Microfilm Copies Research Articles

Paradise lost and found: The story of an Irish manuscript in Illinois

abstract: This article draws attention to a nineteenth-century Irish-language manuscript, thought until now by scholars to have been irretrievably lost. The early history of the manuscript is set out and, by careful interrogation of an extant microfilm copy in the National Library of Ireland, the current whereabouts and identity of the manuscript are traced to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, POST-1650 MS 0115, where it has been since 1958. A description of the manuscript is appended to this article.

Carolyn Dever. Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diaries of Michael Field

Michael Field, the pseudonymous authorial persona of Katharine Bradley and her niece, lover, and life partner Edith Cooper (they characterized themselves as ‘closer married’ that Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning), was the author of one of the most expansive and, until recently, neglected oeuvres in fin de siècle literature. Their published output included 27 verse dramas, eight volumes of lyric poetry, and a handful of short prose pieces. But arguably their greatest achievement was Works and Days, a 28-volume, 9500-page diary, which primarily covers the years 1888 until Bradley’s death in 1914 (Cooper predeceased her by nine months in 1913). Yet the diary has remained largely inaccessible to most readers. While Bradley and Cooper’s literary executor Thomas Sturge Moore (alongside his son) edited a single volume of selected entries in 1933, and a small selection edited by Ivor Treby was published in 2006, viewing the diary in all its messy magnificence required a visit to the British Library’s Manuscripts Reading Room (or from 2003 access to a microfilm copy and the patience of a saint). Yet from around 2015 onwards, the diaries have been digitized and are in the process of being transcribed, saving the neophyte reader the perils and pleasures of familiarizing themselves with Bradley and Cooper’s orthography. The volumes are a treasure trove: Michael Field encountered just about every important figure in fin de siècle literary London and penned vivid (and often amusingly virulent) pen sketches of Robert Browning, Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Berenson, among many others. More importantly, Bradley and Cooper wrote beautifully about their love for one another, their creative process, their intellectual development, and the tragedy and beauty that dominated their lives. Despite its richness and value, the diary has yet to receive sustained critical analysis, until now.

Assessing the Fidelity of Seismic Records from Microfilm and Paper Media

Abstract During the analog era of seismology, seismograms were typically written to paper media. The legacy records from this era make up an irreplaceable resource that covers over a century, and many of them remain extant in both their original paper form and as microformat copies. While microformat copies of seismograms drove decades of seismological research, new capabilities have been developed that allow us to revisit the analog data sets and extend application of contemporary analyses to a considerably longer seismological record. Though microformat seismogram copies have been extensively used, we seek to understand possible differences that could arise from using data recovered from such copies compared to using the original seismograms. Identification of these differences provides understanding of the fidelity of information that is recoverable from these different media. We present a case study here, applying a number of quantitative measures to a pair of records (original paper and its 35 mm microfilm copy), and revealing that microfilm-derived time series differ from the original paper in timing and amplitude. Based on a simple analysis of this pair of short-period vertical records, we estimate uncertainties of ±0.1–0.3 for earthquake magnitude (hence, a factor of about 1.3–2.0 in energy) and ±10 km for hypocentral location.

The historical seismogram collection in Strasbourg

We present a complete inventory of the historical Strasbourg seismograms housed at the École et Observatoire des Sciences de la Terre (EOST), University of Strasbourg, France. Although published seismological records date back to 1892, the Strasbourg seismological station was officially created in 1900, with a structure specifically built for seismological monitoring. The presence of highly motivated and active scientists from the outset, along with the unique geographic and political situation of Strasbourg in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, made the city a central point for seismological research and international exchanges. A wide variety of seismographs were operated at the station throughout the 20th century. More than 130,000 records from Wiechert, Mainka, Galitzin, Peterschmitt, 19-ton pendulum, Nikiforov, and Press–Ewing instruments are preserved within the seismogram collection, with most being the original records. However, for the pre-1930 seismogram records we only have microfilm copies. We also present an inventory of the instrumental constants found in the preserved station books along with the corresponding instrumental responses.

