Bodleian Library’s Medieval Digital Collection Made Available

The first stage of a digitization initiative which makes available high-quality images from the Bodleian Library’s collection of medieval manuscripts and early printed books has been completed. A batch of 4,000 images is now made available by ARTstor, a non-profit organization which started its collaboration with the Bodleian Library in 2005. Including virtually all of the illuminated manuscript leaves from Bodleian manuscripts through the 16th century, as well as selected 19th and 20th- century manuscripts in the medieval tradition, the entire digital collection will reach 25,000 images with subsequent releases through 2008. The project also selectively includes significant bindings, illuminated initials, and text pages. With more than 10,000 volumes, the Bodleian Library’s Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts has one of the greatest collections of western medieval manuscripts in the world.

Access library here.

Oxford-Google Digitization Program

The University of Oxford has concluded a mass-digitization agreement with Google, Inc., of Mountain View, California. This ambitious program should lead, over the next three years in the first instance, to the digitization of more than 1 million of the Bodleian Library's printed books, and their worldwide availability on the Internet, through Google's popular search services and the Oxford website.

The project is at a very early stage and over the coming months Oxford University Library Services (OULS) and Google Inc. staff will begin to work together looking in detail at the different components of the project. The Oxford-Google agreement does not currently extend beyond the scope of this project.

More information here.

Early Americas Digital Archive

The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. Open to the public for research and teaching purposes, EADA is published and supported by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) under the general editorship of Professor Ralph Bauer, at the University of Maryland at College Park. Intended as a long-term and inter-disciplinary project in progress committed to exploring the intersections between traditional humanities research and digital technologies, it invites scholars from all disciplines to submit their editions of early American texts for publication on this site. Texts may be submitted with or without introductions and annotations, as fully marked-up .xml documents or as “plain-text” files. Full credit will be given to contributing guest editors for their work. For more information on contributing, click here.

The Newberry Library History of the Book Seminar
Newberry Library
Chicago, IL

Friday, September 14, 2007 ~ 2:00 p.m.
“Books Fit for a Portuguese Queen: The Library of Catherine of Austria (1507-1578) and the Milan Connection”
Kevin Stevens, University of Nevada, Reno

Thursday, October 11, 2007 ~ 5:30 p.m.
Title TBA
Brian Stock, University of Toronto

Thursday, January 31, 2008
“The First Printed Library Catalogue? A German Doctor's Library of the Sixteenth Century and its Place in the History of the Distribution of Books by Catalogue”
Giles Mandelbrote, British Library

More info here

The Pantzer Senior Fellowship in Bibliography and the British Book Trades

The Bibliographical Society of America announces a new fellowship funded by a bequest of Katharine F. Pantzer Jr., an honorary member of the Society and editor of the revised Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640. Providing a stipend of $6,000, the Pantzer Senior Fellowship will support sustained research in topics relating to book production and distribution in Britain during the hand-press period as well as studies of authorship, reading and collecting based on the examination of British books published in that period. It may be held for two to three months and complements the short-term Pantzer Fellowship, which will continue to be awarded by the Society.

Applications for the Pantzer Senior Fellowship, including three letters of reference, will be due on 1 December 2007 and should be addressed to: BSA Executive Secretary, P.O. Box 1537, Lenox Hill Station, New York, NY 10021, email: bsa@bibsocamer.org.

The St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize in American Bibliography

The Bibliographical Society of America announces the creation of the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize in American Bibliography. Funded by the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, an institutional member of the Society, the prize is intended to encourage scholarship in the bibliography of American history and literature. The prize will be awarded in January 2008 and thereafter every three years. It brings a cash award of $2,000 and a year’s membership in the Society. More information here.

The Bibliographical Society of America Nominations

In January 2008 BSA will elect the officers of the Society and the council class of 2011. The officers (President, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer) will serve a two-year term (2008-2010), and four councillors will serve a three-year term (2008-2011). Please suggest possible candidates before November 1 by contacting:

Terry Belanger
Chair, BSA Nominating Committee
114 Alderman Library
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4103
telephone: (434) 924-8851
fax: (434) 924-8824
email: belanger@virginia.edu

The Justin G. Schiller Prize

The Bibliographical Society of America is pleased to announce
The winner of the first Justin G. Schiller Prize for Bibliographical Work in Pre-20th Century Children’s Books is Lawrence Darton’s The Dartons: An Annotated Check-list of Children’s Books Issued by Two Publishing Houses, 1787-1876 (London/New Castle, Delaware: British Library/ Oak Knoll Press, 2004). It was selected from a very competitive group of candidates, which included monographs, articles, dissertations, exhibition catalogues, and web sites. More information here.

