W&M Libraries Blog

2017

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  "Sea Fables Explained"

  Posted on January 25, 2017
  From the Special Collections Blog
  Imagine, if you will, a creature with a lower body made of the skin and scales of a carp, a human-like upper body with prominent ribs, “thin and scraggy” arms, “skeleton-like” fingers, the head of a small monkey, and the teeth of a catfish. Sound familiar?
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  Building a Library in the Seventeenth (and the Twenty-first) Century

  Posted on January 12, 2017
  From the Special Collections Blog
  Many of the books in Swem Library’s Special Collections have been gifted by individual donors who have themselves built up their own private collections. This practice of endowing educational institutions with the tools of study has long antecedents, but in the seventeenth century a librarian actually laid out a plan for building a library and advocated wider access for scholars.
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  Is Smaller Better? (When talking about textbooks)

  Posted on January 5, 2017
  From the Special Collections Blog
  The University of Leiden in the Netherlands, founded in 1575, is the country’s oldest; it is also now one of the study abroad opportunities offered to William & Mary students. In the first three quarters of a century annual enrollments showed a four-fold rise, with the result being that the Elsevier family in Leiden, who already operated a printing press, decided to get into the early modern equivalent of the text-book industry.