal Society’s long history of scientific publishing.
Conserving a Mughal Album from the Shahjahan period
A Century of Dining Out: The American Story in Menus, 1841-1941
The latest Grolier Club exhibition in-person and online surveys the Henry Voigt Collection of menus.
PSU Libraries amplifies ‘Black History and Visual Culture’ with digital collection
The digital collection, a celebration and remembrance of Black life at Penn State campuses, broadly across the United States, and around the world, is free for public viewing.
2023 Acquisitions of the Library Collectors’ Council
New acquisition highlights from the Huntington Library.
4th Week of April 2023
April 23rd, 2023
Behind the Scenes: Sorting Part X of the NAACP Papers
The challenges of processing this large and important collection to make it available to researchers.
Reconstructing a medieval volvelle
Any volvelle content that reaches my RSS reader will be featured here–that’s the Special Collections Roundup promise to you the reader. Be sure to click through for the animation of the volvelle in action.
Repairing damage to the Well-Tempered Clavier by some ill-tempered iron gall ink.
A new project from Princeton will digitize highlights from the collection that enter the public domain each year.
Register Now for Free Preservation Week Programming
Beginning Monday, a series of webinars on preservation at the Library of Congress.
3rd Week of April 2023
April 16th, 2023
New Discovery Finds Hidden Text Between the Lines of Biblical Passages
UV imaging reveals a Syriac palimpsest in the Vatican Library
National Taiwan Library repairs 500-year-old Quran
‘Book Hospital’ tasked with repairing ancient Quran damaged by time, elements
Seeing Codicologically: New Explorations in the Technology of the Book
The latest volume of the Journal of the Walters Art Musuem
The Printed Image: Wuthering Heights
Fritz Eichenberg’s powerful wood engraving illustrations to the 1945 Random House edition.
Tradition and Modernity in the Palm-Leaf Manuscripts of Lombok
Research into one of the most significant libraries of Indonesian palm-leaf manuscripts ever collected.
2nd Week of April 2023
April 9th, 2023
Baseball Opening Day, and the Library Adds MLB History Online
Celebrate the start of the season with a new digital collection on baseball history from the Library of Congress.
The Wonderful World of Passover Haggadot
The oldest illustrated Haggadah at the John Rylands Library dates from the early fourteenth century.
Margaret Mee: Portraits of Plants
A new Dumbarton Oaks exhibition highlights botanical illustrations from Brazil.
A 1593 inventory of the London house of Alice Smythe.
1st Week of April 2023
April 2nd, 2023
Note: this is an April Fools-free zone; all posts are true to the best of my knowledge.
Medieval and Renaissance Women: full list of the manuscripts
An index of links to all 93 manuscripts digitized for this British Library project.
Anticipating Preservation Needs of Archived Audio Tapes
Testing the stability of audio tape answers some pressing questions for the future of the Library of Congress’s vast collection.
ARCHiOx, part 4: ‘Let him make a statue of a horse with its rider’
Part of a series on a special imaging project at the Bodleian–ultra-high resolution images of clay seals from the Achaemenid Empire reveal the fingerprints of its maker.
A series of behind-the-scenes videos from the Victoria & Albert Museum to send tingles down your spine.
Ashbery-esque: Adventures in Cataloging the John Ashbery Reading Library
Houghton Library recently acquired a collection of 2500 books belonging to poet John Ashbery, which shed light on the reading that shaped his work.
4th Week of March 2023
March 26th, 2023
The Madison crystal flute played in concert by Lizzo last year is just one piece of the nearly 1700 woodwind instruments in LC’s Dayton C. Miller Collection.
Students Propose New Diverse and Inclusive Acquisitions in Notre Dame RBSC
Last fall, students in the multi-disciplinary class, Stories of Power and Diversity: Inside Museums, Archives, and Collecting, created acquisition proposals for Hesburgh Libraries.
Portrait Gallery Research and Conservation Project Used Getty Grant To Create a Microsite Featuring 1,800 Paper Silhouettes From Political Elite to Everyday People
Posters depicting World War II “Woman Ordnance Workers” show them wearing a red bandana with a pattern representing hand grenades.
The Morgan Library Rejoiced When It Saw This Photo from the Amherst Archives
It is the oldest known image of Belle da Costa Greene, perhaps the most celebrated librarian of her time.
3rd Week of March 2023
March 19th, 2023
Frances Clayton and the Women Soldiers of the Civil War
Clayton was reputed to be able to pass as a male soldier in part because of her enjoyment of “manly vices” such as drinking, smoking, swearing, and gambling.
Classics Illustrated Comics at Falvey Library
Great works of literature like you’ve never seen them before!
Radiocarbon dating confirms an 18th century origin for a woodblock long thought to be centuries older.
Modern Books and Manuscripts and the Reese Sale
Houghton added six items to its incomparable Melville collection at the sale.
A heavily annotated copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle.
4th Week of February 2023
February 26th, 2023
The Typography of W.E.B. Du Bois
A new Cooper Hewitt exhibition examines the remarkable data visualizations he made for the 1900 World’s Fair
Mapping the Battle of Fredericksburg
Images from the Library of Congress Map Collection
Restoring a volume of prints by the great British caricaturist William Hogarth.
Henry writes to his owners while they’re away on vacation.
2nd Week of February 2023
February 12th, 2023
Digitizing a collection of historical musical instruments that look as beautiful as they sound.
Mapping “Points of Interest underneath the Harlem Moon”
The making of A Night-Club Map of Harlem” (1933)
Magnificent margins in the Alexander Romance
Images from the manuscripts on display in the British Library’s Alexander exhibition.
The Archives of the East Village Eye Go to the New York Public Library
Leonard Abrams started the paper, which chronicled the cultural life of downtown New York, in 1979. After trying for eight years to place its archives, he handed them off to the library last fall.
The donation of more than 2,700 books, newspapers, and magazines included funding that enabled Princeton to digitize the collection, making it keyword-searchable and openly available.