research aids

In my first post on the State Papers Online, I discussed how to search the database for a document that you already had some sort of reference to, whether that was the document/entry number, or a page number. In this…

The Calendar of State Papers is a well-known historical resource for early modernists across a variety of disciplines. This “calendar,” or register, documents the workings of the British government during the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts, 1509–1714. For decades,…

Picture, if you will, a 16th-century Continental edition of Ovid, an 18th-century illustrated history of London, and a 19th-century book about the American west. Now picture which one of the three might be “in Adams.” Which one did you pick? Years ago,…

Following up on last month’s post about the new-and-improved “Limit location” in Hamnet, the one that lets you quickly limit your search to one of four locations, including just Vault material, I thought I should say a few words about the limits…

We’ve recently made two small but significant improvements to Hamnet, the Folger’s online catalog—not enough to be worth a fanfare of “New and improved!” but probably at least worth pointing at while saying “Still old, but less irksome!” The first change is so obvious…

You know the saying, “the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from?” You know Sarah’s post about the transcription practices used in The Collation, and Goran’s posts about V and U in titles and…

As mentioned in a previous post, several online finding aids for manuscript collections at the Folger now include links to digital images of the documents, providing another avenue of access to both onsite and offsite researchers. Finding aids provide detailed…

Greetings Dear Readers! Today’s tooltip introduces new e-book resources we are in the process of rolling out through Hamnet, including: ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB), a nonprofit online collection of over 3,700 current and recent titles in the humanities, “offering a…

Dear Readers: Our Digital Image Collection has had a bit of a make-over. The purpose of today’s post is to introduce you to new fields and field names and to explain a bit of background that lead to these changes. Background:…

Dear Fellow Collators: Today’s post focuses once again on powerful but perhaps under-utilized features of our digital image databases. Recent tips have dealt with saving static URLs to get back to previous searches or to individual images, and saving static…

As part of their paleography training, my paleography students always spend a bit of each afternoon working in pairs on transcriptions. It gives them a break from being in the “spotlight” as we go around the room reading manuscripts line…

an early modern workspace Dear Readers: This post is a continuation of the last tooltip on digital image URLs. The last post discussed how to link via a static URL to a luna.folger.edu search result set, how to link to…