Manuscript Letter Collections & Digitization
Posted by Robyn Fleming on December 19th, 2011
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The Digitization Team has been scanning and uploading several of Watson Library’s manuscript collections. The goals are both to expand access to these perhaps under-used collections, and preserve the originals to the extent possible by limiting their use. A bonus goal is to withdraw the blue photocopy binders that are currently on the west wall of the Reading Room.
You may be saying to yourself, “I didn’t know we even had any manuscript collections here.” Well, we do. One way to find out what we have is to do a call number search in Watsonline for “MS”, which will show you all of the boxed manuscript collections we have in the Bookcage. There are other scattered collections of manuscripts that are not in the manuscript boxes, such as the Sir Richard Westmacott Autograph Letters, which are bound and are scattered throughout the Bookcage. There’s no one easy way to identify these collections (that I’ve figured out – maybe someone else knows).
If you want to know specifically which collections of manuscripts have been digitized, the easiest thing to do is to go into Watson’s Digital Collections and click on the “Manuscripts” collection directly in CONTENTdm. You can also do a Title search for “contentdm” in Watsoline, and browse through the different digital collections that way.
We plan to digitize as many of the manuscript collections as we can, but some – such as the Kenneth Clark Papers – have copyright issues which prevent us from being able to reproduce them. For now we are focusing on copyright-free collections and collections which are heavily Met-related.
Thanks to Karen and Gwen, and interns Liz Legere, Aimai Reporter, Jenny Matthias, and Rebecca Baugnon, who have all had a part in scanning the manuscript collections so far. Thanks also to Bronwyn Bitteti and her team for working on the cataloging of these letters back in the Spring of 2010
- 19 December, 2011 @ 14:41 by Robyn Fleming