#document library

[hlkgminfluencer]

https://icompass.io/?red=keyaffb4a68a

[conservethis]

Look at this little guy I found in the archives!!

[shuobox]

degrees of lewtidy but instead of getting your freak on its called degrees of radiation and you’re busy trying to survive against some evil ass monstrosity of flesh and toxic waste because Bailey thinks you’re a lazy bum who hasn’t brought back supplies in some time (robin is a few yards away trying to shove as many scraps and resources into a duffel bag as he can)

[garadinervi]

«A photo of Eric Acree (center), director of the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library and curator of Africana Collections in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University, when he was age 11 in 1971 with his mother, sisters and family friends surrounded by and holding "Free Angela Davis" posters. [Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Ithaca, NY]» ― Black Women Radicals

[rotten-dog-teeth]

I need to say something, as an archivist.

Please look after your books. Please. Don't throw them in the bin, don't tear pages out, don't screw them up. If you don't want them anymore, either sell them, or donate them, whether it be to a charity shop, a library, or a school or university.

I rescue old books and look after them. I've just been sorting through the most recent lot that I've gotten, and there were books in there - that the original owners wanted to just throw away - that had survived over 100 years, and predated the first (1st) world war.

That in itself, is amazing. Because what most people don't know/realise, is that so many books did not survive the world wars, especially the second (2nd) one. Not only were countless libraries destroyed in bombings, but so many books were burned and eradicated under the Nazi regime.

This is still an issue today, with book burnings and bannings still taking place, such as in the USA; as well as countries being bombed and seiged, destroying so many books containing records of those people's history, culture and lives, such as in Palestine.

I've found books that were printed the year the second (2nd) world war ended, first (1st) editions filled with documents from the war, detailing everything that happened, every action that was taken, everywhere they went, every letter that was exchanged, every soldier that was felled. Documents that would have otherwise been destroyed, if not during the war by the opposition, then by the people who wrote it in the first place, to try to hide certain aspects of the war to paint themselves in a better light, or cover up certains tragedies or mistakes. These are pivotal resources for historians, especially books for time periods less written about/well-documented.

So often, I see books that are on their last legs, falling apart, and most people's reactions are to just throw them in the bin. This breaks my heart. Not only are you destroying a record of something so human - whether that be stories told to children to help them sleep at night, records of a huge historical event that meant the world to the people of that time, poems written by someone painfully in love so long ago - but snuffing out the life that book lived.

Every book I rescue, I check for two (2) things: print date, and notes.

The print date is simple - it tells me how old the book is. But the notes are what I mean by the life of the book. So many books I find have hand-written notes in them, and they give you little hints of the life they've lived. Here are some real notes I've found in books:

"Peter, Chemistry department of [X] university" in a german-english dictionary of chemistry terminology. This book was a gift to a university student, he was studying chemistry, and probably either working with a German team, or maybe leaving home after university to go to Germany, or some other german speaking country. These kinds of books are really specific, and at the time of print (roughly the 50s or 60s if I remember correctly), you couldn't just search for it online (something a good portion of us have never known) - you had to find a specialist book shop or find one that could track it down for you. Whoever got this book, cared about the person they gave it to, and went through the effort of finding this specific book for Peter before he left home. I would guess maybe a family member. Maybe they never saw him again.

"For our 50th anniversary - Annie & Frank" in a little homemade books of recipes. This book had been put together over several years, presumeably over the course of this couple's marriage - 50 years. This book was probably an anniversary gift from one of the two (2) partners to the other. So many recipes, lovingly collected and kept over decades. Probably having been cooked for eachother a hundred times over. These people probably had such fond memories of being sat at the dinner table - maybe just the two (2) of them, maybe with family, friends, and other company - eating the warm, homemade meals from these recipes. Making and sharing food with someone is often a very intimate and loving thing to do. I like to think they loved eachother so very much.

[A double-sided A4 love letter] found in a book of poetry. The letter was faded, and most of it was indistinguishable, but there were little bits that I could read, and they were lovely. This was written more recently (it contained more modern dialect), but was still so precious all the same. I wonder what that book lived through. A spark. An anxious confession. A romance. Perhaps a break-up too. Maybe that's why the book ended up in the donations. I imagine that the recipient of the love letter and poetry forgot the letter was even in there. The book was probably a gift from their partner - maybe specially picked, perhaps because the recipient liked poetry, or that specific poet at least - and that's probably why they used the letter as a bookmark in it. I still think about those people sometimes, where they ended up. Where are they now?

Those are just some of them, and I hope you understand why I care so much about these little bundles of paper and ink. They tell a story, not just in what's printed, but in their age, their condition, in the little notes people leave behind. Even simply the fact that some books' pages are so thin and smooth from being flicked through and read by an adoring reader so many times that the page corners have been worn thin by stroking fingers.

