Houghton’s website Picturing Prayer (see this previous post) was among those featured at Harvard College Library’s recent Digital Humanities Fair, an event designed to familiarize Harvard faculty and researchers with a few of the many online resources at their disposal. The Picturing Prayer website attracted considerable interest and suggestions were made about how to improve Read More

Hundreds of Islamic books and manuscripts from throughout Harvard University collections, including nearly 500 items from Houghton Library, have now been fully digitized and made available to scholars worldwide. The Islamic Heritage Project, one of several major digitization initiatives from Harvard’s Open Collections Program, encompasses more that 145,000 pages of material, in a wide variety Read More

Richard S. Field, Curator Emeritus of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, Yale University Art Gallery, will give this year’s Philip and Frances Hofer Lecture, on Thursday, December 3, 2009, 5:30 pm, in Houghton’s Edison and Newman Room. Entitled “Cutting Remarks: The Preparation of Woodcuts, 1400-1600”, the talk will discuss the history of the physical craft of Read More

[This post adapted from Kenneth Carpenter’s Reader’s Choice exhibition in the Houghton Library ] The largest component of Houghton Library’s notable bookplate collection was the gift of Winward Prescott, class of 1909. Prescott’s interest in bookplates was clearly lifelong, for as early as 1914 he published a bibliography of bookplate literature, which he revised and Read More

Picturing Prayer: Books of Hours in Houghton Library, Harvard University is a new website devoted to examples of this prevalent form of the medieval book. The site examines the various parts of a typical book of hours, and provides ten examples from Houghton collections, digitized in high resolution from cover to cover, utilizing page-turning software. Read More