News Archives

Institutional Book Arts Collections: Evaluating & Describing

Course Length: 12 hours
Course Week: 7–11 July 2025
Format: online only
Fee: $900

This course will introduce topics in the management of book arts collections, with the term “book arts” referring broadly to any work created through book arts practices (i.e., hand bookbinding, letterpress printing, hand papermaking, &c.).

Topics will include collection development and selection, organization, description, and the development of access policies and procedures. Emphasis will be placed on how book art objects can be evaluated as cultural, material, evidential, artistic, and scholarly objects, and the challenges associated with accurately representing these works through descriptive practices. […]

Medieval Manuscript Fragments: Cataloging & Discoverability

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 20–25 July 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

The study of medieval manuscript fragments has developed into its own specialization in recent years, incorporating paleography, codicology, liturgiology, musicology, textual studies, art history, bibliography, provenance, and digital humanities, among other disciplines. Hundreds of North American collections house early fragments, whether binding waste, cuttings, or single leaves, and most of these are in need of effective description to facilitate discoverability. In this weeklong class—intended primarily for catalogers, curators, and librarians—we will focus on cataloging and discoverability. […]

Modern Special Collections Cataloging

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 8–13 June 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

While rare book and special collections libraries are associated with antiquarian, hand-press books, these collections increasingly include twentieth- and twenty-first-century materials that are not “rare” in the traditional sense of the word. While these materials are more suited to description with RDA rather than one of the Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (DCRM) manuals, they still have unique features and challenges that require a different cataloging perspective than is found in general collections cataloging. […]

Reference Sources for Researching Printed Western Americana

Course Length: 12 hours
Course Week: 24–25 June 2023
Format: in person, Indiana University in Bloomington, IN
Fee: $800

The American West has long been a popular field for book collectors, antiquarian booksellers, and institutional libraries, and bibliographers have produced a large number of reference works related to it. In this two-day course, we’ll examine more than 100 printed and electronic bibliographies, catalogues, and other reference sources, which focus on printed materials relating to, or printed in, the American West through the early twentieth century, as this geographical area has been variously defined by those in the world of rare books. […]

Introduction to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Length: 6 hours
Format: Online

Designed for librarians, archivists, curators, and others with an interest in special collections and exhibitions focused on the global Black experience, this course provides an introduction to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. One of The New York Public Library’s research libraries, the Schomburg Center is an historic institution recognized for its devotion to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences. Special collections materials are held in the Schomburg Center’s Divisions of Art & Artifacts; Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books; […]

The Photographic Book since 1843

Course Length: 12 hours
Schedule: 7–11 July 2025
Format: Online
Fee: $900

The nature, form, and impact of the book changed dramatically with the introduction of photography, altering the way books would be made, would appear, and would help transform the communication of ideas in visual form.

In parallel to this phenomenon, the ability of the photograph to reach its widest audience would entail an essential partnership with the form of the book. The nomenclature of photography remains tied to the book: we think of the photographic “print” and of “printing” a photograph, […]

Scientific Analysis of the Book

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 4–9 June 2023
Format: in person, Yale University in New Haven, CT
Fee: $1,395

There have been tremendous advances in science as it relates to the history of the book. This course will introduce the major technologies currently available to most librarians. During each session, Hark will present the scientific background necessary to make sense of the technology, and will offer an example of that technology as it has been applied to book history. Most of the examples will come from Hark’s own work, […]

Introduction to Audiovisual Archives Management

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 20–25 July 2025
Format: in person, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Fee: $1,495

Media archives present a unique and invaluable world of historical and cultural content captured on an array of aging and obsolete audio, video, and film formats that present unique preservation challenges. Unlike paper, audiovisual media has a very limited lifespan and requires specialized knowledge to safely and accurately evaluate, describe, conserve, replay, and reformat it for preservation and access.

This class will be particularly helpful for collectors, students, librarians, and archivists who plan to or are currently working with media in their collections, […]

Community Archives and Digital Cultural Memory

Jazz saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings on Afrofuturism: “I’ve always been fascinated with the word. I think I first heard about it from John Akomfrah’s documentary “The Last Angel of History.” I watched it and I thought, ‘What does it mean to me?’ I went to a lecture by Kodwo Eshun … and he was talking about Afrofuturism as being a way of poeticising the past. That you recontextualise it and mould it in a way that gives you a power over history. I like that sentiment. It’s essentially this Sun Ra philosophy that I’m really into: the fact that communities that have agency are able to form their own philosophical structures.”

