World Digital Preservation Day is an annual event sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition to bring international attention to the critical challenges and opportunities of digital preservation stewardship. The theme of this year’s celebration is Why Preserve? …
Twenty-Five Years of Digital Preservation
This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Digital Preservation Repository. The DRS is Harvard Library’s centrally-supported platform for long-term preservation of Harvard’s deep, broad, and unique digital collections. These materials span all genres and structural forms implicated in the University’s research, teaching, and learning mission, as well as administrative records necessary for institutional continuity and operational productivity. …
Fall at Widener Library
There’s nothing like Autumn in Harvard Yard. You can download the above image and make it the background for your computer’s desktop or for virtual meetings….
Launch of Collections Explorer (MVP)
On Monday, September 15, Harvard Library and Harvard University Information Technology (HUIT) launched the MVP of Collections Explorer, the first working prototype of the Reimagining Discovery initiative. This marks a pivotal moment: for the first time, researchers, students, and the broader public can explore Harvard’s special and archival collections using natural language search powered by semantic retrieval and generative AI….
Student-curated exhibit at Houghton Library celebrates Caribbean history
Chloe McKain, a Harvard College sophomore and President of the Harvard Caribbean Club, guest-curated The Caribbean: Sea of Resilience at Houghton Library. The Caribbean highlights Houghton’s Caribbean materials, and celebrates the creativity, strength, and history of the Caribbean people….
Celebrating 25 Years of Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center
As the Weissman Preservation Center celebrates 25 years of excellence, Erin Murphy reflects on the success made possible by the Weissmans’ leap of faith and the dedicated collaboration of our Harvard Library and Preservation Services colleagues. …
Revitalizing the Spotlight Community: A Collaborative Effort
You may be familiar with CURIOSity Digital Collections, Harvard Library’s platform for curated, publicly accessible digital collections. But did you know that Spotlight, the content management system behind CURIOSity, is open-source and used by many institutions beyond Harvard? Over the past year, we’ve been working to strengthen the Spotlight community, ensuring that development on the platform is a shared effort with shared benefit, rather than a series of isolated local fixes. …
Wikidata Edit-a-Thon for the Black Teacher Archive
In November, a Wikidata edit-a-thon brought together an enthusiastic group of students and librarians to explore the Black Teacher Archive (BTA), a digital portal centralizing materials created by professional organizations of 20th century African American educators. …
Rediscovering Albert Bushnell Hart
What do a Harvard professor of history and government, a trustee of Howard University, a lifelong friend of Theodore Roosevelt, and a self-proclaimed waffle lover have in common? They are all the same person: Albert Bushnell Hart. …
Harvard Law School librarian attends Rare Book School
The Historical & Special Collections Department (HSC) at Harvard Law School Library (HLSL) holds a world-class and historically significant rare books and early manuscripts collection. Christopher Spraker, the new manager of HSC, recently had the opportunity to attend Law Books: History & Connoisseurship at Rare Book School (RBS)….