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Manuscript Monday: Penn Library’s LJS 46 – Herbal. (Video Orientation)
Dot Porter, SIMS Curator of Digital Humanities, presents a Video Orientation to the University of Pennsylvania Library’s LJS 46, an Italian illustrated herbal, with a group of texts in English, Latin, and Spanish about Morocco added less than a century later. Plant names in Latin, with a few words in Italian; texts about Morocco in…
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Calcutta’s Unlikely Reporter: Gertrude Carew Robinson’s Letters to Her Mother
This past week, I had the honor of surveying and processing my very first collection. The collection in question was a series of letters that a woman named Gertrude Carew Robinson sent to her mother, Eliza Crawford Laurie, throughout the years of 1885 to 1892, mostly detailing her life in Calcutta during the British colonial…
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Identifying tactile alphabets for total beginners: a cataloging story
From time to time in a cataloger’s life, there will appear on a book a feature so distinct, and yet so unfamiliar, that one is impelled to embark on a research side quest in order to properly name that feature. While cataloging The World as I Have Found It: Sequel to Incidents in the Life…
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“The truth of these cases I can verify”: Medicine in 18th-century London
The last time I cataloged a medical manuscript, I found myself unexpectedly interested in the history of pharmacology in southeastern Pennsylvania in the late 18th century. This time, a doctor’s notebook from London in the mid-18th century has won me over. Ms. Codex 2341 came to the Penn Libraries as a “Recipe and medical prescription…
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“My Desire of Breathing a Free Air”: Giorgio Levi Della Vida Letter as an “enemy alien,” December 1941
The recently processed Trustees of the University records improves researchers access to the minutes and supporting documents that document the administrative history of the University dating back to the establishment of the Academy and Charity School. Meeting minutes from 1749 through 1969 can now be accessed online. The records also chart the changes in how…
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The International Appeal of Musicals
Growing up, I was a theater kid, but not in the traditional sense of the term. I grew up watching the Sound of Music, Fiddler on the Roof, and West Side Story on repeat. In high school, I played violin in the pit orchestra for my community theater group for the musicals Oliver!, Les Misérables,…
Unique at Penn 