Data for: “The politics of polarization: Governance and party system change in Latin America, 1990-2010”

Data for: “The politics of polarization: Governance and party system change in Latin America, 1990-2010”

Collecting Community Stories: Local Studies Collections and What They Can Tell You About the Community

Collecting Community Stories: Local Studies Collections and What They Can Tell You About the Community

Recovering Yemen’s Cultural Heritage: The Stookey Microfilms

Abstract In 1973, recent PhD and newly-affiliated Research Associate at the University of Texas at Austin, Robert W. Stookey, made microfilm copies of a number of Arabic manuscripts in Yemen on a variety of subjects. Stookey was not himself a manuscripts expert, but was instead invested in preserving and making available for research the intellectual tradition of Yemen, a country in which he had spent considerable time as a researcher and member of the Foreign Service. Stookey’s microfilms were accessioned to the UT Libraries’ Middle East collection in 1980, and digitized starting in 2014. This article discusses the importance of the Stookey microfilms as an early post-custodial arrangement for preserving, making accessible, and ultimately recovering the intellectual heritage of Zaydism in Yemen. Through their inclusion in the Zaydi Manuscript Tradition portal, these microfilms will be made freely and openly available for anyone to discover and study on the Internet. While the destruction of life, property, and cultural memory continues in Yemen, this is an example of a way for North American library collections to help to recover Yemen’s precious heritage.

Catalogue of the Private Collections of Manuscripts in the Egyptian National Library by Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ

Reviewed by: Catalogue of the Private Collections of Manuscripts in the Egyptian National Library by Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ Elias G. Saba Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ. Catalogue of the Private Collections of Manuscripts in the Egyptian National Library. 8 volumes. Cairo: Dār al-Kutub wal-Wathāʾiq al-Qawmiyya; London: Muʾassasat al-Furqān li-l-Turāth al-Islāmī, Markaz Dirāsāt al-Mukhṭūṭāt al-Islāmiyya, 2015. 6762 pp. £280. ISBN: 978-1-905-12261- The Catalogue of the Private Collections of Manuscripts in the Egyptian National Library published by the al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation is an important contribution to Arabic bibliographic literature. This eight-volume catalog is the result of a larger project by the Egyptian National Library to better catalog and digitize their holdings, much of which is being done in cooperation with the al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation. These eight volumes are the second part of the al-Furqān series of catalogs on the National Library, the first part being the Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts in The Egyptian National Library (Dār al-Kutub alMiṣriyyah): Collections (Majāmīʿ), edited by ʿAbd al-Sattār ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Ḥalwajī in 2011. Like the first catalog, the present catalog includes only the individual works in volumes of collected works (majāmīʿ), not individual works that are volumes in themselves. It also represents the prolonged efforts of a team of three scholars, Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Sattār ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm, Ikrāmī Muḥammad Abū al-ʿAlā, and Aḥmad al-Sayyid al-Ṣādiq, led by the general editor Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ. This catalog covers only a small portion of manuscripts in the private collections in this library. An important aspect of this catalog, which is clear in the Arabic, has gotten lost in the English translation. Majāmīʿ [End Page 253] (sing. majmūʿa) refers to particular Arabic codices that contain a collection of various distinct works. These codical collections, sometimes written intentionally as one volume and sometimes the result of binding together smaller manuscripts and scattered pages, are a particularly important part of Islamic book history. Majmāmīʿ are very common in manuscript and perhaps the most common way to preserve shorter books, letters, pamphlets, and more. Since they contain many different texts, these collections are usually given short shriftin manuscript catalogs and bibliographies. Thankfully, ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ has overseen the production of a wonderful catalog that does justice to all 6,993 works in these collections. It is a pleasure to see such detailed entries for all of the works covered by this catalog. The catalog is arranged alphabetically by title of the work. This arrangement makes for easy consultation when searching for a particular text. Each entry is numbered and gives a full description of the larger manuscript in which this work is found. In addition to the title of the work, every entry also contains the name and death date of the author, the copyist, the date of copy, the number and size of pages (in centimeters), a brief physical description of the manuscript, the incipit and explicit, descriptions of ownership marks and other paratextual elements, further references for the work and author, a note on the physical condition of the manuscript, the topic of the work (i.e., grammar, law, prosopography, etc.), and the call number of the physical manuscript and of its microfilm copy. Each entry is meticulously documented. One gets a relatively complete sense of the works in question. In this regard, this catalog will undoubtedly be a useful research aid for those interested in the history of the book. Although it covers only a very limited portion of the library's vast holdings, it is a marked improvement over the earlier catalogs of the Egyptian National Library, such as the catalogs discussed by Noah Gardiner for Dissertation Reviews (http://www.dissertationreviews.org/archives/7355). In spite of the praise this catalog deserves, there are some shortcomings to this work that are all the more noticeable given how much effort went into compiling this catalog. In particular, it...

