- An employee of the French National Library has been detained in connection to the theft of more than forty engravings from the Library's Richelieu-Louvois branch. Twenty maps were also reported missing from the same branch earlier in the summer. The missing engravings were reported and the "trail ultimately led to a Belgian bookseller who had purchased 20 engravings from a Dutch collector. In turn, that collector identified the employee who had sold him the works."
- A librarian at the library of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts is accused of replacing some 140 paintings with his own forgeries. Xiao Yuan sold some of the paintings at auction between 2004 and 2011 for millions. He said he realized how rampant forgery and theft were at the library when he noticed that some of his own forgeries had been replaced by forgeries by others!
- A House committee chairman has proposed eliminating the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
- David Weinberger writes about the "library-shaped hold in the Internet" for the Boston Globe. Don't miss this one.
- The Lambeth Palace Library is working to document the provenance of the books once held in the Sion College Library (now in the Lambeth collections).
- From Erin Blake at The Collation, a look back at a preservation technology of the past: photostats.
- A 1,500-year-old scroll found at Ein Gedi has been "digitally unrolled," revealing the text within (from the book of Leviticus). More scrolls found at the same site may be deciphered next by the same team.
- NYPL post-doctoral fellow Mark Boonshoft writes about two recently-digitized business letterbooks from late 18th-century New York.
- What may be the oldest known Koranic fragments have been identified at the University of Birmingham: scholars think that the manuscript may "take us back to within a few years of the founding of Islam."
- NYU's Tamiment Library has acquired the editorial archives of The Nation.
- The National Library of Medicine has digitized more than 200 ESTC items from its holdings, and has announced a three-year partnership with the USTC to digitize the "rarest European materials" in the NLM's collections.
- George Mason University has launched a graduate certificate in Digital Public Humanities.
- Margaret K. Hofer has been named Vice President and Museum Director at the New-York Historical Society.
- Cambridge University has digitized several examples of early Chinese texts and printing for inclusion in the Cambridge Digital Library. One text included is a rare 17th-century example of color printing, considered so fragile that it has been completely unavailable for scholarly study.
- Over at Past is Present, Paul Erickson highlights a letter in the AAS collections from Moses Paul to Samson Occom.
- Yale's Beinecke Library is digitizing more than 2,000 videocassettes for preservation and cataloging.
- Amy Brunvand, a librarian at the University of Utah, has a piece in the new C&RL News, "Taking Paper Seriously: A Call for Format-Sensitive Collection Development." Very much worth a read.
- The University of Iowa Libraries are beginning to digitize items from their extensive collections of fan fiction.
Reviews
- Anthony Amore's The Art of the Con; review by Wendy Smith in the WaPo.
- Matthew Battles' Palimpsest; review by Mark Kingwell in the Globe and Mail.
