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Category: Discovery Services

Salad Days (and Months) in Rare Books

Julia Blakely
May 6, 2016
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Salad Days (and Months) in Rare Books

My salad days, when I was green in judgement

This common, if well-worn, phrase first appeared in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra of 1606. At the end of Act One of the play, recalling a youthful affair with Julius Caesar, Cleopatra refers to a time of innocence, silliness or indiscretions. Since May is National Salad Month, let us celebrate the greens by looking at the work of another Englishman, John Evelyn (1620-1706). His Acetaria: a discourse of sallets, printed in London in 1699, was the first book devoted to salads.

 

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Charting the Chesapeake from a Civil War Map

Julia Blakely
August 7, 2015
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Charting the Chesapeake from a Civil War Map

Familiar with its waters, I was delighted when an early chart of the Chesapeake Bay, entitled Map of part of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware of 1861, appeared in my cataloging queue. But then who doesn’t like looking at old maps? Getting absorbed in what is fanciful, long-gone or merely changed, and finding remnants of the well-known from a long association with the landscape. And reading any map on paper doesn’t happen every day now, let alone a very rare one.

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Increasing accessibility with the “MARC cocktail”

Erin Rushing
July 23, 2015
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This post was written by Lesley Parilla, database manager and cataloger for the Field Book Project.

What is a library to do when it has fabulous materials to share with users, but making library records for each item requires significantly more time than a typical collection? This was the challenge of the Russell E. Train Africana collection. It contained materials with both broad public appeal and significant historical value, however content and formats varied widely. The library wanted to create records in the predominant library and archival description standards to assure that materials would be discovered by as wide an audience as possible. By using the library and archive standards, records could easily be shared across online platforms. The Libraries decided to pursue a short term project to see if they could determine a solution to these challenges.

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Celebrate the Rhubarb

Julia Blakely
January 21, 2015
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Celebrate the Rhubarb

Rhubarb, that harbinger of spring for many, is honored in the United States on January 23rd with National Rhubarb Day. Having let National Rhubarb Vodka Day (first Saturday in December) pass without note, I wanted to bake a pie in preparation. Thanks to the generosity of a neighbor and his bountiful garden last spring and summer, I had plenty set by. Rhubarb does freeze well. Inspired by the scholars transcribing, as well as cooking with and blogging about, culinary manuscripts dating from 1600 to 1800 in the University of Pennsylvania collections (recently profiled in The Washington Post), I turned to the Smithsonian Libraries for my commemorative effort.

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Wine and Washington

Julia Blakely
October 3, 2014
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"Vendemmia" (Harvest). Manuscript miniature from Tacuino Sanitatis, 1350 (Biblioteca Nazionale Austriaca, Vienna)
“Vendemmia” (Harvest). From the manuscript Tacuinum Sanitatis, ca. 1350 (Biblioteca Nazionale Austriaca, Vienna)

Now that the time of harvesting grapes for wine in the Northern Hemisphere is coming to a close, let’s raise an appreciative glass and toast John Adlum, known to a few as the “Father of American Viticulture.” The history of wine making in the United States is involved, to say the least (see Pinney’s magisterial work on the subject*) but it was Adlum who nurtured the first commercially viable vine in this country. And he did so, surprisingly but not incidentally, in the nation’s capital.

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