For the last couple of years, I’ve had a bit of an obsession with finding examples of early printed books that aren’t available as open-access digital facsimiles. Why have I been thinking about this? It started off with some frustration that we have a slew of digital copies of (ahem) Shakespeare’s First Folio and of the Gutenberg Bible (25 copies!). Why do we have so many of those and none of…. of…. um…. And so I started looking. The more time I spent looking, the more frustrated I grew about what wasn’t available. How could it be that there were no open facsimiles of Sidney’s ridiculously important sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella? Or Tottel’s miscellany? Or one of the most popular English plays, Mucedorus? These are foundational works in the development of their genres. In some cases, they survive in only a very small number of understandably restricted copies. Shouldn’t…
Tag: digital resources
researching while unaffiliated
It’s been just over a year since I left my job to become an independent scholar/freelance writer/humanist at large/wow this terminology is bad. I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s possible and not possible in this gig. One huge shift was rethinking how I got access to all those library databases that make my research possible. I’ve really been pretty fortunate, given that I could easily not have access to anything I need (more on that after the break). But it’s a bit of a hodge-podge and there are still things I don’t have access to. So for the curious, here’s a list of what resources I use and how/if I have access to them. The specifics of the list come from my particular research interests (at the moment, early modern printing practices), but the general strategies and obstacles should resonate well beyond my particular niche. One point before I get started. This…
looking for open digital collections
Because I have a project coming up that will need lots of pictures of early printed books, I’ve been trying to compile a list of openly accessible digital collections of early printed books. Sound like a straightforward project? You might think it’d be pretty easy to identify whether a digital collection has terms that are useful for your purpose. You’d be wrong. Some collections have clearly stated terms and link to those policies in obvious ways. My favorites are those providing that information with the items themselves—both because of their ease of use and because they allow for item-specific information, which is handy given confusing copyright regulations and diffuse collections. But there are also places that use a cover-their-butts note instead of providing user friendly information. Statements along the lines of “we obey all relevant copyright laws” might protect a library from the risks of wrongly stating whether an item is not or is under copyright, but they do nothing for…
From tweet to resource
This is the story of how a tweet can grow into an amazing scholarly resource. (And it ends with a plea for you to help!) Just over a year ago, in January 2013, I was looking through the Folger’s collection of Greek texts so that I could find works for a course assignment on describing books. (My intent was to drum into them the necessity of looking at books as an activity that is separate from reading them—and what better way to do that than to ensure that they’re in a language they cannot read?) As part of that browsing, I pulled up a 1517 Aldine edition of Homer’s works, and was blown away by the abundance of annotations in the first part of the book. And so I did what I often do when I see something exciting in the reading room, thanks to the Folger’s policy permitting reader…
Bridging past and present
As I hope Collation readers know by now, the Folger is committed to openly accessible resources. Last week provided one example of the exciting results from such a scholarly pooling of knowledge. The story begins with a conference held at the Library on bindings, the culmination of a two-year project creating an online database of images of bindings at the Folger. That database, which Jim Kuhn described here last year, contains over 4,000 images of (mostly) early modern bindings from England, Italy, France, Germany, and the Low Countries, all freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The images show not only decorative aspects of bindings, but structural elements as well (a partial list of the fields and the vocabulary used gives you a sense of the scope of the project and how you can search the database). Users can interact with the database in a range of ways, including performing detailed…