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: open access
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…
new! digital facsimiles, Shakespeare apps & performance, close reading Othello & theater
Greetings! If you are, like me, waiting for the big blizzard to come and bury us all, might you like something else to read? Or if you are far away from the panic and are sick of everyone talking about it, might you like something else to read? I have you covered! Here are 3 relatively recent pieces I wrote—I hope you enjoy them and share them. “When Is A Source Not A Source?” (link) This past November, I gave a presentation at the Stanford Primary Source Symposium, the theme of which was “The Phenomenology of the Source.” My talk focused on a question that has been bothering me for a while now: how do we treat digital facsimiles of early print as source material? I’ll give you a preview of my rousing conclusion: So, when is a source not a source? If we go by what we see evidenced in…
questions to ask when you learn of digitization projects
Some days you wake up and you see announcements of a new project to digitize a collection of primary source materials. Perhaps an archive that covers centuries of technological and commercial changes, perhaps a collection of newspapers that encompasses the history of African-American politics and culture, just to name a couple of purely hypothetical examples. I don’t know any details about such agreements and neither do you, unless you happen to be one of the top-level executives at one of the holding institutions for these collections or at one of the companies doing the digitization. And because we don’t know any details, we don’t know whether such projects are great or not. But we can—and we should—ask some questions when we hear about them: Who financially benefits from such agreements? It is certainly the company doing the digitization and the institution holding the documents, otherwise neither would be doing it. But…
how to destroy special collections with social media
I just got back from a wonderful trip to Rare Book School to deliver a talk in their 2015 lecture series. It was the last week of their summer season in Charlottesville, the week when the Descriptive Bibliography course (aka “boot camp”) was in full swing, and the weather was in all its hot, glorious humidity. I wanted to keep things light as well as make some points I feel very strongly about: the importance of librarians and researchers using social media to help sustain special collections libraries. Below are the slides and my notes for my July 29th talk. Since RBS records and shares the audio of their talks (go browse through past RBS lectures and listen!) I have, with their permission, also embedded the audio of my talk here so that you can listen and read along if you’d like (there are some variations between the two, though nothing substantive—I’ll leave…