Have you noticed any new articles on Wikipedia lately? An average of 700-800 are added to the English-language Wikipedia each day. And recently, some of them were created right here at the Folger.
On Friday, May 13th, the Folger held its first official edit-a-thon: despite the ominous date and intermittent thunderstorms outside, the Early Modern Edit-a-Thon was a success! Participating Folger staff were joined by visitors, including several members of Wikimedia DC who generously shared their knowledge with us, and together we edited and created about 15 articles on Shakespeare and the early modern period.… Continue Reading
Today’s post returns to the cliffhanger at the end of Tuesday’s Physical description in book cataloging overview: if [4], CXXII leaves : ill. ; 31 cm (fol.) forms a complete physical description in a library catalog, then what’s up with a4 A-O8 P10 and where does it fit in?
a4 A-O8 P10 is an example of a signature statement, sometimes also called a collation (one of the many meanings of “collation” for which this blog is named).… Continue Reading
Does a4 A-O8 P10 make perfect sense to you? If so, please read on anyway. This isn’t a post on how to decode a collational formula. It’s a post about what to expect (and what not to expect) in the “physical description” portion of a library catalog record for a book. In other words, the part that looks like this in a Hamnet record, taking the record for the 1513 Venetian edition of Macrobius’s Commentaries on the Dream of Scipio as an example:
International Standard Bibliographic Description (yes, there is an international standard) calls this part of the record the Material Description Area.… Continue Reading
The answer to last week’s Crocodile mystery is, as some of you guessed, £135 15s 0d (or 135 pounds, 15 shillings). This amount is a snippet of one entry made on a page in Folger MS V.b.308, the account book of Elizabeth Hardwick Talbot (a.k.a. Bess of Hardwick), the Countess of Shrewsbury. Her steward, Edward Whalley, apparently kept the accounts in this bound manuscript, dated ca.… Continue Reading
Guest Post by Folger conservator Austin Plann Curley
“You can’t always get what you want.” So said the Rolling Stones in 1969. Such was the case for the Folger Shakespeare Library in our recent request to borrow the Diary of John Wilkes Booth for our current exhibition America’s Shakespeare, which runs through July 24, 2016.
Ford’s Theater keeps the diary on permanent display alongside other artifacts from the assassination.… Continue Reading
Here’s a mystery of the Crocodile manner for May. The text shown in this image is one piece of a larger whole, but the question is what is it and how does it relate to the whole?
As always, post your comments and thoughts below. We’ll be back with clarifying information next week.… Continue Reading
