New York
Bunraku, Japanese puppet theater, is an unusually complex dramatic form, a collaborative effort among puppeteers, narrators, and musicians. Columbia University Libraries' Bunraku collection is one the most extensive in the world, documenting its rich performance tradition, which has been recognized by UNESCO as a "masterpiece" of humanity.
The Bunraku gallery is divided into plays, productions, authors, backstage subjects, kashira, and characters. It documents the form's revival in the second half of the 20th century, through more than 12,500 slides and nearly 7,000 black-and-white photographs of rehearsals and performances.
The Biggert Collection of Architectural Vignettes on Commercial Stationery Gift of Robert Biggert in Honor of Lisa Ann Riveaux The Robert Biggert Collection of Architectural Vignettes on Commercial Stationery was donated to the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library by Robert Biggert in honor of Lisa Ann Riveaux. This unique collection of printed ephemera contains over 1,300 items with architectural imagery spanning the dates 1850 to 1920, in more than 350 cities and towns in forty-five states, as well as the District of Columbia and U.S. possessions. New York City is particularly well-represented with over 100 items portraying structures below Houston Street alone.
Chinese Paper Gods Collection Essays The images in this collection were assembled by Anne S. Goodrich (1895–2005) in 1931, when as a Christian missionary in Peking she became interested in local folk religious practices. She studied the paper gods in this collection for much of her life. After publishing her research conclusions in 1991, she donated these prints to the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University. The images are divided initially by usage: Those which were purchased to be burned immediately and serve as emissaries to heaven; and those which were purchased to be displayed for a year while offering protection to the family in a variety of ways, before being burned. The images are further divided by display locations and by the deities they represent.
The Papers of John Jay is an image database and indexing tool comprising some 13,000 documents (more than 30,000 page images) scanned chiefly from photocopies of original documents. Most of the source material was assembled by Columbia University's John Jay publication project staff during the 1960s and 1970s under the direction of the late Professor Richard B. Morris. More about the project >> Portrait courtesy of The National Gallery of Art
The Digital Scriptorium is a growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research. It bridges the gap between a diverse user community and the limited resources of libraries by means of sample imaging and extensive rather than intensive cataloguing.
About the Collection The C. V. Starr East Asian Library's run of Ling long women's magazine is one of the most complete outside China, acquired, we believe, in the late 1930s or early 1940s as part of a concerted effort to enlarge Columbia University's Chinese-language holdings. The collection expanded dramatically in the years between 1938 and 1941 when the holdings more than doubled, thanks to a special grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
The New York Real Estate Brochure Collection, housed in Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library's Classics Department , consists of over 9,200 advertising brochures, floor plans, price lists, and related materials that document residential and commercial real estate development in the five boroughs of New York and outlying vicinities from the 1920s to the 1970s. The majority of the collection is offerings for apartment and other residential spaces. This collection of ephemeral advertising material constitutes an invaluable resource for researching New York City architecture. The brochures and related materials provide architects' and agents' names, illustrate interior and exterior views of buildings, display typical floor plans, and list prominent features of the buildings.
The Notable New Yorkers Web site offers audio recordings and transcripts of interviews with ten influential New Yorkers, drawn from the collections of the Oral History Research Office of the Columbia University Libraries . These interviews, conducted by the Office between 1955 and 2001, open an imaginative portal into twentieth-century New York City and the ways in which it has deeply affected the culture and history of the United States and the world beyond.
America's First Illustrator: Alexander Anderson Sixteen scrapbooks, containing close to 10,000 wood-engravings by 19th-century master illustrator Alexander Anderson. Collection History Sixteen scrapbooks, containing close to 10,000 wood-engravings by 19th-century master illustrator Alexander Anderson. Background Alexander Anderson (1775-1870) is considered one of America’s earliest and finest wood-engravers. During a career spanning seventy years, he produced a large number of illustrations for books, periodicals, newspapers, and other commercial ephemera, after both his own designs and those of other artists. Related Resources Books illustrated by Anderson are available in large libraries with strong 19th-century holdings, including NYPL.
The NEH-funded Joseph Urban Stage Designs Stabilization and Access Project of 2002-2004 focused on materials relating to Urban's New York theater career from 1914-1933, specifically the documentation of his productions for the Ziegfeld Follies and other theater producers, and his productions for the Metropolitan Opera. The archives of these productions contained many thousands of documents, photographs, sketches, technical drawings, and watercolors, as well as the actual stage models. Some 61 of the models remained fully assembled when acquired by Columbia, while 281 models had been collapsed by the Urban studio into one or more flattened bundles each. Press Release, 5/10/02 Selection for Digitization.
