Calling all movie buffs! We recently acquired a collection of film stills, and a number of them are identified. We’ve posted a few of them on the Houghton Library Blog–please head over there and take a look, and leave a comment if you recognize the movie or the actors in them. Thanks!
So, Octavia Butler willed her “papers” to the Huntington. But she lived past the time of email correspondence, so the exhibit contained some email printouts. Which made me wonder, these days if a notable person wills their “papers” somewhere, does that include email correspondence and computer drafts of speeches or manuscripts? How is all that stuff retrieved? What about old computers that are no longer in use?
Please, reblog this guys… I want to reach some librarians on this because I’m super curious.
Great question! This is one of the biggest challenges in libraries like ours right now. 21st century authors write with computers, and we want to preserve those records and make them available to researchers just as we always have done with records on paper. That’s why when we recently acquired author Jamaica Kincaid’s “papers” we acquired her laptops as well (above). Future generations wouldn’t be able to study her life and writing without the crucial primary evidence.
Ask An Archivist Day is here! We’re here to answer your questions about the work we do, the collections we hold–pretty much anything. What would you like to know?
You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers!
Tomorrow, October 1st, is Ask An Archivist Day, and we’ll be standing by to answer your questions about the work we do here at Houghton Library. What would you like to know?
That’s all, folks!
Sorry, who knew we’d run through 10 billion documents so quickly?
The obvious solution is that you start over, but print everything out in Garamond this time.
Hand knits in the Archives! These wool stockings were knit by Fidelia Fiske, Class of 1842, from wool spun by Mount Holyoke founder Mary Lyon. The wool is incredibly fine — almost like sewing thread — and those long double pointed needles look like quite a challenge to work with. But certainly nothing was impossible for this knitter who went on to found a school based on the Mount Holyoke model in Persia (present-day Iran) in 1843.
Great photos! Anybody else have interesting clothing in their collections? One thing this calls to mind here at Houghton is our collection of costumes worn by contortionists.
Bowfront chest of drawers. New England, unknown maker; circa 1785-1810.
The bottom drawer of this chest of drawers once held hundreds of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Her sister Lavinia discovered them there after Emily’s death. The chest was in the poet’s bedchamber where she did much of her writing.
Houghton Library, Harvard University
Today marks the debut of the Emily Dickinson Archive, a collaborative open access project involving Houghton Library, the Harvard University Press, Amherst College, and many other repositories, to make the manuscripts and texts of Emily Dickinson’s poems available to the public.
William Makepeace Thackeray. Caricature of Napoleon Bonaparte, ca. 1852.
Houghton Library, Harvard University
