News

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

  • The world as they knew it: New Beinecke exhibition charts rise of maps

    September 1, 2022

    Yale boasts one of the most significant map collections in North America, including the continent’s largest single assemblage of portolans — navigation charts that seafarers used to find ports. Ten of the Beinecke Library’s portolans, which comprise the exhibit’s centerpiece, are displayed in the two flat cases on either side of the building’s ground floor.

  • Digital project supports ‘bibliographic turn’ in Black literary studies

    August 11, 2022

    Digital project supports ‘bibliographic turn’ in Black literary studies By Allison Bensinger August 11, 2022 Share this with Facebook Share this with Twitter Share this with LinkedIn Share this with Email Print this A selection of books by Black authors (Photo by Tubyez Cropper) Yale’s Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill of Rutgers University recently received a $1.7 million grant from The Mellon Foundation to support the development of The Black Bibliography Project (BBP), an initiative that aims to revive and transform descriptive bibliography for African American and Black Diaspora literary studies.

  • That Weird Building on the Highway Is Actually Famous and Now a Hotel (Daily Beast)

    July 30, 2022

    A short walk north through neo-gothic delights leads to another modernist landmark open to the public, the Beinecke Library, designed by Gordon Bunshaft for Skidmore Owings Merrill. The exterior consists of marble panels held in place by precast blue-grey concrete panels over steel Vierendeel trusses. We’ve all seen marble before, it’s almost always opaque. When you enter you realize that this isn’t. Its 1-1/4-inch-thick marble slabs reveal ever-changing grain and light inside; a use of material without modern precedent, inspired allegedly by an alabaster wall in the Topkapi Palace. The shelves are all in the center, a tower of tomes within.

  • How Sinclair Lewis Invented Donald Trump (New Haven Independent)

    July 29, 2022

    To find out more about Lewis’s effort to predict such dire circumstance, I became a denizen of the Beinecke, the 1963 building of translucent marble and granite on Yale’s Hewitt Quadrangle. Here, there are priceless relics available to examine by any visitor. These include one of the few extant copies of the original Gutenberg Bible and John James Audubon’s The Birds of America.

  • A Postcard from New Haven, CT (Contingent Magazine)

    July 29, 2022

    Although I spent only two days researching at Yale, I found several pertinent sources for my dissertation. Most of that time I worked at the Beinecke Library, located next to the law school. Tall and modern, the exterior of the Beinecke looks drastically different from the more traditional gothic buildings nearby. Walking inside the library, visitors like myself find a large enclosed glass case of rare books. The library holds over 1 million books, and it’s quite something to see many of them in such a unique display. The library’s reading room offered great space to read through its many collections, small or large, without the pressure of hovering over other researchers.

  • IMLS Announces $21 Million Investment in U.S. Library and Archive Initiatives (IMLS)

    July 28, 2022

    The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and partners, will develop the first set of best practices for archival accessioning in the United States to help archives across the country strengthen and standardize their own accessioning practices. The best practices developed will help archives professionals work more efficiently and ethically, and the project events will help formally establish a community of practice where these professionals can support and learn from each other.

  • The World in Maps, 1400-1600 (Fine Books & Collections)

    July 14, 2022

    This exhibition presents many of the most historically significant manuscript maps from the late medieval and early modern period from the Beinecke Library’s vast collection of maps. It is focused on portolan charts - large, colorful charts that showed the shoreline of the Mediterranean, and were used by sailors to navigate from port to port

  • Wright Lab summer undergraduate researchers explore scientific treasures of Yale Beinecke Library

    July 14, 2022

    Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Beinecke) and the Medical Historical Library together house early editions of many milestones of achievements in physics, including those from Copernicus, du Châtelet, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and other scientists from the 16th-18th centuries, with topics ranging from early materials science, astronomy and cosmology, physics, and mathematics.

  • Remembering Judy Schiff: Library colleagues share memories

    July 13, 2022

    Throughout her impressive sixty-year-long career at Yale—including as ­Yale Library’s chief research archivist since 1971—Judith “Judy” Schiff earned the deep respect and admiration of colleagues throughout the institution. The news of her death this week prompted several of these many friends and co-workers to share their memories of the ways in which she inspired them as a mentor, historian, and valued member of the Yale and New Haven communities she loved.

