From the Mixed Up Files of Avis Clarke

Antiquarian Hall - side view

Dylan McDonough, an AAS summer staffer working on the Printers’ File, attends Harvard College, where he is a rising junior with a concentration in history. A native of Worcester, he graduated from Bancroft School in 2014 and has returned to the area each of the last two summers. Here, he shares a glimpse of his ...

C-SPAN’s profile of Worcester is now available online!

The C-SPAN crew filming AAS President Ellen Dunlap.

Periodically, C-SPAN2 Book TV and C-SPAN3 American History TV profile regional American cities through a series they call C-SPAN Cities Tour. Working with their local cable partners, special C-SPAN production crews explore the literary life and history of these cities by interviewing local historians, librarians, authors, and civic leaders. Last Autumn C-SPAN visited Worcester and ...

Game On: AAS’s Game Collection

"The Improved and Illustrated Game of Dr. Busby." Salem, Mass.: Published by W. and S. B. Ives., [1843?].

This past summer we completed work to make the Society’s collection of over four hundred games more accessible to our readers and the scholarly community. Christine Graham Ward, the Society’s Visual Materials Cataloger, created detailed records for each game in our General Catalog. These records include a brief description of each game, a tally of ...

No Permission Required: Exploring and Using Our Digital Collections

b-w primer

Policy changes frequently will fall under the un-glamorous category. But we are hoping that our newest one will fall under the hooray-for-AAS tally marking. When books have included images from our collection, we’ve been providing photographic reproductions and permission to use them in the form of a licensing agreement; I’ve signed a few (read: thousand) of ...

Abby Goes Digital

AKF1

AAS is excited to announce the launch of an important new digital resource.  In partnership with the Worcester Historical Museum, AAS has digitized both the Worcester Historical Museum’s and our own collection of Abby Kelley Foster Papers.  Foster was a noted mid-nineteenth-century reformer, involved in both the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements.  Both AAS and ...

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! The Mathew Carey Account Volumes: A Digitization Case Study

Carey_Gigi-535

Under cover of night on the Dublin docks in 1784, Mathew Carey, disguised as a woman, set sail for Philadelphia. Having spent the previous week hiding out in his friends’ bookshops along Grafton Street, Carey decided that this was the only sure way to escape the British officials who were in hot pursuit of him ...

Instagram Redux

The Society's Graphic Arts collection is a wonderful place for browsing, looking for visual evidence of whatever topic you may be working on.  I have helped researchers hunt in the collection on such broad topics as death, food production, and dress, and as specific as orphaned children, methods of doing laundry, and book shop interiors. As ...

Give a Gift to AAS Give a (digitized) Gift to World!

Council for New England Records, "The booke of Orders," 1622-1623.

At most non-profits, November and December are year-end fundraiser months. You are probably getting a lot of solicitation letters in your mail box, along with those stacks of glossy holiday catalogs.  AAS has several important initiatives underway, including donations to our Annual Fund.  This year, however, we are also trying something new. The Society’s curators have selected thirty objects ...

Benjamin T. Hill Goes to the Fair

I recently scanned a few boxes of glass negatives from the collection, all made by one Benjamin T. Hill, an amateur photographer and local historian elected to the Antiquarian Society in 1901 who also served as an auditor for the Society for twenty-three years. These negatives were all made at a fair in Worcester in ...

Digitization of the Political Cartoon Collection

This past year the American Antiquarian Society has been hard at work proving the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to cartoons. AAS holds a comprehensive collection of political cartoons produced in the United States between 1764 and 1876.  The separately published American cartoon collection holds ...

Our Need, Now an Employment Opportunity

On March 30-31, 2012, as part of our bicentennial programming, AAS hosted a symposium titled “Research Libraries in the Digital Age: Needs and Opportunities.” This symposium was intended to provide the AAS Council and staff with a set of perspectives that would help inform its vision of how AAS can best position itself to remain ...

New Use of Collections: Dorothee Kocks on Rich-Media eBooks

When I got my PhD, I never pictured myself calling Jaclyn Penny at the American Antiquarian Society and saying, essentially, “You got any smutty stuff?”  The result of my inquiries at AAS and other archives is now out: Such Were My Temptations: Bawdy Americans, 1760-1830. I’m writing about it here, on the AAS blog, because ...

Worcester Through Wohlbrück, or, An introduction to photographic resources in GIGI

Wohl Worcester Images

If you navigate your way to the AAS online content webpage, you’ll find a link to the Society’s digital image archive, GIGI. In GIGI you’ll discover a searchable database of over 50,000 images from the society’s collection - from maps to manuscripts, war images to newspapers, cartoons, illustrations and more. My personal favorite is the ...