News

Selected stories from the Beinecke Library, YaleNews, and external media outlets (the latter noted by source in parentheses after title of article).

  • Beinecke Library hires six curators

    September 26, 2024

    The Beinecke Library has hired a cohort of six new curators—more than half of its curatorial team—who will shape how Yale Library special collections are selected, taught, and used for decades to come.

  • Remembering ‘Amnesia’: Digital preservationists reboot classic video game

    September 19, 2024

    A groundbreaking digital work of interactive fiction by the sci-fi novelist Thomas M. Disch, the game anchors “Remembering Amnesia: Rebooting the first computerized novel,” an exhibit on view through March 2 in the Hanke Exhibition Gallery at Sterling Memorial Library. Drawing on materials from Disch’s archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the exhibit explores the author’s novel attempt to move video games into the realm of literary fiction. It also describes the efforts of the Yale Library’s Digital Preservation unit to preserve the game, originally stored and played on now-obsolete hardware, and restore it to life.

  • Daniel Botsman named Sumitomo Professor of History

    September 13, 2024

    At Yale, Botsman has played a critical role in highlighting the Japanese collections of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library: he co-edited “Treasures from Japan in the Yale University Library” in 2015 and, with colleagues from across the university, convened a symposium on these collections. In addition, he has organized collaborative workshops for graduate students at Yale and beyond to learn new methods in Japanese history.

  • Special exhibit at the Beinecke showcases Holocaust survivors’ testimonies (Yale Daily News)

    September 4, 2024

    The Fortunoff Video Archive, a 45-year-old collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies collected at Yale, is currently on display at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The special exhibit, titled “In the First Person: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies,” aims to showcase the powerful first-person testimonies collected over four decades ago to mark the anniversary of the Archive’s formation.

  • Seeing Dances of the Harlem Renaissance, in Vivid Color (New York Times)

    September 3, 2024

    Along with the researchers Allyson Torrisi and Dahlia Kozlowsky, I dove into the archives of the New York Public Library, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., among others. After combing through thousands of black-and-white images from the early 20th century, I knew I wanted to depict this story of Black dance — as much about the present as the past — in vivid color.

  • Daggers, slides, maps, and more: Objects from 200-plus collections are new online

    August 12, 2024

    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.

  • An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery (The Atlantic)

    August 8, 2024

    Lisa Fagin Davis was starting her medieval-studies Ph.D. at Yale in 1989 when she got a part-time job at the university’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Her boss was the curator of early books and manuscripts, and he stuck her with an unenviable duty: answering letters from the cranks, conspiracists, and truthers who hounded the library with questions about its most popular holding.

  • Archiving Yale’s history 

    August 5, 2024

    Michael Lotstein started his career in 2011 at Yale Manuscripts and Archives, which now falls organizationally under the Beinecke Library. He became university archivist in 2015, and he is also a fellow at Saybrook College. With offices located in Sterling Memorial Library, Lotstein is responsible for acquiring and processing records from offices and academic departments across the university as part of preserving the university’s history. Prior to joining Yale, Lotstein was the assistant archivist for Collections and Records Management at the Arizona State University Libraries. 

  • The Beinecke Remembers The Holocaust (New Haven Independent)

    August 1, 2024

    How do we talk about something for which we have no words? How do we develop a vocabulary for a tragedy of such volume that the human language does not encapsulate it? The Beinecke library’s new exhibit, In the First Person: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, has perhaps the only answer: We let the survivors speak for themselves. The exhibit features 19 video testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, displayed to commemorate the 45th anniversary of their taping. The videos are from the archives of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, a New Haven grassroots community initiative that became the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.

  • Yale exhibit of Holocaust survivors' testimonies opens in New Haven (New Haven Register)

    July 26, 2024

    Starting 45 years ago, a grassroots New Haven organization called the Holocaust Survivors Film Project started videotaping Holocaust survivors' accounts of their experiences. That project grew into the Fortunoff Archive in the Yale University library. In an exhibit that opened on July 25, 19 of those videos will be shown at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The exhibit, titled "In the First Person: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies," will also include books, documents and other items to tell the story of anti-Jewish persecution from the perspective of those affected by it, according to a news release.

  • Baldwin Set to Music at Arts & Ideas (The Arts Paper)

    June 18, 2024

    The concert held particular weight in its coincidence with the birthday of writer and civil rights activist James Welden Johnson, for whom Beinecke’s collection of materials related to African American politics and culture is named. The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection contains an original copy of Johnson’s lyrics for “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—colloquially the Black National Anthem—as well James Baldwin’s letters, among other things. “There are lots of materials related to liberation in this library,” said Beinecke’s Community Engagement Director Michael Morand before the performance. “All are welcome to do research in this place.” (To access materials held in the Beinecke, members of the public should register with the Yale library system.) Morand first encountered Harris at Bill Lowe’s performance at the Beinecke for last year’s Arts & Ideas festival, where Harris played piano. Afterwards, Morand spoke with Harris about his own work and thought that the Baldwin theme related perfectly to Beinecke’s materials on the author as well as the Baldwin centennial. “I had high expectations,” Morand said after the performance. “But this was phenomenal.”

  • Beinecke Jazz Reframes Reality (New Haven Independent)

    June 18, 2024

    As the music swelled to a triumphant peak, Harris encouraged the audience to clap along, which many had already been doing. Then he urged them to their feet, until the entire room was dancing in place. This also meant they were in exactly the right position for a standing ovation, which, as the movement ended, they happily gave. Harris hoped his audience left with a feeling of deep meaning, from both Baldwin and himself. ​“The words of Baldwin that move them, I hope my music moves them in the same way,” he said. If the bright smiles and energetic applause were anything to go by, he had succeeded in his mission.