As spring makes its debut and Manhattan’s cultural institutions continue creating limited capacity, COVID-safe opportunities for enrichment (other than Netflix), a new exhibition has links to one of our oral history collections. Columbia affiliates can access the New York Botanical Gardens’ oral history interviews online before or after visiting the exhibition, Kusama: Cosmic Nature. […]
Microfilm?! Digitizing an old medium yields new discoveries
For many years, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library has been working with the National Library of Israel’s Manuscripts Department to include our digitized Hebrew manuscripts in KTIV, the International Database of Hebrew Manuscripts. In the 1970s, Columbia Libraries created microfilms for about 700 of the Judaica manuscripts in its collection as part of a […]
Bugs for the Month of May
As billions of Brood X cicadas get ready to emerge from the ground, we look back to the billions of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) that helped a former Columbia faculty member claim the 1933 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. Thomas Hunt Morgan (faculty 1904-1928) and his team of researchers laid the foundations to modern […]
News from RBML’s Archivists | April 2021
Insider cheers! Technical Services Archivist Patrick Lawler described and made accessible for the first time, according to Head Archivist Kevin Schlottman, “a truly massive set of 19th-century newspapers” from the Seymour B. Durst Collection of Historical Manuscripts, Documents & Newspapers, 1764-1990. Here’s further news of newly processed collections: Beatrice Saunders correspondence with Gordon Hamilton […]
Now Available | Columbia Students’ COVID-19 Oral History Interviews
The Columbia University student COVID-19 oral history collection is comprised of eighteen interviews conducted by students of Professor Ana Paulina Lee’s course Contemporary Civilization II. Students took the interviews in April and May of 2020, shortly after the pandemic hit New York City, and Columbia University’s courses converted from in-person to online. As such, they […]