The Politics of Polarization: Governance and Party System Change in Latin America, 1990-2010

The Politics of Polarization: Governance and Party System Change in Latin America, 1990-2010

Aviso a su Majestad, de la provincia de Chiapa, de fray Juan de los Reyes, guardián, Ciudad Real, a 14 de enero de 1579

Gudrun Lenkersdorf presents a Memorial text written by the Franciscan priest fray Juan de los Reyes. In her introduction, she notes that the priest provides a good description of the province of Chiapa in 1579, at the same time that he relates a number of problems as seen from the point of view of the Franciscans. In it, they blame all such problems on the Dominicans, their rivals, at times unjustly. In spite of this, the document provides a general and fairly complete idea of the changes introduced into the villages by the colonial regime. The Franciscans' opinions are expressed about their congregations, the election of local indigenous officials, the cofradías, the construction of churches, and the punishments inflicted on the Indians who did not obey them. One can see that in the last half of the 16th century, the work of the second generation of Santo Domingo friars did not correspond at all to the Lascanian principles of gentle persuasion. Those who once had been the protectors of the Indians had been transformed into a heavy burden for the autoctonous population. The manuscript of the Avisos is to be found in the Archivo General de las Indias in Sevilla, Audiencia de Guatemala section, legajo 56, as part of the "Relación de las derramas, Guatemala, 1582," folios 3 to 12v. A microfilm copy is in the archives of the Centro de Estudios May as of the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas of the UNAM.

Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805-1915 by Robert Emmett Curran (review)

Reviewed by: Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805-1915 by Robert Emmett Curran Patrick J. Hayes Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805-1915. By Robert Emmett Curran. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012. 308 pp. $69.95. For over thirty years, Curran's work has centered on the history of Jesuits in the American provinces. The strengths of his prior investigations coalesce in this latest collection. Nine of the twelve essays have appeared in print elsewhere; two others were conference papers. A first cluster of essays touch on early Jesuit life in Maryland, including property disputes between Archbishop Ambrose Maréchal and the Society of Jesus, slaveholding at White Marsh and other Jesuit plantations, and the relationship between Georgetown Jesuits and a spate of miraculous cures in the United States' capital. A second section canvasses the intrigues of New York clergy in the late nineteenth century, save for an essay on the development of the parochial school system - a tour de force ranging from Archbishop John Carroll to the lobbying efforts of publisher James McMaster, who opposed any government funding as an intrusion on religious liberty. The last two essays form part three, under the rubric of "social justice and the intellectual life," which explores the impact that Catholic conceptions of the socio-economic order and the development of the Catholic University of America had upon the region of "the Chesapeake." The book assembles a wealth of archival data, especially from microfilm copies of documents on the Jesuits' American mission contained in the Society's Roman archive. Curran also drew from papers related to the tenure of Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York (1880-1902) which are used to remarkably good effect for his analysis of Father Edward McGlynn and the New York Accadèmia on the advent of the Catholic modernist crisis. Justifying the purchase of a book with this price tag, however, is difficult. It is a disappointment that there are few updates made to the text. The original pieces that appear in print for the first time constitute only a fraction of the whole. But there are larger problems. [End Page 84] The overall presentation of the essays seems rather forced and the argument that cities or regions were vying with one another for ecclesiastical power is both artificial and hollow. Far too frequently Curran is geographically challenged. He discusses episodes that have little or nothing to do with either Maryland or New York. For all his wisdom on Jesuit historiography, he does not delve into the recent scholarship on the New York Province or its most important educational institutions. It is not essential to go into that, though. The book gives the impression that Catholicism in the two regions owed its very existence to the Society of Jesus. There is barely mention of any other religious community and how they helped to ground and grow the faith through a century of immigration, war, and industrialization. This is a missed opportunity. Further, we get very little sense of the growth of Catholic life in Baltimore, particularly from the waves of Germans whose extraordinary thrift and vitality sunk deep roots around neighborhood churches. In short, this "best of" book is suitable for graduate and seminary libraries, but it should be a spur to further research and not considered the last word on these subjects. [End Page 85] Patrick J. Hayes Redemptorist Archives of the Baltimore Province Brooklyn, New York Copyright © 2013 American Catholic Historical Society

