April 3rd, 2017 Final Project Update

This week Loganne is working on putting the Storyline JS part of the project together, while I continue to work on designing the website and get some pictures taken. The hardest problem we’re having this week is figuring out a time that we can go to our special collections together. Our schedules don’t match up this week so I’m probably going to have to go and get whatever pictures I can by myself this week and take some of us together next week or when we have a chance. It’s registration time on our campus right now so everything is crazy and kind of stressful. We’re powering through, though! We’re hoping to have Storyline JS completed this week.

March 27, 2017 Update on Final Project

Time for weekly updates!

Loganne and I have found the majority of the information we are going to use for the final project. We were to our archives last week and found about 15 books from the 19th century that we are going to use to find a comparison between where they were originally published versus where Nolan Moore bought them at auction. It didn’t take us as long as we thought it would, considering we gave our selves two weeks to do our research and it took us about two hours. Always better to give yourself more time than not enough! I am working on website design now and Loganne is working on making our maps. We’re hoping to have most of this done this week, but it might go into next. I feel really confident in where we are at with our project and am excited for us to do a little more research on it to learn more of the history behind the collection!

Nuremburg Chronicle Bibliography

To learn more about bibliography, I went back to our special collections library and looked at the Nuremburg Chronicle. The binding on the Chronicle is still bound and looks like it’s the original leather binding. There is some wear on the edges and corners, but overall it is in pretty good condition. I couldn’t see any chain lines so I think the paper was woven. All of the pages are open and trimmed with one inch margins. There are no watermarks that I could see, but you can see evidence of the paper being made by fabric as you can see some fibers in the pages. The paper is mostly smooth with a few rough spots on all open pages.

As far as book formatting goes, the book was printed on folio sized paper and folded in half to be bound. There are about 300 pages in the books so that would make the number of sheets needed to print the Chronicle 150 sheets.

Nolan A. Moore III Collection at MSU

For the first assignment of the semester, I had to go to my campus’ library and do a little research on our archives. I found that the oldest full text in the collection is the Nuremberg Chronicle, even though we do have a few pages of the Gutenberg Bible. The Nuremberg Chronicle was published in 1493 by Anton Koberger. One of the interesting things about this text is the pictures. On a lot of the pages, custom wood blocks were inked and pressed onto the pages and then colored in by someone the owner hired. Five hundred years later and the pictures are still as bright and vivid as I’m sure they were when the text was published.

All of the books in the collection showed some evidence of reader use, but one that stood out to me was Aesop’s Fables. It was covered in writing and even had a little bookmark that had notes all over it. This tells us that the Fables were beloved and studied just as much then as they are today.

Being at a smaller university, MSU just has the one collection. Although it’s not huge, the collection has everything from pieces of Sumerian clay tablets to newspaper clippings of the Emancipation Proclamation and Pearl Harbor to original comic books. The one thing the collection has in common is that it was all donated by one man, Nolan A. Moore. He travelled the world to find all these texts and being a man from Wichita Falls, TX, he decided to donate all of it to our school. For more information about the collection, click here.