June 2015 Archives

Wednesday, June 24, 10:00am, Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall

The papers of James Boswell and Benjamin Franklin, two intellectual giants of the 18th century, are being edited & published by editorial teams based right here in Sterling Memorial Library! Gordon Turnbull (General Editor, Boswell Editions) and Ellen Cohn (Editor, Franklin Papers) will give a presentation about the lives & context of these two men and Yale’s role in bringing their papers out in scholarly editions accessible to everyone.

All are welcome to this SCOPA Forum.

With the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, the Beinecke Library has digitized its collection of Jonathan Edwards, which documents the life and work of one of the foremost early American theologians and philosophers. The collection, housed in 38 boxes and comprising over 60,000 pages, contains the great majority of Edwards’ surviving manuscripts, including personal notebooks and correspondence in addition to over one thousand sermons. By making the digital images freely available, the Beinecke Library has increased access to this valuable and frequently-consulted resource for the study of religion in early America.
 
Jonathan Edwards was born in East Windsor, Connecticut, on October 5, 1703. He attended Yale College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1720. Upon leaving Yale, he succeeded his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, as minister of the Congregationalist Church at Northampton, Massachusetts from 1726 to 1750. There he became known as an evangelical preacher and stern Calvinist, helping inspire the "Great Awakening" of the 1740s. His writings, which were widely circulated, included A Faithful Narrative and Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. In 1751 he became a missionary to the Mahican and Mohawk Indians at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and minister to the English congregation there. While at Stockbridge he continued to write treatises that expounded his theology, including Freedom of the Will and The End for Which God Created the World. In 1757, he accepted an offer to become the president of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. In March 1758 he received a smallpox inoculation which proved to be infected, and died.
 
The Guide to the Jonathan Edwards Collection provides further description of the collection and a complete inventory of its contents. Digitized material is available to view and download in Beinecke’s digital collections online. A scholarly edition of the manuscripts is under development at the Works of Jonathan Edwards Online. Digitization of the Jonathan Edwards Collection was supported in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions Grant. Photography by Yale Photo & Design.
 

The Yale University Library is delighted to introduce Quicksearch – an online tool that unites several search services under one discovery interface. Quicksearch was built in collaboration with other university libraries using an open source system called Blacklight.

The services initially targeted for this new discovery interface include:

• the main Library catalog (Orbis)
• the Law Library catalog (Morris)
• licensed e-resources (Articles+)

Quicksearch, now in public beta,  will continue to be improved with additional functionality in the fall. It will move into full-scale production in January, 2016.

If you have questions, comments, or other feedback on any aspect of the Quicksearch project, please click here to share them with the project team. Latest updates can be found on our project blog.

Following extensive reviews into ways to improve access to and care of the Yale University Library’s cartographic resources, library staff have begun transferring the collection of pre-1900 sheet maps currently housed in the Map Department on the 7th floor of Sterling Memorial Library to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Before the maps are physically relocated, they will first be scanned, rehoused, and, as appropriate, re-cataloged, before being made available through the Beinecke Digital Library. This will allow freely available, unrestricted, online access to researchers all over the world. Although the maps won’t be physically moved until after the Beinecke renovation is complete in the fall of 2016, the process of digitization has already begun.

The Map Department’s pre-1900 map collection is one of the primary collections of early printed maps in the United States, comprising approximately 12,000 map titles (with an estimated 16,000 individual pieces). Transferring the maps to Beinecke will provide a greatly improved storage environment, enhance the security of the collection, and enable integration with the Beinecke’s extensive collection of early atlases (over 1,300 volumes) and several thousand sheet maps. The digital surrogates created as part of the transfer project will complement nearly 2,000 maps that the Beinecke has already scanned. Providing bounding coordinates for the maps and their digital versions will enhance retrieval through current and future geospatial search interfaces.

The digitization project will be overseen by Todd Fell and Lisa Conathan from the Beinecke Library; Kevin Merriman, Director of Collection Management, Access and Technical Services at the Center for Science and Social Science Information; and Margit Kay, Library Services Assistant in the Map Department. For more information please contact E.C Schroeder at Edwin.schroeder@yale.edu.

The Yale University Library has recently joined the Open Library of Humanities' (OLH) Library Partnership Subsidy system. The partnership will offer the Yale community, and scholars worldwide, greater access to high quality, open access publications in the humanities.

Dr. Martin Paul Eve, a founder and academic project director of the OLH, stated, “I am delighted that Yale has joined us. It is clear that everyone benefits from open scholarship but we must find ways to make the economics work in the humanities. With the help of institutions like Yale, we will achieve this.”

The Open Library of Humanities is an academic-led, gold open-access publisher with no author-facing charges. With initial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the platform covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium, rather than any kind of author fee.

Daniel Dollar, Director of Collection Development, added, “new funding models for scholarly communication continues to be an important area for experimentation. The Yale University Library is pleased to support public access to scholarship as envisioned by the Open Library of Humanities.” In this case, the partnership was made possible through generous funding from the Arcadia fund.

For more information about Yale’s partnership, please contact Daniel.dollar@yale.edu. For information about the OLH program, contact martin.eve@openlibhums.org.

A new collaboration between the Yale Department of Linguistics and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has resulted in an innovative approach to teaching students how to master the field methods used in linguistic research.

Typically, linguistic fieldwork is conducted verbally between a researcher and a native speaker of a language in a natural setting, such as the speaker’s community. Linguists ask questions about a language to understand aspects of it that cannot be learned by simply reading books about the language. It is an especially essential skill when studying languages that are not widely known or well documented.

For the first time this spring, Claire Bowern, associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Linguistics, made use of the Beinecke’s Kilpatrick Collection of Cherokee manuscripts to teach students the skills needed in fieldwork to elicit linguistic data from a native Cherokee speaker. The class both took the unusual step of using historical texts as the basis for the interviews, and made use of Skype instead of face-to-face interviews. Read the full story in YaleNews here.