New Material in Anthony Burgess' Archive

Previously unknown stories, scripts, letters and musical compositions by the late author Anthony Burgess have been found in an archive of his possessions.

The contents of three of his houses were left to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester by his widow, who died in 2007.

Most famous for writing A Clockwork Orange, Burgess wrote 33 novels in all.

Researchers have now uncovered some 20 unpublished short stories as well as unproduced film and theatre scripts.

They include a previously unknown movie script about Napoleon Bonaparte, which was to have been filmed by director Stanley Kubrick.

Full story... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13157885

New York Public Library Launches iPad App

"Now, the New York Public Library has created a new iPad app that bring the library’s research collections into “the palms of the public’s hand,” as library officials put it in a statement released Tuesday. “Biblion: The Boundless Library” is the name for a series of apps available on Apple’s tablet computer that highlight different elements in the library’s collection. It was developed by the library and the design firm Potion.

The first edition showcases the library’s 1939-1940 New York World’s fair holdings, which are among the most consulted by researchers. Users will be able to turn over, zoom in and roam through hundreds of items. At the end of this week, the library is putting out an app that lets the public play “Find that Future,” from game designer Jane McGonigal, author of “Reality is Broken.”This summer, look for an app that lets the public reserve books. The new app is available for free at Apple’s iTunes store. A Web version is to be available soon at nypl.org."

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/new-york-public-library-launches-ipad-app/

Secret Life of Librarians

Brilliant article on the importance of public libraries. Read the full article here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/01/the-secret-life-of-libraries

""If someone suggested the idea of public libraries now, they'd be considered insane," says Peter Collins, library services manager in Worksop. "If you said you were going to take a little bit of money from every taxpayer, buy a whole load of books and music and games, stick them on a shelf and tell everyone, 'These are yours to borrow and all you've got to do is bring them back,' they'd be laughed out of government." ...


The old clichés do not help the cause, given that libraries are meant to be austere places smelling of "damp gabardine and luncheon meat", as Victoria Wood put it, and librarians are either diffident, mole-eyed types or disappointed spinsters of limited social skills who spend their time blacking out the racing pages and razoring Page 3. ...


 In London during the Second World War, some authorities established small collections of books in air-raid shelters. The unused Tube station at Bethnal Green had a library of 4,000 volumes and a nightly clientele of 6,000 people. And what those wartime readers chose were not practical how-to manuals on sewing or home repairs, butphilosophy. Plato and his Republic experienced a sudden surge in popularity, as did Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell, Bunyan and Burton'sAnatomy of Melancholy. ...


"In the 60s, before the Lady Chatterley trial," says Ian Stringer, "you used to get block books – literally, wooden blocks in place of any books the librarians thought were a bit risqué, like Last Exit to Brooklyn. You had to bring the block to the counter and then they'd give you the book from under the desk. So of course you got a certain type of person just going round looking for the wooden blocks."...


[Collins] says that reading seems to be becoming an increasingly alien concept for children. "The pace of life is different now, and people expect art to happen to them. Music and film do that, a CD will do that, but you have to make a book happen to you. It's between you and it. People can be changed by books, and that's scary. When I was working in the school library, I'd sometimes put a book in a kid's hands and I'd feel excited for them, because I knew that it might be the book that changed their life. And once in a while, you'd see that happen, you'd see a kind of light come on behind their eyes. Even if it's something like 0.4% of the population that that ever happens to, it's got to be worth it, hasn't it?""

Digital Images of Yale’s Vast Cultural Collections Now Available for Free

"Scholars, artists and other individuals around the world will enjoy free access to online images of millions of objects housed in Yale's museums, archives, and libraries thanks to a new "Open Access" policy that the University announced today. Yale is the first Ivy League university to make its collections accessible in this fashion, and already more than 250,000 images are available through a newly developed collective catalog.

The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale's vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available...."

http://dailybulletin.yale.edu/article.aspx?id=8544

You can view a slide show of some of their items here - http://opac.yale.edu/images/slideshow/Slideshow-Open-Access/slideshow.html

Why did the BL archive Wendy Cope's emails?

