This spring, twelve students in Professor Stuart Shieber’s Harvard University class, Engineering Sciences and Computer Sciences 96, were assigned the problem of examining the Harvard library special collections with the hope of helping to eliminate the problem of backlogged materials unavailable to researchers. Houghton Library and Schelsinger Library worked with the students and the results Read More
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New on OASIS in June
Finding aids for eight newly cataloged collections, and preliminary box lists for two recent acquisitions, have been added to the OASIS database this month, most significantly the papers of ballet dancer, actress, choreographer and opera director Vera Zorina
You’ve Got Mail: “If you can read this … you can read me.”
And now I’ll tell you a [ ] secret secrets, wrote Mrs. Patrick Campbell, scribbling in dull pencil to George Bernard Shaw on December 9, 1912, some months after her wickedly coquettish reply to the offer that she play Eliza in his Pygmalion. That the part of Eliza Doolittle, Cockney flower girl, was crafted by Read More
Share and Share Alike
One of my greatest pleasures in cataloging is to pick up an unidentified work, wave my magic wand, and end up with a verified attribution and full access to a hitherto inaccessible item. Cataloging of this kind is becoming easier to undertake as technology improves our access to information. Many’s the time I’ve Googled an Read More
Dancing on the edge of forever
Based in an oral tradition, ballet is the most difficult of the performing arts to document. What remains to us from the time before film? Printed or manuscript music, librettos and scenarios, mise en scène, dance notation, images of sets and costumes; manuscript notes from choreographers, composers, or stage directors; newspaper and personal descriptions … Read More