Under The Lens: Coney Island’s Baby Incubators

One of the absolute pleasures of working as a quality control technician in the Preservation and Digital Conversion Division’s Digital Imaging Lab is seeing the wide variety of fascinating materials that pass through the studio on a regular basis. Recently, the Imaging Lab was asked to digitize photographs from the Frederick Fried Coney Island Collection […]

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Recreating a lost Yiddish database: The LCAAJ Project

The Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ) is an extraordinary resource for research in Yiddish studies.  It consists of field interviews recorded between 1959 and 1972 with Yiddish-speaking informants conducted by Columbia University’s Department of Linguistics, who donated the Archive to Columbia University Libraries in 1995. The Archive presents an interesting preservation challenge, […]

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A Short Look at the Long History of Conservation at Columbia

In keeping with our “long view” of the Columbia University Libraries and their collections, we should consider the steadily evolving history of the Conservation Program at Columbia. The first professional conservator was hired at Columbia in the 1980’s, but we know that the University maintained a book bindery since 1912, when Columbia’s library was in […]

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Is Your Google Book Incomplete? We May Be Able To Help.

As many people know, Google has digitized hundreds of thousands of books from libraries around the world, including Columbia University Libraries, and they’ve created Google Books, a wonderful resource for readers and researchers.  Subsequently Columbia and many other libraries have contributed their Google digital versions to HathiTrust to assure that the e-books are preserved into […]

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Hebrew and Judaica Manuscripts Project

Hebrew and Judaica Manuscripts Project Between 2014 – 2015 at the behest of Michelle Chesner, Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies, PDCD staff completed a project to make a number of previously photographed Hebrew and Judaica Manuscripts fully accessible to the world on the Internet Archive. Here is some background from Michelle: “Columbia’s Hebrew manuscript […]

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The Complexity of Color – Creating Digital Surrogates

Researchers and students today have an increasing expectation of being able to find needed materials and information online. Libraries and other cultural heritage institutions have responded by focusing on digitization for both preservation and access to these cultural heritage materials. The Digital Imaging Lab, as part of the Preservation and Digital Conversion Division, is at […]

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A Brief History of the Preservation Reformatting Department

Columbia’s Preservation Reformatting Department (PRD) began as a reprographic services unit back in the 1930s. In the 1970s-1980s, the department gradually became a reprogaphy unit with an emphasis on the preservation of brittle and deteriorating materials. While the Preservation Division was taking shape, the world was just beginning to understand the slow moving disaster headed […]

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