Arctic History in the John Carter Brown Library's Archive

Arctic history is suddenly hot.  An exhibition currently on view at the British Library - Lines in the Ice: Seeking the Northwest Passage - is bringing attention to early prints and maps of the Arctic and to the historic search for the Northwest Passage. Earlier this week an article published on Slate's history blog The Vault highlighted images from a 19th-century British expedition of Baffin Bay captained by John Ross.  The images in the Slate article are all drawn from the John Carter Brown Library's superb online Archive of Early American Images.  And they're just the tip of the iceberg...

Papyri in the John Rylands Library

From the Nag Hammadi codices discovered in 1945 to the tiny, business card-sized scrap of papyrus mentioning Jesus' wife that surfaced in 2012, Egyptian papyri have yielded some of the most interesting tidbits about early Christianity. The latest such discovery is now accessible in digital form through our LUNA software courtesy of the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester...

Freely Usable Images From The Folger Shakespeare Library

Last Tuesday the Folger Shakespeare Library announced that almost 80,000 images in their Digital Image Collection can now be used under a Creative Commons license. The Library's digital collection, hosted through our LUNA software, is an amazing trove of documents that includes images relating to the Bard himself, as well as a massive amount of historic materials from the 1400s through the mid-1700s... 

Behind the Scenes: Adventures in Digitization

I am one of those children who grew up in the ‘90s with a computer-geek brother, myself dabbling with his Frankensteinian cast-offs. I can actually remember a time when there was no ubiquitous internet--although I also remember X-Files usenet groups. I coded Geocities web pages from scratch (dedicated to Harry Potter novels, of course) and my brother navigated me by way of text-based user interface to some mysterious server that had “Hakuna Matata” in every language imaginable...