http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/16/smithsonian.online.ap/index.html

A View to Hugh is an award-winning processing blog is intended to provide information about the project's progress, to provide glimpses into how photographic archivists work, to highlight interesting discoveries mad along the way, and to foster discussion and input from the many “Friends of Hugh”—residents of the state to which he devoted his life and any other interested parties.

Scholars, patrons, and the public are encouraged to "Visit often, make comments, help us identify people and places depicted in the Morton photographs, and enjoy treasures from this wonderful and important collection!"

BERLIN: A major archive in Germany has purchased 15 custom-made scanners to digitize and catalog a huge collection of virtually untapped Holocaust records.

The archive at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen contains testimony from Holocaust survivors as dictated to humanitarian workers in displaced persons camps after World War II. Survivors detailed the horrors they endured in concentration camps and spoke of their plans for the future while workers recorded the testimony on tabloid-sized sheets of paper.

Kathrin Flor, a spokeswoman for the tracing service, said the archive has never been systematically researched, and could fill important historical holes about the fate of survivors after the war.

The new digital scanners cost €180,000 (US$280,800) in total and are large enough to photograph the odd-sized papers, she said.

"You can use them for any size that you want to scan, so we will certainly use them later for other projects," Flor said.

Three people will staff each machine — feeding in the source documents, photographing them for the digital archive and then returning them to their envelopes.

Digital scanning began three weeks ago, and the project will be at full capacity on all 15 machines by next week, Flor said. Some 100 employees and volunteers will work through 2009 to digitize the whole collection.

The papers — some 50 million pages — have been stored on gray metal shelves in Bad Arolsen since the mid-1950s. They were used by Red Cross staff to respond to inquiries about missing persons or the fate of family members, and later to document compensation claims. But they were not open to the public, or organized in a way that allowed for extensive research.

Even after the collection is digitized it will not be published publicly on the Internet.

"You will have to ask for it, because it's very personal data — Medical records and so on," Flor said. She said that Yad Vashem, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Warsaw-based National Institute of Remembrance will each receive a digital copy of the archive.

The archive was opened for families of victims and for historical research late last year. Files that had been kept confidential since World War II were digitally copied and sent to Holocaust centers in the United States, Israel and Poland. About 30 percent of the papers, which occupy 16 miles (26 kilometers) of shelf space, remain to be copied.

About 17.5 million victims of Nazi persecution have been cataloged in the archive. Over the decades, the Tracing Service has responded to nearly 12 million requests for information from survivors or their relatives, and requests are still pouring in — 61,000 of them in 2007.

This digital collection presents a selection of historical maps and photographs of Tibet from the holdings of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library. The collection includes a unique set of 50 photographs of central Tibet and Lhasa taken by two Mongolian Buddhists, G. Ts. Tsybikoff and Ovshe Norzunoff, who visited Tibet in 1900 and 1901. The photographs represent the first photographic images of Potala Palace in Lhasa and other Tibetan monasteries. In addition, over 800 images of Tibet have been drawn from the extensive photographic collection of Harrison Forman. Photojournalist and explorer, Forman undertook three expeditions to remote areas of northern Tibet between 1932 and 1937. The photographic collection is supplemented by four plans of the city of Lhasa and six historical maps of Tibet selected from the map collection of the American Geographical Society Library.

The play remains a crowd pleaser and is performed to this day. Binghamton University's Special Collections holds a beautiful rendition of the play published in London by Hodder & Stoughton. Illustrated by Hugh Thomson, the text is accompanied by a number of colored plates which brilliantly illustrate the play's characters.

Using CONTENTdm, we hope to bring our collections to the world beginning with the extraordinary Link Collections!

The Wizard of Id deals with the goings-on of the run-down, oppressed Kingdom of Id. It follows people from all corners of the kingdom, but concentrates on the court of a tyrannical dwarf-sized monarch, known only as "the King". The jokes center on the idea that people are stuck with the King as their ruler, and that his administration's incompetence has led to a kingdom that is, amusingly, poorly kept. The cast is large for a daily cartoon strip, and there are recurring jokes for each character and for the kingdom itself, so that from day to day it appears as if it were several comic strips based in the same place.

