Mike Widener (Rare Book Librarian at Yale Law Library) wrote a great post about his practice of adding dealers’ descriptions to catalog records of rare books; Jeremy Dibbell included it in his link roundup; John Overholt tweeted about it; and then the conversation began. I’ve storyfied it and embedded it below (you can also go straight to Storify to see it). I wanted to capture the conversation, but we all also wanted to hear a wider range of responses and have a longer conversation about the value and potential pitfalls of this practice. It’ll end up on the EXLIBRIS-L listserv as well, so I’ll include a link to all that when it happens (thanks, John!) but in the meantime, read and comment: [<a href=”http://storify.com/wynkenhimself/adding-book-dealers-descriptions-to-catalog-record” target=”_blank”>View the story “adding book dealers’ descriptions to catalog records” on Storify</a>]
Tag: twitter
Browsing the #wunderkammer
One of the great things about running the @FolgerResearch twitter account is pulling together the Wednesday Wunderkammer from the Folger Digital Image Collection. It’s a chance for me to explore what’s in the constantly growing collection, making new discoveries and highlighting some of the things that catch my eye. It’s a different sort of interaction with the Folger’s collections than I usually have. As a scholar and a teacher, I am usually looking for something specific—a book by a particular author, a work on a certain subject, an object with specific characteristics. But in doing the #wunderkammer, I get to browse and experience the collection serendipitously. It’s a joy to shift gears from searching to browsing and to look at something for no more reason than it tickles my fancy. Yesterday, for instance, I tweeted about a recently digitized mid-sixteenth-century six-language dictionary: Get ready for school with a mid-16C dictionary…
tweets not sheets
Looking for pithy thoughts about early modern printing? Wynken de Worde is now on Twitter! You can follow wynkenhimself or just scroll down to the bottom of the right sidebar to see his feed. And it’s not procrastination. It’s the expansion of his unerring instincts for cross-referencing and promotion that made him the great printer that he was. Um, I mean, is. (Keeping track of the time-period switching and the gender-changing is trickier that you might guess.) And so that you can more fully appreciate the joke in the title: the sheets in question are of course not sheets on your bed, but the sheets of paper that are the basic unit of measurement for early modern printers, who thought of books–and the cost of books–in terms of the number of sheets it took to print them. Funny, right? That Wynken, he’s got a sense of humor.