Digital Library Center – New Equipment!
It’s been a bustling year at the Digital Library Center, and we’re excited to share some recent upgrades to our digitization toolkit. The DLC has welcomed three new pieces of equipment, promising improved capacity, image quality, and speed. iXH Camera System In 2023 we seized the opportunity to upgrade our aging IQ180 overhead camera system…
Black History at FSU: Reverend Dr. William R. Jones
This Black History Month we are spotlighting Reverend Dr. William R. Jones. In 1977, Jones helped found and became the director of Florida State University’s African American Studies program. He retired from FSU in 1999 as Professor Emeritus. Dr. William R. Jones was born July 17, 1933 in Louisville, Kentucky. He attended Howard University, where…
Digitizing the Leon County School Board Minutes
Through a community partnership with the Leon County School District office, Florida State University is digitizing and providing public access to the district’s collection of School Board Minutes which record the history of the school board from 1877 to present. The FSU Digital Library Center has been hard at work digitizing these minutes, which come…
New Digital Collection: 17th-20th Century Correspondence and Documents
A series of over 600 documents have now been digitized by the Digital Library Center into DigiNole, FSU’s digital library! The 17th-20th Century Correspondence and Documents collection features manuscripts from 1618-1981 relating to international names and local celebrities. Some recognizable names apart of this collection include: General George Washington, Albert Einstein, and Mrs. Bram Stoker,…
New Digital Collection – Ulysses B. Roach Diaries
The Digital Library Center has recently digitized a set of diaries and farm accounts from Ulysses B. Roach, a farmer and plantation owner in Jefferson County, Florida. The diaries give us a detailed glimpse into the day-to-day life of Roach, who meticulously documented the weather and the quality of his crops. Ulysses B. Roach wrote…
Introductions and the Medial S/f
We decided we would tell you a little about ourselves and the work we do in Special Collections and Archives. I am Dianna Bradley and I have been assisting in Special Collections and Archives for a little over 4 years now. I am a cataloger at FSU Libraries and work on managing our records, including…
Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Newly Digitized Material Coming Soon to the Digital Library
On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. This legislation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ended segregation and unequal voter registration requirements. It also prohibited employment-based discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.1 This legislation would be passed a few weeks…
New Collection – Flying High Circus
Despite Covid’s best attempts at stopping us from acquiring new material for the archive, we’ve received a large and extremely interesting collection from the Flying High Circus! This collection covers a wide range of material from budgets to publications to photographs and even records. The Flying High Circus was created in 1947 by Jack Haskins.…
Armchair Traveling in the Digital Library
We’ve all been stuck pretty close to home for over a year now and, I don’t know about you, but I am missing the fun and excitement of traveling. I find myself planning trips and adding more and more days onto a European vacation that has been postponed for two years now. A recent new…
Sun City
Recently, we digitized the Sun City Development and Motion Picture Studio Plat Map Sheets for use in a class which led me to look into…what are these exactly? I uncovered a fascinating story of the brother of Cleveland railroad barons and a Georgia inventor who, a decade apart, tried to bring Hollywood to Florida. During…
The DLC in the times of COVID
A long time ago, in March 2020, when we all had such hopes that closing the library was a temporary measure, the Digital Library Center (DLC) started to think about how it could support remote research and instruction during the rest of the spring semester. Fast forward to August 2020, and the DLC is now…
Celebrating Women’s History with a new digital collection
The DLC recently completed processing and started loading materials from the League of Women Voters (LWV), Tallahassee Chapter Records materials held at the Claude Pepper Library into DigiNole. The materials in this first round of digitization with the collection include the newsletters of the Tallahassee chapter from 1962-2012 as well as Study and Action guides…
Records Transfer from the State Archives of Florida: FSU Presidential Files
This post is part of our series celebrating American Archives Month. Special Collections & Archives also did a Twitter Takeover of the @fsulibraries feed for #AskAnArchivist day so be sure to check out those conversations. The State Archives of Florida serves as the Record Center for Florida State University, meaning they hold our non-current records according to state…
A Special Collections Travel Diary
In January, Associate Dean Katie McCormick and I kicked off the new semester by traveling to Berkeley Springs, WV, to acquire a new collection of books related to the French Revolution and Empire. Nestled in the panhandle of West Virginia, Berkeley Springs is within shouting distance of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. It’s also known as…
Flambeau at your fingertips
It has been a long time coming to get to this point but I’m happy to announce that we have finally cataloged and completed the upload of the FSU newspaper, Florida Flambeau from 1915 to 1996. This was a massive undertaking for the Digital Library Center and we didn’t even do the scanning! Digitization of…
The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women
The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women, Illustrated by As Many Engravings; Exhibiting Their Principal Eccentricities and Amusements (1820) was recently added to the John MacKay Shaw Collection of Childhood in Poetry. It was published in London by prominent children’s publisher John Harris as part of “Harris’s Cabinet of Amusement and Instruction.” These little books, “printed…
Books for Troops: C.B.I. Pointie Talkie
The C.B.I. Pointie Talkie Number 4 is a fascinating phrase book issued by the US Army Air Force for airmen in the China Burma India Theater in World War II. Containing sections in Chinese, Burmese, French, Annamese, Thai (Siamese), Shan, Lolo, and Lao, the book offers phrases for airmen to point at when trying to communicate…
The History of the House that Jack Built
FSU Special Collections & Archives is pleased to add a new chapbook to the John MacKay Shaw Collection of Childhood in Poetry. The History of the House That Jack Built is a popular nursery rhyme told as a cumulative narrative. Starting with “This is the House that Jack built,” each verse adds on to the previous…
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Charles Dicken’s first novel, was published in installments by Chapman and Hall from March 1836 to November 1837. There were 20 parts issued in 19 volumes for a shilling each with 43 engraved plates. The first two parts were illustrated by Robert Seymour, who originally pitched the project to Chapman…
Bedford Book of Hours
In addition to our three newest medieval facsimiles, Special Collections & Archives has recently acquired a high-quality facsimile of the Bedford Book of Hours. The Bedford Book of Hours is a lavishly-illustrated early fifteenth century French prayer book made for John, Duke of Bedford, and his wife, Anne of Burgundy. Anne later gave the book…
New Acquisitions: Naked Lunch
When “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch” first appeared in The Chicago Review, public outrage over obscenity caused the University of Chicago to suppress its publication. In response, Chicago Review editor Irving Rosenthal founded a new literary journal called Big Table, whose inaugural issue included a reprint of the ten episodes from William S. Burrough’s novel-in-progress. The completed novel was first published…
New Acquisitions: Artists’ Books
FSU Special Collections & Archives is pleased to announce that a number of new artists’ books have been cataloged and are now available through our Research Center Reading Room. Made Up by Ellen Knudson at Crooked Letter Press (2015) – According to artist Ellen Knudson, “Made Up is a non-scientific science book about the imaginary…
New Acquisitions: Medieval Facsimiles
FSU Special Collections & Archives is pleased to announce that three new, high-quality facsimiles have been added to our rare books collections and are ready for use in our Research Center Reading Room. Codex Rustici – an Italian manuscript from Florence (circa 1444) depicting a pilgrimage from Florence to the Holy Land. This codex, currently housed at…
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