Parker's drawing style was well suited to the humor of the strip; little background detail was given in each pane, to allow a concentration on dialogue. As the years passed, even as Parker's style became more refined (with cleaner lines and more consistent proportions) he drew still less background detail.

The Wizard of Id was named best humor strip by the American National Cartoonists Society in 1971, 1976, 1980, 1982 and 1983, and Johnny Hart received a Reuben Award for his work on it and B.C. in 1968, an award which Brant Parker later received for it in 1984. Furthermore, it has seen dozens of paperback collections published since 1965, and even now there are some still in print. The King is a Fink!, published in 1969, is one of these paperback collections and can be found in Special Collections located on the second floor of the Glenn G. Bartle Library.

http://digilab.browardlibrary.org/sothisisflorida.html

The seventy Floridiana books and pamphlets on exhibit from the collections of the Bienes Museum of the Modern Book chronicle the evolution of American book design and publishing from 1873 to 1999.

The exhibition begins by showcasing gracefully designed pre-dust jacket decorative cloth bindings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A few decades later, in the 1920s, paper dust jackets begin to dominate. For the next twenty years the dust jacket gains more marketing prominence while decorative cloth bindings become less noteworthy. By the 1950s-1960s the dust jacket has won the publishers' visual battle for the reader's eye and the illustrated publishers' cloth and paper bindings practically disappear. The exhibition closes with predictably triumphant, wildly colorful and exuberant paper dust jackets from the 1970s-1990s.

In one way or another, all of the exhibited books are about the endlessly fascinating and complex State of Florida. Florida is defined in many ways: it is neither the North nor the South; it is a land of boundless opportunity; it is a land of perpetual boom and bust; it is a land of new beginnings; and it is a land of perpetual youth and beauty. From utopia seekers in the later part of the nineteenth century, to unbridled and unscrupulous capitalists of the first part of the twentieth century, and to the hordes of twenty-first century European and Latin American tourists, the state has been a magnet for those searching for new visions and new possibilities.

Patriotism has long been part of the fabric of life in America. In fact, a 1998 study done by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that Americans are the world's most patriotic people and are prouder of their country than any other people in the world. Expressions of pride, love of country, and nationalism take many forms. It's a Grand Old Collection showcases these forms of patriotic expression as they are represented in the University Libraries' Special Collections. Included are letters and publications from the Civil War era, World War II maps of D-Day, music and song books, and a 48-star flag.

We invite you to visit Special Collections, located on the second floor of the Glenn G. Bartle Library and experience patriotism in the stacks!

Professor Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Director of the Creative Writing Program, recently donated her papers to the Binghamton University Libraries. Professor Gillan, a renowned poet, short story writer, and essayist, has been a member of the Binghamton University faculty since Fall 2001. Prior to that, she was the Director of the Poetry Center and the Cultural Affairs Department at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey for twenty years.

Professor Gillan has written eleven books of poetry and co-edited four poetry and fiction anthologies with her daughter, Jennifer. She has both written poems in Italian and translated poems into Italian. Her poetry, stories, and essays have appeared in dozens of anthologies and numerous magazines and journals. Her papers include her personal journals from 1954 to 2007; nearly all of her published work; drafts of poems and stories from 1957 to the present; DVDs, CDs, and audio tapes of programs on which she was featured; forty years of correspondence with well-known poets, fiction writers, editors, and scholars; feature articles on her and reviews of her work; photographs of her with many of the most prominent poets of the last thirty years; and the Poetry Center and Cultural Affairs Department archives.

Since 2002, Professor Gillan and the Creative Writing Department have held two annual contests, the Milton Kessler Poetry Book Award and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. From the submitted entries to these contests, she has donated more than 100 poetry and fiction titles each year to the Libraries’ literature collection. She has also donated titles to the Broome County Public Library and the Elmira Correctional Facility Library.

Enjoy learning about the founders of the Cleveland Museum of Art, take an architectural tour of the museum, or see the 1916 Inaugural Exhibition.

Comrade rockstar : the life and mystery of Dean Reed, the all-American boy who brought rock ’n’ roll to the Soviet Union / Reggie Nadelson. Edition: Rev. ed. New York : Walker & Co. : Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2006. Gift of Allan Rogg.

Special Collections Rogg Collection ML 420 .R298 N33 2006

If you have any questions or need further information, please call the Special Collections Reference Desk at (607) 777-4844.