Depression, murder, insanity….not the first words that come to mind when contemplating lexicography. Nevertheless, such is the history of English dictionaries. The stories of Samuel Johnson, James Murray and W.C. […]
Got Classification? “Dewey Ever!”
From ancient times, there have been attempts to sort collections of texts and to create classifications for collected information. The earliest known archives and libraries were discovered in Ugarit with […]
Only for Leisure, Breaks, and Procrastination…No More! Studying and Researching Comics
We’ve suggested reading comics and graphic novels a couple of times now, but we’ve yet to really talk about the study of graphic novels and comics. After attending this year’s […]
Will the Real Dr. Jones Please Stand Up?
Are you tired of searching for yourself in Google Scholar, Scopus, or Academic Search Complete and finding other people who share your family name? This is a serious problem for […]
What I Found In Special Collections: Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
Welcome to the first in a series of occasional posts in which Special Collections student employees discuss the cool items they get to work with! Gabriel Denis, the author of […]
Beyond the Bookplate: Small-timore, 19th-Century Style
It is 1850, and an unidentified chronicler sits amidst the Greek Revival architecture of the Mondawmin Estate, awaiting the start of the third auction to empty the 10-year-old mansion of its […]
American Drama
Many know of Walt Whitman as America’s first true poet and the liberator of American literature. What many might not know is that Whitman did not emerge on the literary […]
How NOT to treat our books
Don’t you love to sit down with a good book, or better yet, a book that’s crucial to your research, and find that someone before you has treated it like […]
What is the Bibliotheca Fictiva?
From antiquity to current times, there have always been writers devising literary forgeries of all kinds, either copying an existing book from the classical period or simply creating a fake […]
Why Aren’t All Journals Available Online?
We are always getting questions about why some journals are available online and some are not. Some of the comments from a recent library survey requested that we get “…..all […]