ANDREJS PLAKANS, A Concise History of the Baltic States.

ON 23 August 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Molotov–von Ribbentrop Pact, two million Baltic men, women, and children formed a human chain reaching from Tallinn through Rīga to Vilnius, a distance of over six hundred kilometres, to sing their way to freedom. It was one of the greatest and most moving demonstrations of modern times. For half a century the Soviet Union had denied the existence of the secret protocols between Germany and Russia over the latter’s annexation of the Baltic states in 1940, but after ‘The Baltic Way’ demonstration, Gorbachev appointed a commission to investigate the legality of their incorporation into the USSR. Although the original document had vanished, a microfilm copy had survived in British hands. It was examined by the Federal Government of Germany which declared on 1 September 1989 that the protocols were genuine but contrary to international law and therefore invalid. On 29 December the Congress of Soviets followed suit and formally denounced the protocols as illegal from the moment of their signing. This public acknowledgement of the illegitimacy of Soviet rule in the Baltic opened the way for the governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to regain control of their nations.

Religion, Space Exploration, and Secular Society

This article concerns the efforts of Reverend John M. Stout and the Apollo Prayer League to land microfilm copies of the Christian Bible on the lunar surface during the Apollo era. The efforts of Stout, a NASA information scientist and industrial chaplain who orchestrated the years-long undertaking, underscored manned spaceflight not only as a technological and geopolitical achievement, but as a collective spiritual quest. The venture was countered at the time by the renowned head of the American Atheists, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who insisted that religious artifacts and observances had no place on state-sponsored, taxpayer–funded missions. Stout believed that the astronauts themselves had rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. The rancorous debate between Stout and O'Hair, which was played out in the media, laid bare the innate conflict between personal religious freedom and the specter of state-sponsored religion in a secular society making its first expeditions into deep space.

Gifts and Acquisitions

The Elizabeth Daily Journal and its weekly predecessor, the New Jersey Journal (established in 1779), have had the longest continued existence of any newspaper in the state. Through the generosity of its publisher, Mr. Robert C. Crane, the Library has received not only the entire office file of the Journal but also a microfilm copy of the whole. This is a gift of no small proportions—there are 409 reels of microfilm alone—and of considerable research value. Including several volumes previously owned, the Library now has bound files of the weekly Journal for 1786-87, 1796-97, 1808-09, 1813-17, 182123, 1832-34, 1840-42, 1847-64, 1867, 1870-765 and of the Daily Journal from 1872.