Reading the Book: How Preservation Impacts Interpretation
A symposium presented by the Intermuseum Conservation Association
and hosted by the Friends of the Oberlin College Library
September 7, 2007
9AM-5PM

This free one-day symposium at Oberlin College will feature four scholars presenting a
broad historical overview of the evolution of the book as an object, with a nod to how the physicality of the book (and actions such as conservation) can impact its use as an historical/literary tool.

Exact campus location will be posted to the ICA website as it becomes available.
RSVPs to Nicole Hayes at 216.658.8700 or nhayes@ica-artconservation.org

Patricia Klingenstein Research Fellowships 2007-2008
Deadline extended to September 1, 2007

The New-York Historical Society is currently accepting applications for short-term visiting fellowships. The New-York Historical Society, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, is an independent research library and museum, with extensive collections documenting the American experience in general and the history of New York City in particular, from cultural, social, political, military and mercantile perspectives. The collections cover four centuries, and are especially strong in late-18th- through late-19th-century holdings, which helps support our mission to promote serious scholarship about the history of the United States, and the history of New York.

For information on research fellowships, click here

History of Text Technologies (HOTT)
A new interdisciplinary PhD program at Florida State University brings in five new senior scholars

Professor François Dupuigrenet Desroussilles (Interdisciplinary Humanities) was for two decades rare book curator in the Bibliothèque nationale, one of the world’s finest collections of manuscripts and early printed books, where he organized such exhibitions as “God’s Kingdom. The Bible in France from Saint Louis to the Revolution.” A specialist in the literary and visual cultures of France and Italy he taught for many years the history of the book and the history of comunication in the universities of Geneva, Lugano and Lyon while directing the French national school for chief librarians.

Professor Elaine Treharne (English) works on English manuscripts of the early medieval period, their contexts of production, their physical compilation and their cultural significance. She is the Principal Investigator of a five-year project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, "The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220". She is Chair of the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland, Convenor of the English Association's Research Group "The History of Books and Texts", and an Editor of Review of English Studies, Speculum and Literature Compass.

Associate Professor A. E. B. Coldiron (English) specializes in late-medieval and Renaissance literature. Her research focuses on French-English literary relations, translation, poetics, and early printing, with special attention to cross-cultural aspects of textual transmission. She has held, among other awards, Folger research grants, a Kluge Fellowship in the Library of Congress, and an NEH fellowship.

Associate Professor David L. Gants (English), formerly Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing at the University of New Brunswick, publishes on bibliographical, textual, and technological matters, and is the Electronic Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. He is also director of the Early English Booktrade Database project, which seeks to describe, quantify, and classify every book in the STC period.

Associate Professor Elizabeth Spiller (English) is the author of "Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature" (Cambridge, 2004), a study of the historic emergence of literature and science that focuses on the role of reading in the creation of knowledge. She has just completed an NEH Fellowship to pursue work on her current book, "Reading in Color: Race, Romance, and the Complexion of Early Modern Print Culture," a project that examines how reading practices contributed to the creation of racial identities in early modern culture. She is also the editor of a two volume collection of seventeenth century English recipe books (Ashgate, forthcoming).

Students interested in HOTT should contact Professor Treharne at etreharne@english.fsu.edu. This year, students will need to apply to a traditional department (English, Interdisciplinary Humanities, etc), for studies beginning in fall 2008; for subsequent years it may be possible to apply directly to HOTT.

Quintress
An online journal for the history, art, and culture of the Jewish book

Published in association with the Libraries of The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and Jerusalem (the Schocken Library), Quintress is now accepting submissions for its innaugural issue.

English submissions should be sent electronically to David Kraemer
(dakraemer@jtsa.edu), Hebrew Submissions to Shmuel Glick
(shglick@bezeqint.net).