Born-Digital Blog Post #6: Accessioning Workflow part 1

This post continues the series, “Behind the Scenes at Houghton”, giving a glimpse into the inner workings of the library’s mission to support teaching and research. Thanks to Magdaline Lawhorn, Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Resident & Project Archivist, for contributing this post. Library and information professionals love developing workflows! Workflows make our…

Summer Spotlight: Soldier-Poets of World War I

Announcing the Summer Spotlight Series     I am a recent graduate of Harvard College, and I began working as a library assistant at Houghton in May.  Mostly, that means I hunt down books for patrons and return them to the shelf when they’re done.  An indelible part of my subterranean stack-roaming has been a whole…

Collections Now Available for Research: June 2018

In surveying our collections for born-digital materials while also committing two staff to processing backlog collections and providing access at point of accession, we are excited to announce the following 22 collections are now more fully described and discoverable online. Russell Ball Photographs, circa 1920-1930 (MS Thr 1792) – processed by Betts Coup Lucia Berlin…

Born-Digital Blog Post #5 : Analyzing Results of the Survey

This post continues the series, “Behind the Scenes at Houghton”, giving a glimpse into the inner workings of the library’s mission to support teaching and research. Thanks to Magdaline Lawhorn, Administrative Fellow & Project Archivist, for contributing this post. So far in this series, I have discussed Houghton’s first steps in the born-digital initiative, the…

Collections Now Available for Research: May 2018

Houghton Library is pleased to announce that the following collections now have descriptive finding aids and are available for research in the library’s reading room. José María Castañé Collection of German Wartime Propaganda Flyers in Russian, 1942-1944 (MS Russ 144) – processed by Irina Klyagin Angna Enters Collection, 1929-1962, and undated (MS Thr 1784) –…

Born-Digital Blog Post #4: Digital Forensic Workstation

This post continues the series, “Behind the Scenes at Houghton”, giving a glimpse into the inner workings of the library’s mission to support teaching and research. Thanks to Magdaline Lawhorn, Administrative Fellow & Project Archivist, for contributing this post. A functional workstation is pivotal to every archivist’s work, especially when dealing with the born-digital environment…

Langdon Warner through his Archive

In 2016, I stumbled across a surprising body of materials at Houghton Library while conducting research for my dissertation project on the establishment of East Asian art history as a discipline in the United States, circa 1900-1960. I had been aware for some time of the life and legacy of Langdon Warner (1881-1955)—the first curator…

Announcing Houghton Library Visiting Fellows 2018-2019

Each year, Houghton Library awards visiting fellowships to support scholars whose research requires extensive use of the library’s collections. We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2018-2019 awards, including two inaugural fellowships: the Maryette Charlton Fellowship for the Performing Arts, and Donald and Mary Hyde Fellowship for Research in Early Modern Black Lives, including…

More Mystery Film Stills

We received an enthusiastic response to our first post on uncaptioned film stills in our Ludlow-Santo Domingo Collection, including a very nice writeup in the Boston Globe. Thanks to all who posted comments to help us identify those mystery movies. It seemed like readers had fun with the process, so we’ve asked the cataloger of…

Calling All Movie Buffs!

UPDATE: The response to this post was so great we’ve posted 25 new unidentified movie stills–let us know if you can help! We recently cataloged a collection of several hundred film stills as part of the Ludlow-Santo Domingo Library. Many identify the film or actor depicted, but to make this collection as useful as possible…