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Imaging rare, unusual, and intriguing objects at the Brown University Library

“Absolute money”

March 13, 2014 by | Comments Off on “Absolute money”

The Rider Broadsides collection, currently being digitized by the Library, contains unique examples of cultural-political ephemera from the 17th–20th centuries. Shown below are front and back views of an “absolute money” bill, c. 1880, spoofing the period’s Greenback movement. (The majority of materials in the Sidney S. Rider Collection — a wide variety of pamphlets, manuscripts, broadsides, ephemera, scrapbooks and newspapers — are related to Rhode Island history.)
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Porcelain Figures from Brown’s Monuments Man

February 7, 2014 by | 7 Comments

Porcelain figures originally commissioned by John Nicholas Brown II (1900–1979) are currently on exhibit at the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. library through April 25, 2014. Brown II was a civilian-status Lieutenant Colonel, Special Cultural Advisor for Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) in Europe toward the end of World War II — as well as husband to collector Anne Seddon Kinsolving Brown, the founder of the Library’s military art collection (a substantial part of which has been digitized for online viewing). While the 21 porcelains currently on display in the library were not salvaged works per se, they were commissioned by Brown in 1945 while he was a “monuments man” in Europe.

Thanks to a movie opening on February 7, 2014, directed by George Clooney and loosely based on historical accounts, the “monuments men” have been making a resurgence in both popular media and the cultural heritage community: from features in the New York Times (re: monuments women, as well), to educational reference resources showcasing the retrieved artworks (Scholars Resource set featuring 111 salvaged works), to recent commentaries by associated museums (“In the Footsteps of the Monuments Men: Traces from the Archives at the Metropolitan Museum”).

The image shown below, a porcelain commissioned by John Nicholas Brown II in late 1945 while serving with MFAA, was taken by Digital Production Services for the library’s exhibition publicity. Curator Peter Harrington describes the context of its commission:

While John Nicholas Brown was working with the allied forces in Germany in 1945 reporting on stolen art works, he visited the factory at Nymphenburg in Bavaria and ordered 21 porcelain figures for his wife, Anne S. K. Brown. Subsequent additions to this set came from the Dresden porcelain factory. Today these porcelains form a unique segment of the foremost American collection devoted to the history and iconography of soldiers and soldiering.

Interpreting Flatland

October 25, 2013 by | 1 Comment

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“Instructions” for reading the 1980 Arion Press edition of Flatland, atop aluminum covers and frame.

This semester the Library will commemorate the mathematical-philosophical novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) by Edwin Abbott (1838–1926). 2013 marks the 175th anniversary of Abbott’s birth, and 2014 will be the 130th anniversary of Flatland‘s 1884 publication. The exhibition “Flatland Worldwide and Edwin A. Abbott at 75 (+100)” opens in the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. library on November 1, 2013; Brown professor Thomas Banchoff, mathematician and Abbott scholar, will present a related talk on Wednesday, November 13 (at 5:30 p.m. in the Digital Scholarship Lab).

In 2005 the Library captured a rare 1980 Arion Press edition of Flatland, limited to 275 copies, featuring aluminum covers, accordion-style page binding, and illustrations designed to integrate creatively with the text. As described by the Press, this custom edition aimed to formally accentuate elements of the content:

Andrew Hoyem‘s radical design and illustrations realize many implications of the book, such as: the “volume” can be opened out flat to form a thirty-foot plane; the plane-geometrical citizens of Flatland are infinitely thin (holes in paper); they cast shadows; their edges glow.…

Shown below are some sample spreads from the book. Stop by the exhibit to view the original.

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Civil War General Hawkins’ sword to return to Annmary Brown Memorial

August 30, 2013 by | Comments Off on Civil War General Hawkins’ sword to return to Annmary Brown Memorial

As announced earlier this summer in a Brown University press release and on the Library News blog, a silver Tiffany presentation sword once owned by General Rush Hawkins (Annmary Brown Memorial benefactor, 1831–1920) is returning to Brown. The sword was stolen from Brown sometime during the 1970s, and subsequently switched ownership at least four times.

Shown below are two portraits of a young Rush Hawkins: a 1863 engraving by John Chester Buttre based on a photo by Mathew Brady (click image below for a zoomable image view), and a 1860 portrait by Jacob D. Blondel currently housed in the Annmary Brown Memorial building (photographed by DPS for a Memorial promotional brochure).

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Hawkins by Buttre/Brady

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Hawkins portrait by Blondel

Cabinets in the front section of the Annmary Brown Memorial, pictured below, showcase swords from the Cyril and Harriet Mazansky British Sword Collection, part of the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection.

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Swords from the Cyril and Harriet Mazansky British Sword Collection (Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection). Photo: Lindsay Elgin.

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Swords from the Cyril and Harriet Mazansky British Sword Collection (Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection). Photo: Lindsay Elgin.

The Library will officially celebrate the return of Hawkins’ presentation sword on November 7, 2013 at 3:00 p.m., at the Annmary Brown Memorial. The event will feature brief presentations, a performance by the Higher Keys (Brown’s oldest co-ed a cappella group), and refreshments.

The World-Wide Telegraph

June 27, 2013 by | Comments Off on The World-Wide Telegraph

Digital Production Services routinely photographs rare or oversize items requested by researchers for use in publications. In the event that these materials are out of copyright, many of these requests are added to the Brown Olio digital collection, a group of miscellaneous items published apart from “signature collections” or other online digital projects.