Wired.co.uk spoke to two of the British Library team working on that project -- Modern Literary Manuscripts curator, Rachel Foss, and Jeremy Leighton John, e-Manuscripts curator, to discuss the benefits and difficulties of capturing an author's digital life and what researchers of the future will have to root through [...]

He explains: "Digital preservation is about things like being able to read file systems and physical media. It's a question of how to read particular files in the future. Future-proofing formats is a big challenge."

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/10/british-library-digital-archives

Article on Prof Helen Taylor's Honorary Fellowship

"This annual award, inaugurated in 2009, recognises American Studies academics who have made an outstanding contribution to the Association, to their institution, and to the American Studies community in general over the course of a distinguished career. Professor Taylor has contributed to this area of research for almost four decades. Her research on ‘Gone with the Wind’ made a significant contribution to the understanding of the role of popular culture in the notions of the South, of femininity, of whiteness and of slavery. Professor Taylor’s work on the studies of Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston and Tennessee Williams have helped to keep a range of American and specifically Southern American writers at the forefront of American and literary studies...."

http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_137129_en.html

Lost Archive of Ludwig Wittgenstein

"The Cambridge academic Prof Arthur Gibson revealed on Tuesday that he had spent much of the past three years working his way through an archive of Ludwig Wittgenstein material which disappeared in the chaos of the second world war.

The archive, around 170,000 words plus mathematical equations, provides fresh insights into the philosopher's mind and also shines a fascinating light on the complex relationship he had with the man who, as amanuensis, put most of the words on to paper – his young male lover Francis Skinner.

Gibson recalled when he first opened the archive: "I was just stunned. It was astonishing because it's a whole archive, never seen before and most of it entirely new. It provides an insight into his thought processes – you're almost peering into his mind.""

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/26/wittgenstein-lost-archive?CMP=twt_gu

BBC radio 4 program - Tales from the Digital Archive

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010m9sw

"Once a writer's archive consisted of letters, badly-typed first drafts and corrected manuscripts. But now they write on computers and communicate by email, what clues to their creative process remain? Archaeologist Christine Finn sets out to explore how the new generation of archive from the digital age will be made accessible to future generations.

She hears from Erika Farr, the Coordinator for Digital Archives at Emory University in America, which recently acquired Salman Rushdie's archive. It is a definitive 21st century archive, including emails, discs, and the computers on which he wrote his best-selling books.

Meanwhile the British Library is also addressing the digital challenge. Christine meets their first-ever Curator of Digital Manuscripts, Jeremy John, who explains how they're developing a 21st century approach to the preservation of the writer's environment. Instead of having to travel to Ted Hughes' Devon home to view his work-place, devotees will be able to access a digital reconstruction of his study via th BL website.

Christine Finn also discusses the impact of technology on the art of archiving the work of writers and poets with novelist Fay Weldon, exploring how these developments affect authors, their readers, and potential biographers. She hears from Margaret Atwood's biographer, Professor Nathalie Cooke, Associate Provost of McGill University in Montreal, and from Bobby Friedman, who has written an unofficial biography of politician John Bercow.

The traditional lament is the loss of data, as email replaces letters and drafts disappear with the delete key. But here Finn celebrates the new technology that is as much a part of an archive as the words themselves."

Emory University - how using archives aided students

http://web.library.emory.edu/blog/archival-expedition-part-3

Nice little piece about students changing their views about Sexton's poetry in light of using archival sources, correspondence etc.

Wendy Cope's Archive bought by the British Library

Wendy Cope's archive has sold to the British Library for £32,000. It includes letters, drafts etc plus 40,000 emails.

 "Cope's school reports – kept for the author by her mother – see the 16-year-old Cope's English teacher note that "Wendy's ability to penetrate to the heart of a question is of great value", while the author is also praised for her "power of expressing herself concisely and forcibly"."


Link to BL's press release - http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Press-Releases/-Some-sort-of-record-seemed-vital-British-Library-acquires-the-archive-of-Wendy-Cope-4e6.aspx