Daggers, slides, maps, and more: Objects from 200-plus collections are new online
Yale Library Digital Special Collections continues to grow. According to librarian and access strategist Alison Clemens, from April 1 through June 30 of this year, more than 8,500 new object landing pages were created. These pages contain 30,000-plus images of individual items, including handwritten letters, manuscripts, photographs, maps, and more.
The Lewis Walpole Library alone added digital images for more than 2,000 items, including objects from the British Theatrical and Literary Prints collection, a bound collection of playbills, and a watercolor drawing and woodcut print of a dagger that Horace Walpole believed once belonged to Henry VIII.
In an ongoing effort to move all materials from FindIt, the library’s legacy digital library, to a more-modern, cutting-edge digital environment, more than 6,000 objects from the Yale Papyrus Collection were migrated to Digital Collections. The papyri—in Greek, Latin, Demotic, Coptic, and Arabic—include private correspondence, official and religious documents, legal deeds and contracts, biblical texts, and literary works.
A few of the hundreds of additional highlights include:
- Personal correspondence in the Langston Hughes Papers (33 folders, comprising 487 images, ca. 1920s to 1960s)
- Covers of 19th- and 20th-century publications Puck, Judge, and The Daily Graphic (New York) in the Bert Hansen Collection of Medicine and Public Health in Popular Graphic Art (27 objects added to hundreds previously digitized)
- Scutum orthodoxiae, etc, manuscript of Greek texts on the faith of the Orthodox Church (between 1600 and 1700)
- Jūnigatsu kachō shikishi, 十二月花鳥色紙), a Japanese manuscript containing artistic renderings of flowers, birds, and calligraphy (between 1780 and 1867)
- Rephotographed and redigitized Visconti di Modrone tarocchi (or tarot) cards, Milan, Italy (between 1442 and 1447) and Este tarocchi cards, Italy (1450)
- Lantern slides from the Divinity Library’s Missionary Ephemera Collection, documenting China and Japan (addition of 143 objects, between 1795 and 2015)
- Printed maps of Alaska (1917 to 1921)
- Letters from Willa Cather (1873–1947) in the Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant Papers (letters), the Argus Book Shop Correspondence (letters), the William Lyon Phelps Papers (letters), and the Yale Collection of American Literature Manuscript Miscellany (letters)
About the online visitors
The Digital Collections User Data Dashboard gathers data and presents visual analytics about the number of visitors to Digital Collections, their geographic locations, browser languages, and the types of technology they used to access the site.
According to the dashboard analytics, from Jan. 1 to June 30, more than 160,000 users in the United States accessed the database. Germany and the United Kingdom account for 35,000 visitors in that time period; Italy, Canada, China, and India each engaged more than 5,000 users. Forty percent of visitors accessed Digital Collections via mobile devices or tablets. Overall, there was a 21 percent increase in the total number of users visiting Digital Collections in this six-month period (287,000) than in the prior six months (237,000).
About Digital Collections
Digital Collections is overseen by the Digital Special Collections and Access department, which provides the leadership, services, and strategic direction that enable users to access digitized and born-digital special collections content across Yale Library.
All digitized materials are findable through the Digital Collections site and can be viewed online and also downloaded as JPG images, TIFF images, or PDFs. The content in Digital Collections is made available via the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), a set of open standards for delivering high-quality, attributed digital objects online at scale.
Digital Collections represents only a portion of the library’s extensive collections materials. Learn more about accessing the entire repository of Yale Library Special Collections online and on site.
—Deborah Cannarella
Images: “Liberty Enlightening the World,” The Daily Graphic, October 26, 1875. Bert Hansen Collection of Medicine and Public Health in Popular Graphic Art; “A” General, Langston Hughes Papers. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Map of Alaska, John G. Brady Papers. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Lantern slide, Japan, Missionary Ephemera Collection, Special Collections, Yale Divinity School Library; Cavalier of Coins (female) and Cavalier of Coins (male), from the Visconti di Modrone tarocchi deck
