Special Collections Roundup

Years in the making

The new site Science in the Making digitizes 30,000 manuscripts from the collections of the Royal Society’s long history of scientific publishing.

Under the microscope

Conserving a Mughal Album from the Shahjahan period

A Century of Dining Out: The American Story in Menus, 1841-1941

The latest Grolier Club exhibition in-person and online surveys the Henry Voigt Collection of menus.

PSU Libraries amplifies ‘Black History and Visual Culture’ with digital collection

The digital collection, a celebration and remembrance of Black life at Penn State campuses, broadly across the United States, and around the world, is free for public viewing.

2023 Acquisitions of the Library Collectors’ Council

New acquisition highlights from the Huntington Library.

Behind the Scenes: Sorting Part X of the NAACP Papers

The challenges of processing this large and important collection to make it available to researchers.

Reconstructing a medieval volvelle

Any volvelle content that reaches my RSS reader will be featured here–that’s the Special Collections Roundup promise to you the reader. Be sure to click through for the animation of the volvelle in action.

Preserving Bach’s manuscripts

Repairing damage to the Well-Tempered Clavier by some ill-tempered iron gall ink.

Entering the Public Domain

A new project from Princeton will digitize highlights from the collection that enter the public domain each year.

Register Now for Free Preservation Week Programming

Beginning Monday, a series of webinars on preservation at the Library of Congress.

New Discovery Finds Hidden Text Between the Lines of Biblical Passages

UV imaging reveals a Syriac palimpsest in the Vatican Library

National Taiwan Library repairs 500-year-old Quran

‘Book Hospital’ tasked with repairing ancient Quran damaged by time, elements

Seeing Codicologically: New Explorations in the Technology of the Book

The latest volume of the Journal of the Walters Art Musuem

The Printed Image: Wuthering Heights

Fritz Eichenberg’s powerful wood engraving illustrations to the 1945 Random House edition.

Tradition and Modernity in the Palm-Leaf Manuscripts of Lombok

Research into one of the most significant libraries of Indonesian palm-leaf manuscripts ever collected.

Baseball Opening Day, and the Library Adds MLB History Online

Celebrate the start of the season with a new digital collection on baseball history from the Library of Congress.

The Wonderful World of Passover Haggadot

The oldest illustrated Haggadah at the John Rylands Library dates from the early fourteenth century.

Margaret Mee: Portraits of Plants

A new Dumbarton Oaks exhibition highlights botanical illustrations from Brazil.

Inside a Tudor woman’s home

A 1593 inventory of the London house of Alice Smythe.

Note: this is an April Fools-free zone; all posts are true to the best of my knowledge.

Medieval and Renaissance Women: full list of the manuscripts

An index of links to all 93 manuscripts digitized for this British Library project.

Anticipating Preservation Needs of Archived Audio Tapes

Testing the stability of audio tape answers some pressing questions for the future of the Library of Congress’s vast collection.

ARCHiOx, part 4: ‘Let him make a statue of a horse with its rider’

Part of a series on a special imaging project at the Bodleian–ultra-high resolution images of clay seals from the Achaemenid Empire reveal the fingerprints of its maker.

ASMR at the museum

A series of behind-the-scenes videos from the Victoria & Albert Museum to send tingles down your spine.

Ashbery-esque: Adventures in Cataloging the John Ashbery Reading Library

Houghton Library recently acquired a collection of 2500 books belonging to poet John Ashbery, which shed light on the reading that shaped his work.