The Collation

Research and Exploration at the Folger

Folger Tooltips: Making a spreadsheet from raw Hamnet data

August 25, 2015 | By Erin Blake

Hamnet, the Folger’s online catalog, is more than just a searchable inventory of printed books, manuscripts, engravings, paintings, and other resources in the collection. It is also a giant data set, freely available for machine analysis. But there’s a catch: library catalog data is encoded in MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging), the coelecanth of the digital world. Developed in the 1960s, this data standard is now a living fossil.… Continue Reading

Libraries ǂx Special collections ǂv Blogs

August 18, 2015 | By Sarah Hovde

How do catalogers make library materials findable? The cataloging process has already been covered here at The Collation—identifying the item and describing its contents so that users and other catalogers alike can compare the book in the catalog record to the book in their hands or the book they want to retrieve from the stacks. At the Folger, we pay particular attention to the artifactual evidence of our items in addition to their contents, and this level of cataloging is enabled by the use of genre and form terms.… Continue Reading

‘I Grapple him to my Soul with hooks of Steel’

August 11, 2015 | By Abbie Weinberg

I’m sure all of our readers know that moment when you’re looking for one thing but find something else entirely (some call it serendipity—I just call it research). Such as doing a Name Browse in Hamnet for “Adams” (I believe at the time I was looking for something edited by our former director, Joseph Quincy Adams), and discovering the heading “Adams, Abigail, 1744-1818, correspondent.” I remember being bemused by this discovery, a little perplexed as to why we would have that in our collection, and filing its existence away for another time.… Continue Reading

A Pin’s Worth: Pins in Books

August 4, 2015 | By Caroline Duroselle-Melish

The object you see tucked in the gathering of the book in this month’s Crocodile Mystery is a pin. Recently, I have become aware of the presence of pins in a number of books at the Folger Shakespeare Library. At one time, curators and conservators removed them from the books and placed them in curatorial files. Now, we leave pins where we find them if they do not risk harming the book or the reader.… Continue Reading

“What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?”: August 2015

July 28, 2015 | By The Collation

It’s nearly August (where has the summer gone?), and you know what that means! Time for another mystery. At first glance, the “what” of this picture may be obvious. But take a second look. What is this foreign object, and what is it doing here? As always, comment with you thoughts, and we’ll be back next week with a full explanation.… Continue Reading