An exciting breakthrough has been announced this week, one that permits researchers to read letters without unfolding them, offering new ways of managing sealed and fragile documents. Using a combination of X-rays and 3-D imagining techniques, researchers virtually “opened” four letters from the Brienne Collection, a trunk filled with 2,600 notes sent from Europe to the […]
Category Archives: Cultural Heritage
Manuscript fragments: a webinar to catch up on
posted by mdever
The Rare Book School at the University of Virginia has been running a lively set of lectures and panel discussions that are now available online for anyone slow to catch on or living in incompatible time zones. For those interested in manuscripts there is: A Fractured Inheritance: The Problems, Challenges, and Opportunities of Collecting Manuscript […]
Boxes: A Field Guide — Download this new book free
posted by mdever
Mattering Press has published this quirky book, Boxes: A Field Guide edited by Susanne Bauer, Martina Schlünder, Maria Rentetzi. This is not a book that deals explicitly with archives, but it does raise some exciting questions about archival materiality, given we often first encounter archived papers via boxes. As the Mattering Press site observes: “This […]
Call for papers: Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Popular Culture
posted by mdever
Living in hopeful times, this appears to be a call for a real life gathering in 2021. The Popular Culture Association annual conference will be held June 2-5, 2021, at the Boston Marriott Copley Place, Boston, Massachusetts. The Libraries, Archives, and Museums area is soliciting papers dealing with any aspect of Popular Culture as it […]
New book: Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market
posted by mdever
Just out from the University of Massachusetts Press is Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market by Amy Hildreth Chen. This new work will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the political economy of literary archives and how the US market for writers’ papers developed in the second half of the twentieth century. […]
New: The Digital Materiality of Digitized Manuscripts
posted by mdever
A new book by Cornelis van Lit investigates how we might think about the materiality of digitized manuscripts. Of particular interest may be the chapter ‘The Digital Materiality of Digitized Manuscripts”. Often distinctions between analogue sources and digital surrogates turn on the latter’s apparent loss or lack of materiality, a proposition that is challenged here. […]
Now in paperback: Spontaneous Particulars by Susan Howe
posted by mdever
Good news that a paperback edition is coming in May 2020 of Susan Howe’s wonderful short book, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. Originally published in hardback by Christine Burgin Gallery in association with New Directions, this glorious tribute to the importance of being in the archive will hopefully now reach new readers. Spontaneous Particulars […]
Article: Material Provocations in the Archives
posted by mdever
A recent article by Dani Stuchel in The Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3:1 (2020) sets forth a particularly important intervention in terms of archives and materiality. As Stuchel outlines in the abstract:
Virtual exhibition: Subscribed: The Manuscript in Britain, 1500-1800
posted by mdever
While the Beinecke Library like so many others is currently closed, it is possible to view online some of their exhibition, “Subscribed: The Manuscript in Britain, 1500-1800”. There is a beautifully detailed exhibition brochure and a series of videos on different aspects of the materials on display. You can download the Brochure for Subscribed at […]
Cutting up manuscripts or do you like my new ‘mystery bag’?
posted by mdever
Just catching up on the coverage of Sekrè, a German-Swiss startup, which is creating luxury handbags with “a secret” – namely, that they contain a fragment cut from a rare letter or document. Marketed with the tagline that “Every woman needs a secret”, the start-up – which claims Sekrè is the Haitian word for “secret” […]