  • In Memoriam: Judith Ann Schiff, Yale’s long-serving chief research archivist

    July 12, 2022

    Judith Ann Schiff, a longtime archivist at the Yale University Library who loved helping others gain a deeper understanding of Yale’s and New Haven’s histories, died on July 11. She was 84. Over the course of a Yale career spanning more than 60 years, Schiff — the library’s chief research archivist and the university’s longest-serving staff member in recent memory — guided countless students and scholars through the library’s archival collections. She built and managed many of those collections, making them more accessible to researchers. And she delighted in sharing fun, fascinating, and often forgotten stories from the university’s history through her beloved “Old Yale” column in the Yale Alumni Magazine. Generous by nature, she enjoyed sharing her knowledge of Yale’s history with alumni, frequently giving talks during reunions and other special events.

  • Student curator Gabrielle Colangelo ’22 brings obscured lesbian histories to light

    June 6, 2022

    For her exhibition, “We Are Everywhere: Lesbians in the Archive,” now on view in Sterling Memorial Library, student curator Gabrielle “Gabby” Colangelo ’22, began by asking questions. “Why are there so few lesbians represented in Yale’s archives? And who is Silvia Dobson, this unknown woman who appears so prominently in my search results?”

  • Unraveling the past: New Sterling Library exhibition goes beneath the surface

    May 9, 2022

    Rather than craft a conventional narrative encompassing the disparate materials, the exhibit’s curators — Bill Landis, associate director for public services at Manuscripts and Archives; Jae Rossman, director of the Department of Area Studies and Humanities Research Support; and Nancy Kuhl, curator of poetry in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke — framed the show around the basic questions that guide scholars’ thinking when they first encounter unique primary source materials: Who made this? When was it made? What was its function? Whose perspectives are missing?

  • Six faculty members honored for ‘transformational’ classroom instruction

    May 5, 2022

    Students who nominated the six Yale faculty members awarded this year’s Yale College teaching prizes on May 5 used many different adjectives to praise their instructors. But there was one overarching theme in their comments: All of the prizewinners were credited with being “transformational” in their students’ lives — in the classroom and beyond.

  • Celebrating the new Hanke Exhibition Gallery in Sterling Library

    May 2, 2022

    Lynn Hanke was honored at a University Library Council (ULC) ribbon cutting to celebrate the completion of the Hanke Exhibition Gallery in Sterling Memorial Library, a project she and her husband, Robert Hanke ’60, made possible. “For years, we have aspired to have a state-of-the-art exhibition gallery in the Sterling Memorial Library where we can share inspiring stories from across the library’s special collections in a central space,” Barbara Rockenbach, the Stephen F. Gates ’68 University Librarian, told the assembled guests. “Thanks to the great generosity and vision to support our special collection mission, Lynn and Robert Hanke have encouraged us to finally open such a space.”

  • Visiting Voynich (Manuscript Road Trip)

    April 24, 2022

    As we begin to make our way out of the COVID-19 pandemic, it isn’t only restaurants and theaters that are opening up. Libraries, too, are reopening to the public, and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is no exception. After several years of restricted access and closures, the Beinecke is now open for outside researchers, albeit with masks and proof of vaccination required. The Beinecke is one of my favorite places to visit, and when I heard that the Library would be welcoming outside researchers as of April 11, I made my plans right away, securing authorization to visit the campus and permission to spend April 22 with none other than MS 408, a.k.a. The Voynich Manuscript.

  • Behrens releases Cook film (Independence Bulletin Journal )

    April 22, 2022

    Roy Behrens, Emeritus Professor of Art at the University of Northern Iowa and Independence native, has released a new 60-minute online documentary film about Iowa expatriate artist William Edwards Cook, and his close long-term friendship with American writer Gertrude Stein ... there are 250 pages of letters between Cook and Stein in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, in which they often talk about Independence ...