University calendars tend to operate on a different year than the standard January-December. The academic calendar begins in the fall, and the budget calendar restarts in the summer, and so January 1 is simply the restart after a holiday break. However, the new year is a good time to consider the many new unique and […]
Many thanks to Lucia Raspe for sharing her work on censorship in early printed Selihot, which was very helpful in writing this post. The Jewish month of Elul, coming right before the High Holidays of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, is a particularly solemn one in Jewish religious life. Special penitential prayers, called Selihot, are […]
As part of the follow up on the fantastic work that was done by Kelilah, Hannah, and Avinoam, I have been revisiting some of the interesting materials that they came across while working on cataloging our rare Judaica imprints. Below is just a sampling of some of the wonderful materials that we have in the […]
Happy New Year! December 2016 marked the end of a three year project to catalog Columbia’s rare Hebraica and Judaica collections. While Columbia has been collecting Judaica since its inception (with a donation from Kings’ College founder Samuel Johnson that included his Hebrew-Latin Psalms), many of the books were left uncataloged due to lack of […]
The Conservation Department at Columbia University Libraries is an often unsung hero of the libraries. The work of their talented conservators encompasses all areas of the library, and ensures that our collections, both modern and ancient, will endure for years to come. Many times, in a routine conservation activity, hidden aspects of books come to […]
The wonderful thing about Columbia’s rare Judaica collection is that there is so much yet to be discovered – and rediscovered! A brief foray into the RBML rare stacks always yields wonderful stories. A couple of weeks ago, I began looking at some of the very largest rare Hebrew books, trying to see if any […]
Just in time for the beginning of the Fall semester, I am pleased to announce the purchase of two new databases for Columbia’s Judaica collection: 1. Otzar HaHochma – a database of 72,700 digitized Hebrew books, from the 15th century to the present day. Includes books from the presses of Mossad HaRav Kook and Mekhon […]
Columbia’s printed Judaica collection is composed of many different books, each with their own story to tell. Unfortunately, however, only about 1/3 of our books were actually in our online catalog. To rectify this, we hired Hannah Vaitsblit, a Barnard student who has been carefully checking every Judaica book in our rare stacks to make […]
The Columbia University Libraries has recently acquired a database of 400 digitized Yiddish books from the Hebraica and Judaica of the Tychson Collection at the Rostock University. According to the publisher's description: "The nearly 400 titles of this edition offer a cross-section of the history of Yiddish books up to the 19th century. There are […]
One of the wonderful things about being the first librarian for Jewish Studies at Columbia is the constant discovery that takes place as I research and document the history of the Judaica collection. In the process of reviewing a list of Hebrew books in the Columbia Manuscript Room (which included both rare printed books and […]