The Kevserî Mecmûası Unveiled: Exploring an Eighteenth-Century Collection of Ottoman Music

AbstractThe Kevserî Mecmûası is an eighteenth-century Turkish manuscript, which includes, in addition to a variety of music-related contents, a fairly large collection of notations. Given the scarcity of notational sources, it offers invaluable material for understanding the performance practice and compositional style of Ottoman music before the nineteenth century. Having studied a hitherto unknown microfilm copy of this manuscript, the original of which has remained up to now in a private library and closed to our access, the author aims in this article to introduce this source and discuss its potential contribution to the knowledge of Ottoman music. The article is organised roughly in two parts. First, it will present briefly the contents of the manuscript, integrating new evidence and clues about its date, author and purpose into existing knowledge. Second, it will focus on the collection of notations in the manuscript, and by comparing it with the earlier collections will argue that, contrary to the prevailing views expressed in the literature, no large-scale transformation in the style of Ottoman music took place in the early eighteenth century.

Ronsard et le livre etude de critique génétique et d’histoire littéraireClément Marot: Recueil inédit offert au connéctable de Montmorency en mars 1538

Francois Rouget. Ronsard et le livre etude de critique genetique et d'histoire litteraire. Cahiers d'Humanisme et Renaissance 95. Geneva: Droz, 2010. Pp. 288. Francois Rigolot, ed. Clement Marot: Recueil inedit offert au connetable de Montmorency en mars 1538. Coll. T.L.F. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2010. Pp. 353. Francois Rouget's study of the works that Ronsard had known and annotated while preparing his own collections and Francois Rigolot's critical edition of Clement Marot's manuscript copy of a collection of recent verse offered in March 1538 to constable Anne de Montmorency are works of passion and pleasure. From complementary angles the authors examine the creative process, what Proust would later call the moi oeuvrant, of two of the greatest poets of sixteenth-century France. The Recueil des dernieres Oeuvres/de Clement Marot, non imprimes/Et premierement/celle quil fit durant son exil,/Et depuis son retour,/[1]537[8] en mars is the only known manuscript of Marot's poetry that was composed during his lifetime. A photographic facsimile of 147 pages of the microfilm copy in the Musee Conde de Chantilly Ms 524 (748) is set in front of Rigolot's jeweled introduction, which is followed by a carefully annotated transcription and a list of variants. An ample bibliography and index round out the study. The organization and composition of the 140 poems (most of which were written during the poet's exile in Ferrara and his return to the French court by way of Venice) speak volumes about the poet and his work in the wake of the Affaire des Placards (October 17-18, 1534) and on the eve of the Wars of the Religion. Obliged to leave France for reason of his reformed belief, Marot took refuge in Bordeaux under Marguerite de Navarre before reaching Ferrara, where, unlike her Catholic husband Hercule d'Este, the duchess Renee was a partisan of Gallican ideology. In Ferrara Marot found renewed calling. Reading Petrarch and Ovid, he wrote epideictic while conceiving the blason du beau tetin that would inspire agenre that soon became the delight of the French court. Leaving Ferrara on Hercule's orders, Marot went to Venice before reaching France. Celebrated upon his arrival in Toulouse, Marot prepared his Recueil to offer a portrait of his life, travels, and reformed views to the powerful Connetable, the man whom he had befriended in 1529. The collection is built upon what Rigolot calls lines of force that can be seen in the arrangement and disposition of the poems. Of the sum of 140 only 18 had been previously published; 93 soon appeared in the Gryphius/Dolet edition in Lyon in the summer of 1538; 18 were printed at the time of Marot's death in 1544; 13 remained unedited throughout the century. Marot carefully orchestrated the collection in order not to draw upon his earlier writings. The scribe (it is not known if the manuscript is of Marot's hand) took care to use spatial markers to indicate the seven units or virtual chapters comprising the sum of the manuscript. The first three sections include poems composed during Marot's exile; the four that follow are set in France. Epistres et blasons (1) give way to dizains et huictains, (2) while the oeuvres faictes a Venise (3) are juxtaposed to oeuvres faictes depuis son retour (4). Then follow an array of autres oeuvres, (5) epigrammes de son invention, (6) and Epygrammes a l'imitation de Martial (7). A nascent autobiography emerges from the circumstantial items set in Ferrara, his sojourn in the company of Renee de France, his blason as a mode written in exile prior to its success in France, the poet's departure for Venice and his stopover, his return to France, the other pieces he published, and, finally, his invention of and experiment with a new genre. Close analysis reveals that Marot changes the tone of his poems according to the perceived attitudes of his intended receivers and readers. Some poems are ludic while others are devout. …

