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Blog Tag: Collection building, cataloging, and publishing

April 22, 2024

Skidmore College and JSTOR collaborate to enhance digital access to special collections

By Maria Papadouris, Content and Community Engagement Manager, ITHAKA
Explore how Skidmore College digitizes its special collections in this insightful blog post detailing David Seiler's efforts in leading the transition to the digital age.

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February 9, 2024

Academic institutions increase the reach of their digitized collections on JSTOR: The results of a three-year initiative

By Kevin Guthrie, President, ITHAKA and Bruce Heterick, Senior Vice President of Open Collections and Infrastructure
Discover highlights from the Coalition for Networked Information's biannual membership meeting, where discussions revolved around networked information technologies in higher education and research. Explore the outcomes of JSTOR's Open Community Collections program, showcasing the benefits for participant libraries in terms of reach and visibility.

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November 14, 2023

Broadening global access:
Sharing open access special collections through our pilot program

By Jason Przybylski Associate Director, Infrastructure Services, Outreach & Participation, JSTOR
Partnering with libraries, publishers, and museums, ITHAKA reduces costs and preserves scholarship for the future with digital special collections.

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October 17, 2023

On the road to future-proofing all digital content:
How Portico now preserves libraries’ self-curated collections

By Jason Przybylski, Associate Director, Infrastructure Services, Outreach & Participation, JSTOR; Kate Wittenberg, Managing Director, Portico
Portico has earned its reputation as a trusted guardian of digital content for publishers, with over 1,000 publishers and 1,000 libraries worldwide relying on its time-honored preservation approach. Portico centers long-term content management and organizational commitment, as well as a dedication to addressing the needs of future scholars.

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July 25, 2019

Three ornithology collections that are free as the birds

The history of ornithology (the scientific study of birds) has involved observations captured in imagery going as far back as prehistoric stone-age drawings.[1] As ornithology developed as a natural science it faced the aesthetic challenge of convincingly capturing depictions of different bird species,[2] leading to beautifully documented and historically fascinating works of illustration. Several shared […]

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July 9, 2019

Books of hours: illuminating the Trinity College Watkinson Library special collections

Books of hours are devotional texts that contain a personalized selection of prayers, hymns, psalms, and New Testament excerpts chosen specifically for their owner. Popular in the Middle Ages, the most expensive of these books could be highly decorated, but the more affordable versions usually only showed minimal decoration, usually of the first letter of […]

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March 4, 2019

What’s in the box? The art of reliquaries

Relics—bits of bone, clothing, shoes or dust—from Christian martyrs became popular in Western Christianity in the Middle Ages. The cult of relics dates back to the second and third centuries, when martyrs were persecuted and often killed in ways that fragmented the body, which was taboo in Roman society. The intention was to desecrate the […]

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October 30, 2018

Open Access: an early guide to hieroglyphics

The Allegheny College Egyptian Hieroglyphics collection features every page of a single manuscript in the James Winthrop Collection. The collection includes approximately 3,000 titles from the libraries of Winthrop and his father, John Winthrop, who was Hollis Professor of Natural Philosophy and Mathematics at Harvard. This particular manuscript is in the public domain, and Allegheny […]

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September 27, 2018

On this day: the book that led to the creation of the EPA

On this day in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published, bringing widespread attention to environmental issues caused by the use of synthetic pesticides in the United States. The book sparked controversy, particularly from chemical companies that dismissed Silent Spring’s assertions about the connection between pesticides and ecological health. However, Carson’s claims were borne out […]

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August 16, 2018

2,000+ punk rock flyers, free as they were intended to be

  Punk flyers from the 1970s to the 1990s shared many of the qualities of the music they promoted–a DIY aesthetic, an embrace of cheap and accessible technology (i.e., photocopiers), plus a healthy dose of humor. In contrast to the often ornate Art Nouveau-inspired rock posters of the psychedelic 1960s, punk flyers typically featured dissonant […]

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