digital resources
Introducing our new finding aids website
We are pleased to announce our new https://findingaids.folger.edu/ site!
“Good Grief! What’s That?”: Odd Images in the Folger Microfilm Image Collection
A guest post by William Davis Thank you to everyone who left a guess on this month’s crocodile mystery! Everyone got a piece of it, but none the whole. It takes a stalwart person to identify some of the many quotes…
Folger manuscripts out and about: a field trip to Penn!
During the Folger’s building renovation, we have been fortunate to be able to send a selection of twenty-nine pre-modern manuscripts up to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts in Philadelphia. This exciting…
Happy Retirement, Hamnet!
After over a quarter century of devoted bibliographic service, the time has come to bid farewell to Hamnet, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s first OPAC (“Online Public Access Catalog”). Hamnet officially retires tonight, at the end of the last day of…
Our new catalog is here!
In April we announced the preview of our new catalog, and now it is time to make it official: the new catalog is here! Visit it at https://catalog.folger.edu/. The new catalog! Huzzah! TIND ILS (Get comfy; this is a long…
Invitation to preview our new catalog
Psssst…. we’re working on a new online catalog for the Folger collection. Do you want to help out by having an early look? If so, please keep reading! The link is deliberately buried deep in this blog post because there’s…
The Folger G.K. Hall Catalogs, or How to fit an entire card catalog on your bookshelf
I had the good fortune of learning to do scholarly research during the transition from card catalogs to Online Public Access Catalogs or ‘OPAC’s, as they are known in libraries. I have a particular fondness for card catalogsSee also Abbie…
An Experiment in Following a Worm Through a Folded Letter
A guest post by William Davis Folger staff have long been interested in folding early modern letters for mailing. It comes up periodically when someone finds a letter with unusual folds. Both Heather Wolfe and Erin Blake have written Collation…
Introducing the Folger Reference Image Collection
Sometimes when people contact the Folger to ask questions about items in our collections, the easiest way to provide an answer is to take a quick photo of a particular detail. This has resulted in a growing collection of smartphone…
Strange New World: Folger Resources for Online Learning and Teaching
I think Miranda will forgive the paraphrase when we say it’s a strange new world out there right now. For many of us, our lives have been turned upside down in the last week (has it really only been a week?),…
Printed Elizabethan poetry now included in Union First Line Index
As of September 2019, researchers have 35,261 more reasons to use the Union First Line Index of English Verse, hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library. The database now contains all first lines, not just manuscript first lines, from Elizabethan poetry:…
British Book Illustrations
Good news, picture-seekers! If you’ve ever tried to search Luna for a picture of something specific, you’ve probably noticed that relatively few digital images match one-to-one with their source descriptions. For example, although a keyword search for “dog” will bring…