The cartoonist Bill Griffith has had a storied career, from his early underground comics featuring Mr. the Toad, to his long-running character Zippy the Pinhead, to his involvement in the influential comics anthology, Arcade, to his recent foray into long-form comics with his revelatory family history Invisible ink: my mother’s secret love affair with a famous cartoonist. […]
Category: Archives and Manuscripts
RESOURCE: medieval art in CORSAIR, the Morgan Library’s catalog
Scholars looking for medieval illuminations to illustrate their arguments need look no further than the Morgan Library. The Morgan has digitized and cataloged every image in its vast holdings of medieval manuscripts. While an image search can be made in CORSAIR, the general catalog of manuscripts and printed books, there is a specific area of […]
Columbia University Libraries Expands Support for Research in Comics and Graphic Novels
Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML) is pleased to announce the acquisition of two significant additions to its Comics and Graphic Novels collections: research materials for Larry Tye’s well-received 2012 book, Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Superhero, as well as six 1940’s Batman scripts from the estate of Jerry Robinson. […]
Explore the Library’s Online Exhibitions
The Libraries house so much more than print resources! Four new online exhibitions opened recently, ranging in topic from social welfare to journalism to architecture to literature. Photographs from the Community Service Society Records, 1900-1920 An exhibit of photographs (by Jessie Tarbox Beals, Lewis Hine, and others) and publications used in the “scientific charity” movement […]
Archival Recordings of the Composers Forum, 1951-1977
Contained within the archives of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (which are held by Columbia University Libraries) there is a series of original reel-to-reel recordings of the concerts of the Composers Forum, made in New York from 1951-1977. The Composers Forum concerts were an important series of concerts of art music by contemporary American composers. […]
Digitale Sammlungen: Riches from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
E-books in CLIO have gotten a lot snazzier. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB) has been digitizing thousands upon thousands of their rare book holdings, and these free e-books are all findable in the Columbia Libraries catalog. These BSB records have been gathered into a collection called "Digitale Sammlungen." Thus far there are over 28,000 of the […]
Presidential Libraries
Separate presidential libraries are a generally a 20th century phenomenon–previously presidential papers were usually kept by the National Archives or in historical societies. The privately funded museum/library/shrine of modern presidents has many advantages, and some drawbacks. The advantages are that there is a focused, dedicated staff collecting and arranging material, and the drawbacks are that each library […]
Military History Institute
The website of the Military History Institute at Carlisle PA (official name: U.S. Army Heritage & Education Center) http://www.ahco.army.mil/site/index.jsp is a gold mine of useful information, both bibliographic and full text, for an area in which Columbia traditionally hasn’t been strong. There are two basic catalogs listed on this link, the Research Catalog, which is […]
British National Archives, plus Manuscripts
The National Archives, English version, is the newish name for the Public Record Office. The archives has a very good search engine here: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ The search link (simple and advanced) is on the upper right hand side. If the material either hasn’t been microfilmed or if no one in the U.S. has the film, it […]
City Hall Library
The New York City Hall Library at http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/html/about/chlibrary.shtml has just brought up their catalog online, and the librarian has asked that we urge our students to use the online catalog before going down, since they are very short-staffed, and this will save both the Library and our students a lot of time. […]