The amiable Einstein and Nordström

Schucking replies: The uncharitable story that Albert Einstein refused to see physicist Gunnar Nordström, who had traveled from Finland to Zürich, Switzerland, to discuss his theory of gravitation, does not accord with the events as recounted by Paul Ehrenfest. For almost a month in June and July 1913, Ehrenfest stayed with Einstein in Zürich. In his diary for 13 June through 1 July of that year, 1 1. P. Ehrenfest, diaries, Papers 1902-1933, ENB 4-15, Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, the Netherlands; microfilm copy at Archives for the History of Quantum Physics, Ehrenfest Notebooks, EHR-12, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, College Park, Maryland. particularly in the entry for 29 June, Ehrenfest says that Einstein and Nordström discussed their gravitational theories during Nordström’s visit. Based on those discussions, Nordström published an improved version of his theory, dated Zürich, July 1913, in which he thanked Einstein directly. In his September 1913 lecture in Vienna, Einstein extensively discussed Nordström’s new version and made it clear that it was a viable alternative to his own then unfinished theory. The relationship between Einstein’s and Nordström’s theories is analyzed in The Genesis of General Relativity . 2 2. J. D. Norton, in The Genesis of General Relativity, vol. 3, J. Renn, ed., Springer, Dordrecht, the Netherlands (2007), p. 413. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4000-9_18 The volume also contains English translations of Nordström’s papers.REFERENCESSection:ChooseTop of pageREFERENCES <<1. P. Ehrenfest, diaries, Papers 1902-1933, ENB 4-15, Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, the Netherlands; microfilm copy at Archives for the History of Quantum Physics, Ehrenfest Notebooks, EHR-12, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, College Park, Maryland. Google Scholar2. J. D. Norton, in The Genesis of General Relativity, vol. 3, J. Renn, ed., Springer, Dordrecht, the Netherlands (2007), p. 413. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4000-9_18 , Google ScholarCrossref© 2009 American Institute of Physics.

Fragments of Lappish Mythology (review)

