Since 1915, the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library has led a spirited life as Harvard's physical and, in a sense, its spiritual heart. With copious illustrations and wide-ranging narrative, this book is not only a record of benefactors and collections; it is the tale of the students, scholars, and staff who give a great library its life.
Harvard's home for rare books and manuscripts opened in 1942, and thanks to the energy of a small group of librarians and the creativity and generosity of its benefactor, Arthur Houghton, it quickly emerged as a center of inquiry and memory without equal. This 1992 volume, compiled by senior Houghton librarians, blends documentary with oral history to look back on the library's origins, the growth of its collections, and the activities of the staff who made it a home for precious books and original scholarship.
Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles reflect on what libraries have been in order to speculate about what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels. They combine the cultural history of libraries with innovations at metaLAB, a research group at the forefront of digital humanities.
Contains those portions of the early records of Harvard College known as College Books 1, 3, and 4. College Book 2 was destroyed when the second Harvard College was burned in January, 1764
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Excerpt from The Library of Harvard University: Descriptive and Historical Notes About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.