American Antiquarian Society update: GIGI

Since my post in January 2012, the American Antiquarian Society has launched its Digital Image Archive, called GIGI with beautifully presented tif-format thumbnails. This is in addition to other stand-alone digital projects and online exhibitions. Of particular interest to ephemerists are the 1415 broadsides (Browse and select broadsides).  A keyword search for ephemera yields 3018 results at the time of writing (of 10,000 results from a keyword search in the General Catalogue). There are links from the catalogue into GIGI where appropriate, so the advice to scholars is to start there.

All very exciting for those of us who don't have Readex and want to browse the collections of the AAS.   There is advanced searching too within GIGI.



Search for broadside in GIGI (C) American Antiquarian Society

A list of collections represented includes the following categories of ephemera:
Album cards; Billheads; Broadsides; Christmas cards; Civil War envelopes; Currency; Election Ballots; Invitations; Membership Certificates; Menus; Postcards; Ream Wrappers; Sheet Music; Trade Cards; Valentines; and Watch papers from Graphic Arts, and Trade catalogs from Books. There are also hundreds of prints.

The AAS blog also has posts about ephemera (e.g. the recent post about Irish ballads for St. Patrick's Day) and a very active Twitter account: @AmAntiquarian

Ephemera at Chetham's Library, Manchester

Chetham's Library in Manchester has rich collections of printed ephemera, most of which are catalogued, including bookplates, postcards, chapbooks, broadsides, ballads, theatre programmes, posters, trade cards and bill heads.

The Chethams website has a very useful guide to discrete collections of rare books and printed ephemera, notable among which are the Halliwell-Phillipps collection (donated to the library in 1852), a fne collection of scrapbooks of local material and the Belle Vue zoo and gardens archive.

(C) Chetham's Library, Manchester

There is project to digitise ballads across all Manchester libraries, including the newly-acquired (and already indexed) Robert Holt Collection of Manchester Street Songs and Ballads.

The California Ephemera Project and the Online Archive of California

The California Ephemera project (CEP) currently brings together the ephemera of four institutions:, all located in San Francisco: the California Historical Society; the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society; the San Francisco Public Library; and the Society of California Pioneers.   The date span is 1850 onwards and many genres of ephemera are included, notably advertisements, announcements, brochures, catalogs, menus, pamphlets, billheads, theater programs, clippings, bylaws, flyers, tickets, and travel guides.

The CEP links very seamlessly  (through 'browse all collections' or "search OAC") into the Online Archive of California, which provides: "free public access to detailed descriptions of primary source collections (artwork, manuscripts, papers, historic photographs, and so on) maintained by more than 200 libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California — including collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses".  A search of OAC for ephemera returns an impressive 2954 collections (from the output of fine presses to Walt Disney) and 847 items.

While many Online Archive of California searches bring up finding aids to the collections, others reveal multimedia approaches, such as the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, presented by the Bancroft Library, which has an online exhibit, interactive map and 360 degree panorama.

Collections can be searched or browsed. Browsing is by collection or institution, and a little eye symbol indicates digital image content.

A box titled 'Need to find a digital image' takes the user to Calisphere (which is not devoted to ephemera) where you can search by topic or genre, e.g. Advertising (screen shot). There are also themed selections for Educators.

Copyright © 2011 The Regents of The University of California

NYPL Menu crowd-sourcing

(c) New York Public Library

What's on the menu?

I love the New York Public Library approach to menu transcription by crowd-sourcing (What's on the menu) and am thinking of ways to implement something similar for the John Johnson Collection. Possible projects are transcribing the titles and tagging the image content of WW1 postcards and transcribing the lists of products purchased in Bill Headings. Watch this space!
There is a great introduction to the NYPL menus too: http://legacy.www.nypl.org/research/chss/grd/resguides/menus/