In 1956, Edward Connery Lathem (1926-2009), who would later distinguish himself as a Robert Frost scholar, took leave from his position as director of the Division of Special Collections at Dartmouth College to pursue an advanced degree under renowned Jonathan Swift scholar Herbert Davis at Oxford University. There, Lathem completed his bibliography of “English Verse ...
Katie McGettigan is a lecturer in American literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her first book, Herman Melville: Modernity and the Material Text, is forthcoming from the University Press of New England, and she is working on a study of the publication of American literature in England, 1830-1860, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Katie ...
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 ...
After two years of working under the generous dome, I will no longer be the ACLS Public Fellow and Digital Humanities Curator at AAS. Instead, I will be the Digital Humanities Curator, a full-time staff member. My work will not change much, but this transition from fellow to staffer offers a chance for me to ...
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 ...
In recent years and in a variety of different ways, librarians are considering how different methodologies brought to bear on historical inquiry might shift their practices. Recent examples include Meg Phillips’s post in which she asks whether distant reading practices should inform archival appraisal practices to support more distant reading. Doing so would mean that archivists ...
Molly O’Hagan Hardy is AAS digital humanities curator and an ACLS public fellow. Every month on Past is Present she will be sharing news on digitization efforts at AAS, coverage of digital humanities projects using AAS materials, and ideas for such projects. Stay current with all things DH at AAS by checking out the “Digital ...
The American Antiquarian Society is almost 200 years old. I guess that's not entirely shocking, given that "Antiquarian" is in our name, but sometimes it's easy to forget that when we were founded there were no functional steam-locomotives, no sewing machines, no modern matches. Napoleon was still fighting his way across Europe. Even "The Star-Spangled ...
People tend to treat catalog records a lot like refrigerators: open it, grab what you need, and close it up again. At AAS, the milk, eggs, and butter of the record are the author, title, and call number. Locate those three and the rest can stay a black and white blur. But know that ...