This is a course on conceptualizing and curating digital cultural memory, […]

Integrating Born-Digital Materials: Archival Standards & Approaches

Archives have always been format agnostic and nothing has changed with the introduction of born-digital materials (born-digital materials are those that began life on a computer, rather than as digitized surrogates of real-world artifacts). Managing archives and providing access to them requires a toolkit of flexible strategies and standards that archivists can deploy based on a shifting landscape of institutional priorities and realities. We will explore the range and utility of existing archival standards and approaches to integrate management of born-digital materials into the broader endeavor of keeping archives. Strategies for managing or incorporating digitized surrogates into archival finding aids will not be discussed in any detail. […]

Special Collections Leadership Seminar

“It was tremendously helpful to be among a community of peers and to have so many generous visiting speakers to learn from, ask questions of, and bounce ideas off. I learned so much this week.” — 2017 student

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 6–11 July 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

Organizational leadership and management require a portfolio of skills and strengths that are often difficult to develop within the traditional functional areas of special collections librarianship. These skills and strengths include strategic thinking and planning, […]

Preservation Imaging: Science, Scholarship, and the Artifact

Utilizing non-invasive integrated digital imaging systems such as spectral imaging provides the scholar and researcher with a tool that can provide useful, hidden and unknown information about an artifact. When we look at a document, we do not usually see everything that is contained within the original material. The unaided eye often cannot detect features such as writing and inks that are erased, hidden by overwriting or varnish, or faded because of environmental factors; nor can it identify important provenance components such as colorants. These features on photographs, manuscripts, maps, and other materials are important for scholarly investigation, authentication, “fingerprinting” […]

Born-Digital Materials in Special Collections

Special collections libraries have always held a wide-range of format types, each with its own affordances. This course will consider the more distinctive issues and considerations related to collecting and providing access to born-digital materials. (Born-digital materials are those that began life on a computer, rather than as digitized surrogates of real-world artifacts.) Contemporary collections of “papers” are often hybrid collections, with diskettes, CDs, hard drives, and sometimes entire computers commingling with more traditional kinds of archival content. Many collection creators have a more intimate relationship with their websites, social media, and mobile devices than with the paper in their lives. […]

Introduction to Archives for Special Collections Librarians, Booksellers & Collectors

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 1–6 June 2025
Format: in person, Yale University in New Haven, CT
Fee: $1,495

Libraries with special collections increasingly collect, curate, and provide access to many forms of rare and archival materials within one integrated environment. Managers, curators, catalogers, and reference librarians whose education and experience have focused on published materials must therefore be conversant with archival issues and collection management strategies. Similarly, booksellers and collectors commonly find themselves handling material that may best be managed using archival principles. This course, […]

Visual Materials Cataloging

Need help with “hidden collections”? This course is intended for librarians and archivists who want to make visual material resources available and useful to researchers. The types of pictures we will consider range from eighteenth-century fine prints to born-digital photographs, from cartoons to posters, and from book illustrations to stereograph cards. The cataloging techniques we will use cover entire collections as well as single items. Specific topics include: description and transcription; subject indexing and form/genre access; the relationship between physical processing and cataloging; and establishing institutional priorities.

The core guideline is the new national standard Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Graphics). […]

Advanced Rare Book Cataloging Workshop

This course is intended for library catalogers who have mastered the basics of cataloging rare printed monographs according to Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books), and wish to solidify their expertise and receive specialized guidance in applying those skills. It is particularly suitable for those who have successfully completed Rare Book Cataloging (L-30).

The bulk of class time will be spent on full-level DCRM(B) cataloging of uncataloged rare printed monographs, using OCLC’s Connexion client, with plenty of opportunity for questions, discussions, and correction. The course is not advanced in the sense that students will be given especially problematic materials to catalog; […]

Rare Book Cataloging

Assisted by Amy Tims (1–6 June) & Jessica Grzegorski (20–25 July)

“Every single day was as useful and relevant as the last. I’m walking away not only a better, ‘sleeker’ cataloger, but an inspired one as well!” — 2017 student

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Weeks: 1–6 June 2025; 20–25 July 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

Aimed at catalogers who find that their present duties include (or shortly will include) the cataloging of books in their rare materials or special collections and want to be trained in applying Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books). […]

Reference Sources for Researching Rare Books

“Until we live in the Matrix and can upload the Joel Silver Memory Palace Expansion Pack into our own brains, this course is the best you can get!” — 2017 student

Course Length: 22 hours
Course Week: 2–6 June 2025
Format: online only
Fee: $1,100

This course presents a systematic introduction to approximately 300 printed and electronic reference sources for researching rare books. Emphasis will be placed on sources in the fields of early printed books; British and American literature; historical Americana; voyages and travels; maps and atlases; science and medicine; […]

Special Collections Curatorship

Curators must possess a range of professional skills and competencies in order to build, explicate, preserve, promote, and administer effectively the collections in their care. Gaining these proficiencies, however, can prove difficult: the curricula of library science programs often do not deal directly with curatorial practice, and attaining the requisite training or knowledge on the job is not always possible.

Special Collections Curatorship surveys the responsibilities that are typically shouldered by curators, acquainting students with the issues, procedures, considerations, and challenges common to the profession along with the principles that undergird the field. Topics to be covered include collection development, […]

XML in Action: Creating Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Texts

A practical exploration of the creation, preservation, and use of electronic texts and their associated images in the humanities, with a special focus on special collections materials.

This course is aimed primarily (although not exclusively) at librarians, publishers, and scholars keen to develop, use, publish, and control electronic texts for library, research, scholarly communication, or teaching purposes.

The week will center around the creation of a set of archival-quality etexts and digital images (probably 18th and 19th century letters, which are short enough to allow each participant to take an entire document through all its creation stages during the course). […]