Copyright law: The history of an early American tunebook
A view of New Haven, 1786
Blog topic: Rare books
Dime novels digitization collaboration launches
This month Stanford Libraries is launching a collaborative project to expand access to our extensive holdings of American dime novels from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dime novels, which flourished in the United States in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, featured an ever-evolving array of popular fiction genres: frontier stories modeled on the work of James Fenimore Cooper, detective stories, westerns, romances, sports stories. Widely read in their day, dime novels provided cheap fiction for an expanding reading public. Today, many dime novels are in particularly fragile condition due to the cheap nature of the paper used in their production, and collections are spread across the country with few institutions holding complete runs of major dime novel series.
Starstuff: science meets art, print meets photography, Galileo meets Linda Connor
In recent years, Prof. Elizabeth Kessler’s American Studies course, “StarStuff: Space and the American Imagination,” brought students into our Special Collections Barchas Room for hands-on viewings of antiquarian astronomy texts, 19th century lithographs and planispheres, scientific literature, and contemporary fine art photography.
Stanford Special Collections & University Archives share statement on potentially harmful language in cataloging and archival description
Stanford Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives has published a Statement on Potentially Harmful Language in Cataloging and Archival Description. The statement was developed by staff across the department over the past two months, with additional input from staff in Stanford Libraries’ Metadata Development Unit...
Metal, paper, glass: the devotional object and the challenges of interpretation
Welcome to Part 2 of our blog post series, Metal, paper, glass. As Elizabeth Ryan noted in her blog post, subtitled Perspectives on a stained glass panel and other objects in Stanford Libraries Special Collections, we were inspired by this striking stained-glass object to explore how we each interact with a variety of unusual materials in our collections, and to share our different perspectives.
Metal, paper, glass: perspectives on a stained glass panel and other objects in Stanford Libraries Special Collections
Left, Buckminster Fuller bronze life mask by Ruth Asawa, circa 1992, M1823; Center, [Die ghetijden van onser lieuer vrouwe[n] : fragment]. Paris: Widow of Thielman Kerver, 1533?]; Right, Leaded stained glass plate of St. Eustache, late 19th or early 20th century, M2336
Rare book cataloging projects during shelter-in-place, part 1
Rare book cataloging activities are somewhat limited during shelter-in-place, since without the books in hand, we cannot create complete and accurate catalog records for them. We may do some preliminary cataloging of some new acquisitions based on dealer descriptions and other information, but for the time being, we have been focusing our efforts on editing existing metadata for rare books. In this post, I'll describe a project that has been completed; in part 2, I'll describe a large, on-going metadata cleanup project.
Rare book cataloging projects during shelter-in-place, part 2
Rare book cataloging activities are somewhat limited during shelter-in-place, since without the books in hand, we cannot create complete and accurate catalog records for them. So, we have been focusing our efforts on editing existing metadata for rare books. In my previous post, I described a project that has been completed; in this post, I'll describe a large, on-going metadata cleanup project.