Shown below is a January 1902 two-sheet supplement to National Geographic Magazine, depicting in detail “Telegraph Lines and Cables in the Military Division of the Philippines” (map produced by the U.S. Army Signal Corps). The included visual key distinguishes between “military telegraph lines, military cables, Eastern Extension Australasia and China Telegraph Company’s cable, commercial telegraph stations, military telegraph stations, telephone stations, open ports, coastwise ports, light houses, and post offices” (click on each section below for zoomable views).

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Tom Standage’s popular book The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers (New York: Walker and Company, 1998) recounts the spread of the telegraph system throughout the 19th century and beyond. A more detailed account of the development of telegraph cables in the Pacific can be found in Robert W. D. Boyce’s “Imperial Dreams and National Realities: Britain, Canada and the Struggle for a Pacific Telegraph Cable, 1879–1902” (The English Historical Review, Vol. 115, No. 460 [Feb., 2000], pp. 39–70).

From Brown and Back Again

May 24, 2013 by | Comments Off on From Brown and Back Again

On June 1, 2013, Brown’s John Hay Library — built in 1910 and now home to the Library’s special collections — will close its doors for a major renovation of the first floor. (Updates on the project can be followed on the John Hay Library Renovation website and blog.) Many of the materials that Digital Production Services regularly captures, especially those from signature collections, are housed at “the Hay,” named after the Brown alumnus (1838–1905).

Photograph of John Hay, taken at the time of his marriage to Clara Stone (1874), by an unknown photographer.

Photograph of John Hay, taken at the time of his marriage to Clara Stone (1874) by an unknown photographer.

Sargent's portrait of Hay, on cover of new 2013 biography

Sargent’s portrait of Hay (detail), featured on the cover of a newly published biography.

Earlier this month, a substantial new biography of John Hay was published by Simon & Schuster (see a recent review from the New York Times). Several images featured in the book were captured by Digital Production Services, including the John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) portrait used for the book’s cover, a photograph of a young John Hay, and a portrait of his wife, Clara Stone Hay.

Clara Stone Hay by Anders Zorn (1860–1920), gift of Stuart Symington

Clara Stone Hay by Anders Zorn (1860–1920); gift of Stuart Symington.

Apart from his connections to Brown, Hay was Abraham Lincoln’s secretary and a diplomat under Theodore Roosevelt. The Library’s online exhibit from 2008, “John Hay’s Lincoln and Lincoln’s John Hay,” curated by American Historical Collections Librarian Holly Snyder, highlights the Hay-Lincoln connection by way of additional original documents — now stored at the Hay.

Garibaldi Returns

April 26, 2013 by | Comments Off on Garibaldi Returns

 

In late-summer 2007, the Brown University Library contracted with Boston Photo to photograph both sides of a unique oversize panorama scroll depicting the life of Garibaldi. After the initial capture files were processed and digitally merged together by Digital Production Services staff in the Library, they were used to develop a website about the panorama. The process of reconstituting the panorama’s narrative scenes from the initial set of discrete digital photographs is described below:

Example from the end of side 2: Yellow line represents edges of initial digital files, which were then merged together in order to visually preserve the narrative continuity of scenes.

Example from the (supplementary) end of side 2: Yellow line represents edges of initial capture files (which included on average .5–1′ of overlap). Files were then digitally merged together in order to visually preserve the continuity of narrative scenes.

The sheer dimensions of the Garibaldi panorama — 4.75′ tall and 260′ wide on each side — presented unique digitization challenges. Boston Photo Imaging, a digital imaging company, was contracted to capture digital images of the panorama as it was unrolled across a custom-built wooden platform. Using a vertically mounted Better Light 4″ x 5″ digital scan back, capturing both sides of the panorama took three days and resulted in 91 digital image files, each file ~244 MB and representing ~6.5′ of horizontal width (including on average .5-1′ of overlap, in order to facilitate subsequent image merging). The scan back captured 300 dpi RGB TIF files; given the height of the device this resulted in an effective real-world resolution of ~137 dpi at the actual size of the panorama.

Because scenes within the panorama’s visual narrative do not correspond to the uniform width used in the capture process, sets of capture files were digitally merged together five at a time by the Brown Library’s Center for Digital Initiatives [now Digital Production Services] staff, at full capture resolution within Photoshop CS3/v10, and then individual scenes were isolated and saved from these roughly 30-feet merged sections. A continuous image of each side of the panorama was produced by subsequently merging sequences of these five-section composites at a reduced resolution. As part of this process the plastic-over-board background initially visible along the top and bottom edges was digitally removed, and each merged group of five was slightly rotated in order to compensate for some inevitable alignment drift produced during the unrolling process. Tonal levels and saturation values were slightly adjusted, and files were moderately sharpened for full-resolution and reduced-resolution delivery sizes. [Read more from “Behind the Scenes”]

In early 2013, the Center for Digital Scholarship and its student employees substantially upgraded the Web presentation of the Garibaldi scroll. In particular, one can now view the scroll’s narrative scenes directly alongside their accompanying descriptive texts. Flash-based animated views of the scroll are also still available on the site, which allow click-throughs into zoomable views of each narrative scene.

In addition to the redesigned website, the scroll has also been (briefly) mentioned in a new book from MIT Press, Illusions in Motion by Erkki Huhtamo, and has been featured as a teaching tool in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, by way of Massimo Riva’s Fall 2012 course on Garibaldi and the Risorgimento.