You may feel like nobody cares about that one book you have sitting in the corner of your room, and that "there are thousands of those books, this one doesn't matter", or that it's "ruined" because of that little message your mum wrote on the front page when she got it for you, but what you don't realise is that future historians and archivists are begging you to look after it, and make sure it's given to a good home. It may end up being the last surviving copy of that book. That little message could tell them so much that you don't even notice right now.

It breaks my heart finding old books with pages missing, which may never be recovered - the contents lost to time forever. Finding books whose spines are falling apart and pages are moulded from dampness - having been neglected for years. Finding books whose pages are worn and faded, yellowed and bent - just left to rot.

It fustrates me when I find books that have been poorly or just outright incorrectly handled. You can tell if a book's from a school library, because it has tape all over the cover, hiding the face of the book with a permanent dust jacket, because apparently they decided it ought to stay hidden; because it has check-out pages glued over the print date, because the day somebody borrowed it is more important than the book's birthday. I love libraries, and they're so important, but sometimes I wish some of them took better care of their books.

This is my plea to the people, and love letter to the books.

Please. I love you.

[mythosphere]

I love academia because everyone has loud parasocial beef with a specific scholar over a completely asinine point. like yeah that's my future colleague kevin, he thinks Alexander the Great is a fascist. i would deck him in the face if i could.

[extravagantliar]

I see I missed collections talk last night, so Varric is a book collector and map collector, he has a couple of first editions in Kirkwall, and continues to collect even on the road, however it is easier to collect and find old map than books on the road.

[portrait-paintings]

John Elliot

Artist: Unknown

Date: n.d.

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA, United States

Inscribed: Inscribed in upper right of recto in image: JOHN ELIOT / PREACHER to the INDIANS in NEW ENGLAND

[archivlibrarianist]

I love this blog post, and how the author, Erin Blake, goes in to the way that catalog and documentation are such an important and vital part of provenance-- and how a text might have progressed over its life cycle.

It also links out to the Folgerpedia, a free resource where I anticipate eventually doing a research freefall at some later point.

[gracehosborn]

Tumblr, help! In drafting a post centering on Hamilton’s artillery company, I’m having to look at some of Alexander Hamilton’s pay book for the company [x], and I’ve noticed this (the below images) within one of the weekly return tables Hamilton wrote. However, I’ve only been able to decipher some of this note. This section of the book (images 182-185) is not included in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton for whatever reason, only the middle section with his notes on Plutarch and Postlethwayt.

Here’s the full page, and below a close up of the note at the header of the October 11th table. Also interesting to note are the “Prisoners” rows but that’s besides the point.

Source: Image 184 of the Alexander Hamilton Papers: Miscellany, 1711-1820; Military papers; By period; American Revolution, 1775-1783, Library of Congress. [link here].

Here’s what I’ve managed to read:

Drivers. 2 - Drafts 29 4 [Something starting in A] went over in Dec to see how [something] was detained in this reg't

If anyone has any ideas, please feel free to tackle this for yourselves!

[into-blossom]

The first piece of tiny furniture for my first attempt at a full room diorama!

This tiny writing desk (and the beginings of the desk clutter) are all handmade from card, paper, glue, and paint, and form the very first pieces towards my library dolls house project!

[jils-things]

it just dawned on me that midterms are literally next week .. wou

[stars-and-branches]

I spent today documenting a bunch of newspapers from the 1810s while jamming out to hozier dark academia bitches WISH they were me

[pinktrapped]

More of Hallowest with @alecz-obssesionz. Here's Monomon and her student/child Quirrel brbbr

[garadinervi]

Lucy R. Lippard, 4,492,040, Edited by Jeff Khonsary, New Documents, Los Angeles, CA, 2012, facsimile reprint of a series of catalogs produced by curator Lucy R. Lippard [MassArt Library, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA]

Co-presented with the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Seattle Art Museum

[chambersevidence]

Search Engines:

Search engines are independent computer systems that read or crawl webpages, documents, information sources, and links of all types accessible on the global network of computers on the planet Earth, the internet. Search engines at their most basic level read every word in every document they know of, and record which documents each word is in so that by searching for a words or set of words you can locate the addresses that relate to documents containing those words. More advanced search engines used more advanced algorithms to sort pages or documents returned as search results in order of likely applicability to the terms searched for, in order. More advanced search engines develop into large language models, or machine learning or artificial intelligence. Machine learning or artificial intelligence or large language models (LLMs) can be run in a virtual machine or shell on a computer and allowed to access all or part of accessible data, as needs dictate.