"His Soul is Marching On": Artifacts from the Raid on Harpers Ferry
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On the night of Sunday October 16, 1859, twenty-three men emerged from the woods surrounding the town of Harpers Ferry, which sits at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers in present-day West Virginia. Armed with rifles and pikes, their mission was to successfully secure the large cache of weapons kept in the town's armory and expel the U.S. military from the area.
Christmas Behind the Scenes
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There's nothing like browsing through hundreds of Christmas books right after Halloween to get you in the holiday spirit. Even better is spending hours searching through every box for cookie cutters that were listed under the wrong number. Jokes aside, it was an endless pleasure to pour over colorful illustrations of Santa Claus and pick the perfect pages to display for the campus community.
Tis the Season
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In this month's dog series post, we decided to focus on dog books related to the December holidays. In doing so, it became quickly apparent that while we have a small number of titles related to dogs and Christmas, we do not have titles related to Hanukkah or Kwanzaa. Our awareness of this deficiently will inform future collecting decisions. If there are specific titles you would like to suggest, please hit us up in the comments section.
Basque in the Archives
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Down in the belly of Special Collections sits a mysterious blue velvet box. Its contents are simultaneously mundane and bizarre, important for the study of language in Spain, and remarkably unremarkable. The box bears the inscription Matxin de Zalbaren Gutuna, La Carta de Machin de Zalba, 1416. What is it? Why do we have it? What makes it both special and ordinary?
Family Donates Civil War Diary of Henry Alexander Scandrett
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Recently I had the opportunity to attend a conference at Radford University called The Innovative Library Classroom, or TILC. Radford University which is in, yep, you guessed it, Radford, Virginia, is about 270 miles from Williamsburg; therefore, road trip!
Must Love Dogs: 11/11/18
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In 1918, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, an armistice was signed between the Allies and Germany, effectively ending World War I. This Saturday marks the anniversary of this event, commemorated as Veteran's Day in the United States, Armistice Day in France, and Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom.
Processing Reveals Trading Cards of Decades Past
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As a child of the 90's, I'm pretty familiar with trading cards. Pokémon and Yugio cards were all the rage throughout my younger years, but little did I know that trading cards have a much richer history than keeping myself occupied throughout elementary school.
Must Love Dogs: Journal of a Neglected Bulldog
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You may recall from our first series blog post that the Special Collections Research Center holds the second largest collection of books on dogs in the United States. Today's blog post highlights one of our many titles, Journal of a Neglected Bulldog by Barbara Blair, published in 1911 by George W. Jacobs & Co. of Philadelphia.
Mourning Lincoln
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In reviewing boxes labeled as "unprocessed ephemera," a colleague and I came across something really cool. It is a tiny image of Abraham Lincoln framed in copper.
Get ready! National #AskAnArchivistDay is Next Week!
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Have you ever wished you could have all of your archives-related questions answered by an archivist? Well you're in luck! October 4, 2017 is national Ask an Archivist Day, sponsored by the Society of American Archivists. Our University Archivist, Kim Sims, will be ready to respond to your questions! Just add @SwemSCRC and #AskAnArchivist to your tweet on October 4.
Must Love Dogs
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If you've ever visited the Special Collections Research Center, you may have learned that we hold the second largest collection of books about dogs in the United States, second only to the American Kennel Club. I love dogs and thought it would be fun to write a series of blog posts highlighting the dog book collection. This brief introduction to the collection will be the first.
John Marshall Letters Document Writing of George Washington's Biography
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In December 2016, David B. Wolf, a New York attorney and collector interested in John Marshall and his biography of George Washington, donated three letters that join an existing collection of John Marshall Papers.
"The Looted Book"
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Institutional knowledge is an awesome thing and something that is often taken for granted and/or overlooked. I recently learned a cool story surrounding one of the rare books housed in Special Collections, thanks to former Dean of W&M Libraries, Nancy Marshall.
Mosaic Intern's Work Offers Glimpse of Artistic Text
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What do Indiana Jones and the Content Services Mosaic Intern have in common? We both spend our days searching for historical treasure: in my case that involves paging through old texts—often plain or even dirty in appearance—researching their autographs and marginalia, and mining valuable snippets of the lives of people important to both our local and national history.
Instruction in Special Collections: A Closer Look at SCRC's Recent Acquisitions
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With a goal of not only collecting and preserving texts and objects for future generations, the Special Collections Research Center is devoted to acquiring books and artifacts that can benefit instruction at William & Mary. Chinese scrolls, facsimiles of medieval texts, and a replica of Dead Sea scrolls are just a few examples of items in the SCRC that faculty have frequently used in their teaching.
Work at SCRC Involves More than Books: An Intern's Perspective
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"You work at the library? So, do you put books away and stuff?" Er – no. While our vast collection of books is one of the astonishing things that I love about Earl Gregg Swem Library, on a normal day I am usually sliding between computer screens, meetings, and the occasional trip to the Daily Grind.
An Intern's Experience in Special Collections
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From the warm and welcoming reading room to the frigid ground floor stacks, the Special Collections Research Center offers a wealth of historical resources, right at the heart of campus. I am grateful to have the opportunity to take a behind-the-scenes look at the SCRC and explore many of its treasures this summer through Swem Library's Mosaic Internship Program.
"[T]o be published in the usual places": The proclamation of William & Mary as King and Queen
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What is the difference between printing and publishing? This is perhaps something many of us don't think about, but there is a difference. After all, we now speak of things being published on the internet, so there is not an inherent relationship between print and publication, at least not anymore. Two documents from the Thomas G.
A Lover of Words Reveal'd
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Swem Library holds two editions of A grammar of the English tongue, with the arts of logick, rhetoric, poetry, &c., but it is in the earlier one, printed in 1714, that we find something unexpected and extraordinary. This volume belonged to Samuel Clark, who, according to Alumni Oxonienses by J. Foster, matriculated at St. John's College, Oxford in 1725 at age 18, graduated BA in 1729, MA in 1733, and BD in 1738.
Bingo Finds his Way to Belarus: Yiddish Dog Books in the Interwar Period
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Many of the treasures in Special Collections don't actually live in the stacks downstairs but are instead housed in Swem Library's Offsite Stacks (SOSS). Most materials are kept in SOSS either because they are infrequently requested through Special Collections or have specific requirements for the environment in which they must be housed.