Blog Tag: Infrastructure services

For Middlebury and other small liberal arts schools, taking part in JSTOR’s shared collections program is almost a no-brainer, Irwin says, since JSTOR is a database with which many students are already very familiar.

In 2020, Johns Hopkins University faced sudden closure due to COVID-19. Discover how the Special Collections team adapted by partnering with JSTOR Forum, revolutionizing access to materials for faculty and students alike.

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.

Partnering with libraries, publishers, and museums, ITHAKA reduces costs and preserves scholarship for the future with digital special collections.

Preserved collections were launched with Portico as part of ITHAKA’s suite of infrastructure services. Preserved collections provides long-term digitally managed preservation for institutions’ digital collections with Portico. The service is designed to be flexible, so that it can be taken up on its own or integrated with ITHAKA’s other infrastructure services and work as part of institutions’ existing workflows. 

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]