Yul phyogs so soʾi gsar ʾgyur me loṅ The Tibet Mirror (Tib. Yul phyogs so so'i gsar 'gyur me long) was published from 1925 to 1963 in Kalimpong, and chronicles the most dramatic social and political transformation in Tibet during a time when vernacular writing was relatively scarce and a Tibetan media practically non-existent. The paper also relayed information about World War II, the independence of India, and other global news to Tibetan readers in Lhasa, Gyantse, Kham, etc., and to traders and aristocrats who frequently traveled from Lhasa via the Chumbi Valley to Kalimpong, Darjeeling and Calcutta.
About About the Lehman Special Correspondence Files The Columbia University Libraries has scanned and made available here electronically the Special Correspondence Files of Herbert Lehman. More than 37,000 documents are included. Typed documents have also been OCRed, permitting full-text searching. The Special Correspondence Files of the Herbert Lehman Papers contain correspondence with nearly 1,000 individuals from 1895 through 1963. Beginning with letters from Lehman's family in the late nineteenth century, the series documents the range and scope of Lehman's long career in public service. Lehman started the series in an attempt to isolate materials he wanted for his own personal use.
APIS is a collections-based repository hosting information about and images of papyrological materials (e.g. papyri, ostraca, wood tablets, etc) located in collections around the world. It contains physical descriptions and bibliographic information about the papyri and other written materials, as well as digital images and English translations of many of these texts. When possible, links are also provided to the original language texts (e.g. through the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri). The user can move back and forth among text, translation, bibliography, description, and image.
History of the Susan H. Douglas Collection The central goal of the project is to preserve, digitize, and catalog all items in the Susan H. Douglas Collection of Political Americana. Acquired from an individual collector between 1957 and 1961, the Douglas collection includes approximately 5,500 items of American political campaign memorabilia and commemorative items dating to between 1789 and 1960. Mrs. Douglas characterized them as: ballots, bric-a-brac (larger three-dimensional objects), broadsides, buttons, cartoons, maps and charts, pamphlets, paper miscellaneous, parade items, posters, prints, ribbons, sheet music, songbooks, textiles, trinkets, and wearing apparel.
The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections , Cornell University Library , is home to the Andrew Dickson White Architectural Photographs Collection of approximately 13,000 nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of architecture, decorative arts and sculpture. White (1832-1918), the first president of Cornell University, established the collection by donating several thousand images from his personal architectural library.
About the Project This digital collection references the canonical works or “major moments” that have come to be regarded as important in the study of South Asian architectural traditions. Images of rites, festivals and customary practices enrich and clarify the material record and situate canonical architecture in broader understandings of landscape experience and artistic production. A sub collection of images from 89 Aiyanar temples in Tamil Nadu, South India is one special aspect of this database. It draws on Robert MacDougall’s unfinished study of a folk tradition. Another unique aspect of the database is a collection of images of domestic architecture and community life in Sri Lanka.
The Billie Jean Isbell Andean Collection This collection of materials is derived from my years of research in the Andes, primarily in the southern Andean department of Ayacucho and specifically in the village of Chuschi, Peru and the surrounding region of the River Pampas Valley in the province of Cangallo. I began research for an undergraduate honors' thesis in 1967 and the earliest images are from that date and continue through 2002. Included in this collection are approximately 1500 photographs, thirteen songs, my ethnography, To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village , as well as selected publications. - Billie Jean Isbell, 2005 Visit Professor Isbell's latest project:
About the Alfredo Montalvo Bolivian Digital Pamphlets Collection This collection of 715 digitized works comes principally from a donation made to Cornell by the Bolivian bookseller, Alfredo Montalvo, who has supplied the university with library materials for over a quarter century. The pamphlets document a century of Bolivian literate culture, beginning in 1848. They show a nation's struggle to establish viable institutions, to develop its economy, to educate its children and the back and forth of political argument. In their aggregate these pamphlets capture the energy of the Bolivian people-sometimes misdirected, often contentious, but never quiescent. Readers will also want to consult complimentary collections of Bolivian pamphlets.
Database selection The goal of this project is to catalog and digitize each of the 1,780 slides within the Claire Holt collection. Microsoft Excel was selected as the application most suited to cataloguing requirements. Image browser After researching options available for creating and maintaining a widely-accessible virtual collection, Luna Imaging’s In sight® browsing software was selected as the most appropriate way to present the Claire Holt images over the Internet.
The story of American agriculture is captured in a broad band of documentary resources ranging from the memoirs and transactions of early agriculture societies to newspapers and almanacs; family, community, and corporate archives; and state and county extension service publications. The evolution of farm and rural life and agricultural economy is chronicled in the agriculture periodical press and the numerous local, regional, and national farm journals that exhorted, informed, and shaped the opinions, values, and concerns of early farm families. Journals such as Country Life in America , Cappers' Farmer , and Farm and Family have much to tell historians about the daily activities, issues, and practices of the time.
