Ever since Omeka Mania first took hold here at AAS, we have delighted in learning about this exhibition publishing platform and helping each other make the most of it. A group of us meet about twice a month to share our progress and help each other out. From these collaborations, AAS has published six online exhibitions in … Continue reading Omeka Tutorials
We at AAS have figured out one way to beat the winter blues: Omeka! Thanks to the generosity of Jay Last (member since 1987), we held a two-day training session for our staff to learn this content management system for online exhibitions of special collections. Omeka is not archival software, but it was developed at … Continue reading Omeka Mania at AAS
Black Self-Publishing is a new collaborative research project from the American Antiquarian Society. The core of this site consists of a list I developed of books self-published by black authors within the scope of the American Antiquarian Society’s collecting period (origins to 1876). Studying self-publishing, occasions when an author pays for the printing of his … Continue reading Black Self-Publishing: A New AAS Research Project & Resource
The American Antiquarian Society houses more than a thousand photographs and glass-plate negatives produced by photographer Theodore Clemens Wohlbrück (1879–1936) between 1900 and 1910. Since 2010, we have periodically highlighted different aspects of the collection on this blog, including information about Wohlbrück’s views of towns in Worcester County, his photographs of urban architecture, and a … Continue reading A New AAS Illustrated Inventory: The Wohlbrück Collection
Did you miss the Radiant with Color & Art exhibition featuring a portion of the AAS’s large archive of McLoughlin Brothers material that was shown at the Grolier Club last winter? Yes? Then you’re in luck! The exhibition has now been fashioned into a colorful online exhibit showcasing the history and work of the McLoughlin Brothers, the New York publishing … Continue reading New Online Exhibition: Radiant with Color & Art
After many years of inventorying, identifying and digitizing, the Society’s collection of nearly 500 watch papers are now available as an illustrated inventory! Watch papers are small, decorative pieces of paper or cloth that are meant to protect the mechanisms of watches, and were also used to indicate when a watch was last repaired and … Continue reading Time for a New Illustrated Inventory – Watch Papers
Editor’s note: Originally from Texas, Zoe Margolis is an Art History major at Smith College, slated to graduate this upcoming spring (class of 2018). Zoe wrote the first draft of this post on behalf of the students in the Spring 2017 course at Smith College “ARH291: Be My Valentine.” It was later revised by Prof. … Continue reading New Online Exhibition – Victorian Valentines: Intimacy in the Industrial Age
This semester, AAS is partnering with a class from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, as students there learn about the production and popularity of valentines in America. In an upper level colloquium, Professor Laura Kalba and her students are exploring the connections between nineteenth-century print ephemera and the ephemerality of images in the digital era. “Be … Continue reading Reading into Valentines
In 1858, John Woodhouse Audubon, son of John James Audubon, set out to recreate the success of his father’s work Birds of America, published in 1838 with four hundred large, hand-colored engravings. John Woodhouse partnered with lithographer Julius Bien and the publishing firm of Roe, Lockwood & Company to create a less-expensive set than the … Continue reading New Illustrated Inventory: Bien’s Edition of “Birds of America”
The American Antiquarian Society’s collection of just over two hundred American silhouettes has recently been cataloged and photographed and an inventory of these profile portraits is now available via a new digital resource. Silhouettes were popular in the United States starting at the end of the eighteenth century. Profile drawings, profile miniatures, and silhouettes all … Continue reading Perfect Shadows: An Illustrated Inventory of AAS Silhouettes
For some collections within the Graphic Arts Department, we do not catalog each item in the collection individually. Sometimes, it makes more sense to create one all-encompassing record that describes the collection as one entity to avoid redundancy in the catalog. These collections are still easily found in the online catalog, and they will usually … Continue reading Now available online: Photographs of Tuskegee Institute
Associate Professor of History at Assumption College Carl Robert Keyes and our digital humanities curator, Molly O’Hagan Hardy, recently collaborated to combine early American history and digital humanities in the classroom. About a year ago, AAS launched the Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project: Verses in Vogue with the Vulgar. Featuring 338 broadsides, 800 images, and many contextualizing … Continue reading Transcribing the War of 1812: AAS Collections in the Classroom
Assistant Professor of English at University of Maryland Baltimore County Lindsay DiCuirci and our digital humanities curator, Molly O’Hagan Hardy, recently collaborated to combine early American labor history and digital humanities in the classroom. It is with great pleasure that we introduce to you the latest Omeka exhibition from AAS: Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print. … Continue reading Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print: AAS Collections meet DH Pedagogy
The North American Imprints Program makes the AAS Catalog ideal for bibliometric analysis in the North American colonies and in the early United States before 1820, as I have noted before on Past is Present. In this screencast, I walk you through how to export Machine-Readable Catalog (MARC) records from our General Catalog and then … Continue reading Converting MARC Records to a Spreadsheet: A Screencast Tutorial
It seems as though many studies of James Fenimore Cooper begin on the defense. Mark Twain’s severe treatment of Cooper in the 120-year-old essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” leaves many a poor Cooper critic to battle with Twain before easing into the comforts of Cooper. Never mind that Melville called him “our national novelist” or … Continue reading New AAS Online Exhibition Launched: James Fenimore Cooper, Shadow and Substance
