2020 was a year like no other. It started normally enough, but on March 16, 2020, Columbia University closed its physical facilities as part of the New York State-mandated PAUSE that sought to control the spread of COVID. For months, staff were permitted onsite only for essential security and maintenance checks. As restrictions loosened over […]
Archival description is a critical part of any special collection program. Researchers rely on description of our archival collections to find materials relevant to their work. Archivists rely on description to manage the materials. As office technology changes, archival description changes along with it. […]
Kevin Schlottmann, RBML’s Head Archivist, shares these updates about finding aids that our archivist and collections management specialists have stewarded over the past month and made available for RBML researchers – a season of bounty even in a global pandemics! Newly digitized oral history collections Gail Mary Killian and Stephen Desroches sound recordings, 1970-2003 “The […]
Columbia’s collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts is rich and resplendent, for all that much of it has sat quietly and largely unseen in the stacks throughout most of this tumultuous year. But while opportunities to leaf through these manuscripts in person may still feel distant, it just got much easier to see a few […]
It sounds like the setup for a magic trick: how can an archivist and a public services assistant, both working from home without access to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, identify 1,257 (!) women previously referred to in our finding aids by their husbands’ names? Yet it involved no sleight of hand. We used […]