About Introduction The Cornell University Library and the Cornell Daily Sun are collaborating on an ambitious new digitization project to provide online access to the Sun's historical files. All of the original newspapers will be scanned and made available on a web site maintained by the Cornell University Library. For more than 120 years, the Sun has provided news, information, and entertainment to the entire Cornell community. Accounts of campus events and activities, sports reporting, and editorial commentary all contribute to make the Sun one of the most important sources of information on the history of the university.
About The Cornell East Asia Book Series (CEAS), published by the East Asia Program, is well known within the scholarly community for publishing quality books at affordable prices. We have a well-maintained website , and distribute our own books to the academic community and the public at large via mail-order and a secure online bookstore. We have published many books of lasting historical and literary value since the series was founded in 1972, when the publication was called the Cornell University East Asia Papers and the program was called the China-Japan Program. Some of these titles have gone out of print, mostly due to financial limitations. Here we are making available the best of our out-of-print collection. Most books are text-only, some include pictures and maps.
Cornell Modern Indonesia Collection Professor George Kahin's introduction to the first "Interim Report" describes the concerns and intentions of CMIP's editors. Prof. Kahin noted that, "With respect to much of the research carried out in post-revolutionary Indonesia, there has been a lag of two to three or more years between the termination of field work and the first publication describing the results of this work" and " ... the delay has been particularly regrettable inasmuch as the extent of research [on Indonesia] being undertaken is so limited." For this reason, the editors proposed to invite researchers to make their findings available in a provisional form, as CMIP "Interim Reports," or working papers, before the publication of their finished books.
About GloPAD GloPAD (Global Performing Arts Database) records include authoritative, detailed, multilingual descriptions of digital images, texts, video clips, sound recordings, and complex media objects related to the performing arts around the world, plus information about related pieces, productions, performers, and creators. GloPAD is in a continual process of development: we have recently merged two related databases, restructured GloPAD to support our newly developed metadata standards, and redesigned the user interface. Approximately 4,500 objects are currently available, with new records added and older records revised on a daily basis.
A Digital Collection of Cornell's University Archives The Cornell University Digital Archives is a collection of publications from the Cornell University Archives, comprising of a total of 26,481 pages dealing with the history of Cornell University. These materials date from 1868 until 1945 and involve a number of different publications including annual reports, class books and University registers. For a a complete listing of our digital collection click on the browse link.
The Cornell University Witchcraft Collection Part of Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell's Witchcraft Collection contains over 3,000 titles documenting the history of the Inquisition and the persecution of witchcraft, primarily in Europe. How to Find Materials The Witchcraft Collection is open to the public. To schedule a research visit or ask a question, please fill out our reference form . Terms of access and research policies are described on the Division’s Registration & Guidelines for Use and Reproductions & Permissions pages. See our Digital Witchcraft Collection to view 104 English language books from Cornell’s Witchcraft Collection.
CUGIR: Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository About the Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository (CUGIR) CUGIR is an active online data and metadata repository and a participating node in the National Spatial Data Infrastructure program. CUGIR provides open and free access to geospatial data and metadata for New York State, with special emphasis on natural features relevant to agriculture, ecology, natural resources, and human-environment interactions. Subjects such as landforms and topography, soils, hydrology, environmental hazards, agricultural activities, wildlife and natural resource management are appropriate for inclusion in the CUGIR catalog.
Introduction Cornell University has a number of collections of cuneiform tablets, donated to the university over the past century. These tablets are made of clay and inscribed with signs that modern scholars call cuneiform ("wedge or cone shaped"). They come from an area that is called Mesopotamia, which today roughly equals the territory of modern Iraq. These written documents date from the beginnings of writing, ca. 3350 B.C.E. until the end of the cuneiform tradition, sometime towards the end of the second century C.E. The largest collection of cuneiform tablets at Cornell is housed in the Jonathan and Jeannette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Seminar in the Department of Near Eastern Studies (NES) and currently consists of ca.
About the Ezra Cornell Papers Preface Ezra Cornell referred to himself as a farmer and mechanic who had spent some time working in the telegraph industry. His ambition and imagination, however, were not so prosaic. Skillful work, uncommon tenacity, and fortuitous circumstances resulted in his amassing a fortune. As soon as it became clear that it was a fortune, he promptly rejected conventional practice and sage advice, and directed that those riches be used to found a unique university: a comprehensive and practical institution dedicated to all forms of intellectual endeavor.
About While most research on the very early period of the reform era focuses on New England or New York City, Friend of Man illustrates that reform was thriving in Central New York as well. In this periodical, one meets a small, but vocal group of people from both races and all walks of life, intent on changing America. Scholars studying social reform in New York State will be interested in Friend of Man 's revelations about the regional interconnectedness of reform, especially in areas such as Utica, Rochester, Buffalo, Albany, and New York City.
