Last week was orientation week at Harvard and Houghton was in high gear. Wednesday, Houghton joined the Archives and Special Collections table at Dudleyfest, the orientation fair for new Grad Students in Arts and Sciences. Thursday, Houghton participated in the Harvard College Library Freshman Open House hosted by Lamont Library. Reference Librarian James Capobianco introduced students to the Houghton and other special collections
while Curator John Overholt demonstrated Lamont’s new touch-screen PixelSense table, using it to explore the Houghton online exhibition, A Monument More Durable Than Brass: The Donald & Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson.
Meanwhile, in the Houghton Seminar Room, Professor Jeffrey Schnapp, Matthew Battles, and a team of graduate students are digitizing Houghton objects including Bewick’s woodblocks for Aesop’s Fables and Emily Dickinson’s bible. They hope to inspire students in the upcoming course, Fragments of a Material History of Literature, to capture, display, and explore materials in new and creative ways.
[Thanks to Rachel Howarth, Associate Librarian for Public Services, for contributing this post, and to Enrique Diaz, Designer/Multimedia Specialist, for contributing the pictures of the Freshman Open House.]