It’s been much longer since I’ve written a proper post here than I meant for it to be. In my defense, I’ve been pretty busy over at The Collation, running the show and writing my own contributions. There’s lots of good stuff over there, including a whole world of manuscript exploration that I don’t do here; check out Heather Wolfe’s and Nadia Seiler’s interesting posts if you like that sort of thing (and if you don’t think you do, browse anyway and you’ll learn that you do!). And if you’re looking for advice on using Folger digital resources, like searching Luna and the power of permanent URLs and Mike Poston’s new tool, Impos[i]tor, the tooltips series is for you. In any case, this post isn’t meant to be an advertisement, but to do a pretty picture penance: sharing some great book images, even if I don’t have the time to…
Author: Sarah Werner
Research aids: understanding catalog records
A number of posts and comments in The Collation have discussed the wonderful work that Folger catalogers do. But sometimes we all need assistance to fully grasp what information is being conveyed in those detailed Hamnet records. As I mentioned in a footnote in my last post, I find the RBMS/BSC Latin Place Names File a very useful resource in working with early book imprints, since the Latin form of place names given in imprints is sometimes so very different from the names by which I know of those places. So in this post I thought I would share some of the other resources that I use when trying to understand library records and book history. There’s an abundance of information out there that I draw on in doing research and in teaching, much too much to be all included here. For this post I decided to focus primarily on information that might…
The books on our shelf
Headers on blogs are sometimes just pretty pictures, just as sometimes books sitting on a shelf are just books sitting there. In this case, however, the books sitting on the shelf in our header image are not only pretty, but revealing! The picture that is the basis for The Collation‘s header was taken by Erica Abbey, one of the Folger’s photographers, in our Deck C rare materials vault on September 11, 2009.
Undergraduate reports from the Reading Room
Today’s post features two accounts from students at The George Washington University who are in this semester’s Folger Undergradaute Seminar. Lyssa Meddin When I first heard about the Folger Shakespeare Library Undergraduate Seminar I was finishing up my freshman year at The George Washington University; from that moment on I couldn’t wait to be a senior. At a time when e-readers were becoming popular, getting a chance to learn about how books were made and to be surrounded by them seemed like the best thing I had ever heard of. It is about a month and a half into the semester and I am thrilled to say that this class has been everything I was hoping it would be.
book history at mla12
Taking inspiration from Mark Sample’s compilation of Digital Humanities sessions at the 2012 Modern Language Association convention, I’ve compiled a list of book history sessions. My method of madness was to skim the session titles and descriptions and note those that seemed to focus on bibliography, print culture, or textual scholarship. I came up with 70 sessions, including my own roundtable. That seemed like too many to be of interest to many of you, so rather than fill your feed, I put together a separate page listing them all. Check out the offerings and let me know if I’ve missed any. You can browse the entire program and, if you’re an MLA member, create your own personalized schedule of sessions you want to visit (it’s a pretty nice set-up, and yet another way in which the MLA does us proud as our scholarly organization). As a side note, there are not as…