- Your must-read piece this week is John Overholt's "Five Theses on the Future of Special Collections," which will appear in a forthcoming issue of RBM but is available now via Harvard's OA DASH repository. It is an excellent, timely, and provocative essay which I hope will receive the large audience it very much deserves.
- The editors of the OED have issued a public appeal for help in identifying a book cited in the dictionary but which doesn't seem to be held in any libraries and is only found mentioned in a few places (so far). Quite a fun rabbit-hole to lose yourself down, as I've discovered. Let's help them find this book!
- At The Collation, Erin Blake explores "Two disciplines separated by a common language" - that is, "print culture" as either pertaining to printed pictures or printed words.
- Jennifer Howard profiles Bethany Nowviskie of UVA's Scholars Lab for The Chronicle.
- The Bodleian Library has acquired a manuscript of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Binsey Poplars" for £50,000.
- In today's New York Times, a look at how the sequester budget cuts are affecting the Library of Congress.
- The National Library of Wales announced this week that they will no longer be claiming copyright over digitized copies of items from its collections.
- From the medievalfragments blog, a summary of a recent (and very awesome) find: 132 medieval notes and fragments found in the binding of a 1577 book.
- Sarah Werner expands on her recent Collation post on digitized copies of the First Folio at Wynken de Worde, asking just what it is that we should want as users of such digital surrogates (and not just of the First Folio, but of such things generally).
- New from the Massachusetts Historical Society, a digital presentation of the wonderfully interesting Harbottle Dorr annotated newspapers. See the blog post announcing the launch.
- David Rubenstein has lent a copy of the Stone Declaration of Independence to the State Department and will fund reproductions of the broadside to be displayed in every U.S. embassy.
- Over at EMOB, Anna Battigelli summarizes a recent Beinecke Library conference on digital archiving, Beyond the Text: Library Archives in the 21st Century.
- From Cultural Compass, the blog of the Harry Ransom Center, a post about the process used to create a digital version of the Center's Blaeu "great wall map."
- At Boston 1775 this week, J.L. Bell talked to Nat Philbrick about Philbrick's new book on the Battle of Bunker Hill: Part I, Part II.
- The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists announced the launch of their new journal this week: J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.
- Over at Brown's curio blog, a look at a first edition Great Gatsby inscribed to T.S. Eliot by Fitzgerald (who spelled Eliot's name wrong) with Eliot's pencilled marginal notes throughout.
- I'm not sure if this is new or not, but it's new to me so I wanted to mention it: The Morgan Library & Museum has posted a piece on the provenance of their copy of the Gutenberg Bible.
Reviews
- Randall Woods' Shadow Warrior; review by Evan Thomas in the NYTimes.
- Steve Vogel's Through the Perilous Fight; review by Joyce Appleby in the WaPo.