Reviewed by: Fragments of Lappish Mythology John Lindow Fragments of Lappish Mythology. By Lars Levi Læstadius. Ed. Juha Pentikäinen. Introduction and Afterword, Juha Pentikäinen. Trans. Börje Vähämäki. (Beaverton, Ontario: Aspasia Books, 2002. Pp. 335, acknowledgments, translator’s foreword, introduction, afterword, bibliographies, index, illustrations.) The revivalist form of evangelical Lutheranism common to northernmost Scandinavia and deeply rooted in the Sami community takes its usual name, Læstadianism, from the author of this work, Lars Levi Læstadius. Ordained in 1824, Læstadius was a pastor in parts of the Torne River valley in northern Sweden until his death in 1861. Of partly Sami background himself, he spoke both the Sami and Finnish that were widespread in the area. His pastoral duties required him to travel throughout Swedish Norrland, and he also worked and gained a certain reputation as a botanist. In 1838–40 he joined a French research expedition in northern Scandinavia and agreed to draft a "mythology" of the Sami, to be published in France. The work reviewed here is an English translation of the Swedish original, which was completed in 1845. It was never published in full in any language until quite recently, though one part was appended to Jacob Fellman's Anteckningar under min vistelse i Lappland (1906) and a selection of the rest was edited by Harald Grundström [End Page 247] in 1969 from a microfilm copy of the manuscript in the Uppsala dialect archives (ULMA) and published in Svenska landsmål. Juha Pentikäinen's claim that the manuscript was lost for 150 years (p. 50) is therefore an exaggeration, though the parts of manuscript certainly had a curious and complicated fate, as Pentikäinen shows. He tracked down a great deal of interesting information in French archives, and this makes up the most diverting part of the "Introduction" (not least for the curious French; pp. 37–8 for the most apt examples). Pentikäinen also seeks to present a general introduction to all aspects of Læstadius and lingers over the theological writings. At times the "Introduction" reads like conference papers stitched together, and readers not already familiar with Læstadius may have difficulty following it. For example, Anders Fjellner is mentioned in passing as "the author of the Sami epic," with no additional information (p. 35). The brief afterword devotes a page or so to each of the sections of the manuscript and considers especially what Læstadius has contributed to the subject. The "Bibliography for Pentikäinen's Introduction and Afterword" (327–28) does not cite all the works referred to in these two sections (e.g., Drijvenes 1992, Marmier 1999, Pentikäinen 1968 and 1998, and Rydving 1993 and 2000). Læstadius's Fragments consisted of a "Reminder to the Reader," followed by five parts, treating, respectively, gods, sacrifice, divination (that is, as carried out by the noaide or shaman), traditional tales (common Sami legends, with Stallo at the center), and a response to a manuscript on Sami mythology sent to Læstadius by Fellman after the other parts were complete. As a rule, Læstadius worked with printed texts, and especially the sections on gods and sacrifice comprise large quotations from earlier Lappologists such as Schefferius, Jessen, Lehm, and Tuderus. Læstadius followed these quotations with comments based on his own experience or theories, and these are of interest not just as examples of 1840s scholarship or because Læstadius underwent his own conversion in 1844 while the work was still in progress, but also because he was a clear-eyed and relatively open-minded observer of the Sami community. Probably the main value of the work is for specialists in Sami tradition or the origins of Læstadianism, and they will need to stick to the Swedish original. Börje Vähämäki's English translation thus offers the world a scholarly luxury. The editorial decision to retain and translate the footnotes from Risto Pulkkinen's Finnish translation, apparently without much editing or thought for the needs of an English-reading audience, seems questionable, and I must confess that I was sometimes uncertain, despite the information in Vähämäki...

Digitalnewspapers.org

This article describes the Utah Digital Newspapers Program at the University of Utah's Marriott Library. Background information regarding the historical importance of newspapers, the current state of commercial newspaper digitization, and the problems with small newspaper digitization are reviewed, and the solution provided by the University of Utah is offered. Details are provided for the program's history, funding, goals, and future plans. Other topics covered include the trade-offs between microfilm and hard copy source materials, how titles were selected, the processes and technologies utilized, Website organization, displaying PDF files with Macintosh computers, and using bi-tonal or grayscale images.

Practise, organisation and quality control of microfilming projects

Nicholson Baker, his name has already been mentioned several times during this conference. In 1994 he published an erotic fantasy novel: The Fermata. I will not discuss the contents of this novel before this audience, but I want to read to you a quotation: "The particular library table I had chosen with some care, of course. It had one other resident, a petite woman in her late thirties with curly salt and pepper hair (…). She was looking through several piles of microfilm copies, sorting them and and circling paragraphs ever so often. She spun her pen silently on the table as she read, as if it was a spinner in a child's game. Her eyes moved with impressive speed over the chemical smelling, legal sized pages, but she looked tired from spending hours gazing at the grey light in one of the libraries horrible microfilm readers, contending with the trembling magnified crotch hairs and scratches on its screen." It appears that Baker already was concerned about microfilming and reading equipment by that time. Seven years later he launched his famous campaign against libraries' abuse of microfilming as an excuse for destroying originals, mainly newspapers and periodicals in his book Double Fold (Baker, 2001).