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A visual tour of Halloween in America during the first half of the 20th century

Children dressed up in costumes for Halloween. from the Daily Reflector (Greenville, N.C.), 1950’s What better way to wrap up  American Archives month then with a Halloween stroll through the Digital...

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German university unveils what may be the world’s oldest Qur’an

  With about 95% certainty the team at the Coranica Project, part of the University of Tübingen, have placed a manuscript of the Qu’ran to between 649-675 AD. Using carbon-14 dating on select samples...

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For Your Listening Pleasure: New Technology Rescues Poets from Old Vinyl

 The Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University just might be the closest thing we have to a poetry heaven on earth. Yes, there is the extensive collection of 20th and 21st century English-language...

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The World’s First Mobile Library; A ‘Jacobean Kindle’

The year was 1617. William Hakewill MP commissioned it to give as a gift to a friend. And it just might be the first mobile library. The Jacobean miniature travelling library consisted of 50...

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And a happy new year…Holiday Cards by Poets

Postcard by Alice Notley. Photograph: Courtesy of Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, MARBL, Emory University As the 2104 holiday season wraps up let’s finish the year with a look at how some of our most...

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Happy New Calendar! A Sampling of Calendars at the DPLA

Now that we have our new calendar in place to help track the year ahead let’s have a look back at some of the thousands of calendars available for your perusal at the Digital Public Library of America,...

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What Darwin Saw: Sketchbooks from the voyage of the HMS Beagle added to...

Charles Darwin considered it to be one of the most formative journeys of his life. His diary and scientific journal of his time aboard the HMS Beagle, now best known as The Voyage of the Beagle, was a...

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VHS Tapes = Cultural Artifacts: Yale acquires collection of 2700 VHS tapes

From the late 1970s through much of the 1980s VHS, which stands for Video Home System, tapes were all the rage. They were the dominant form of home video entertainment and in many ways revolutionized...

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George R.R. Martin donates first edition of ‘The Hobbit’ to Texas University

    George R.R. Martin, whose  “A Song of Ice and Fire” book series is the basis for the hit HBO show Game of Thrones, has donated a rare first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) to Texas A...

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Poetry is Wanted Here!

We can’t let National Poetry Month go by without a taste of some of the poetry goodness that lives within the confines of the Digital Public Library of America. From the postcard above featuring an...

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BiblioTech: Keeping Hope for Libraries Alive in the Digital Age

John Palfrey’s lucid, passionate account of the state of American libraries reminds us both how important public libraries are to a healthy democracy and how close they are to going the way of the dodo...

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Brewster Kahle says ‘Digitize Everything’

What a perfect way to follow up my look at John Palfrey’s new book BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google then with a short video from EDUCAUSE Review Online of Brewster...

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Project REVEAL: The Harry Ransom Center takes a huge digital step forward

One of the kinks in the harried digital evolution for university special collections and archives has been the focus on getting their best stuff processed first. This selective approach to...

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New York University’s Tamiment Library Acquires The Nation Archives

“To read The Nation is to see the evolution of the American Left.” –  Timothy Naftali, director of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives   Currently celebrating its 150th anniversary...

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A university in the UK unveils what just might be the oldest known fragments...

Last November we reported that a German University had discovered what was then one of the earliest known copies of the Qur’an. The folks at the Coranica Project, part of the University of Tübingen,...

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