This week Loganne and I are deciding whether or not to change one of our pieces of technology because we don’t know if we will have enough information for it. I went home for Easter break and didn’t have as much time as I expected to work on the website. Loganne and I are going back to our archivist on Wednesday to get some more information and for me to get some more pictures for the website. The hardest thing for Loganne and I right now is finding time to get together to work on the project. Between classes and both of us working, it’s hard to get together to work.
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!
Who Borrowed These Books?
For this assignment we had to use the Dissenting Libraries website to discover who checked out certain books from a certain time period. I chose to do 1848-1849 from Manchester College. This one was a little more difficult for me and I feel like my data didn’t turn out the way I expected. I didn’t have any overlapping connections, which I thought was weird and cleaning some of the data up, didn’t turn out like I thought. I got the information uploaded to Kumu, but couldn’t figure out exactly how to get it the way I wanted. I like Kumu, but the data scraping part is what confused me. I am interested in the connections I did find. It was interesting to see that John Jay Taylor had the strongest connection.
Where Was This Book Published?
For this week’s assignment, we had to use The English Short Title Catalogue to track down the publication locations of a particular book our university owns that was published in the 18th century. I chose The tender husband; or, The accomplished fools. : A comedy by Sir Richard Steele. With a title like “Sir,” I was pretty confident that at least one of the locations this work was published would be in England. Unsurprisingly, it was most often published in London, England! The second most published place was in Dublin, Ireland and, finally, one lonely copy was published in Glasgow.
The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Provenance Timeline
This week for The Social Life of Books, we had to find a book with evidence of provenance and create a timeline of ownership. I chose the Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This book was particularly interesting because there were lots of marks and writings throughout it as evidenced in the gallery above. I had a lot of fun with this assignment, because in my research, I found that three of the four previous owners are from Wichita Falls, Texas where I go to school at Midwestern State University. Although I couldn’t find out a lot on one of the owners, I found three of the four to be related, so before it was donated to my university, it was passed down through a couple generations of the McGregor family. I really liked learning more about each owner and how Mrs. A. H. Carrigan was the daughter of one of the founders of Wichita Falls. It was really neat learning more about the history of the small town where I go to school. At one point, I even had to get Dr. Pauley and Dr. Bankhurst to help me interpret an Outline Descendant Report on Patsy McGregor. I would love to continue researching the previous owners of this book to try to find more on Patsy and Mr. Henkle.
Timeline JS was a little confusing at first, but I think I figured it out.
Overall, I had a lot of fun with this assignment and would love to do another one like it.
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.