300,000 images (and many more to digitize before we sleep)

May 11, 2011

The Beinecke Library’s Digital Images database  just reached a milestone with our 300,000th digitized image: an opening from WA MSS 50, Joseph Goldsborough Bruff Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, from the Western Americana Collection.

vol. 4, p. 14-15

This is one of 16 volumes describing an 1849 Western expedition by Joseph Bruff, a draftsman in the Bureau of Topographical Engineers. Learn more about the Bruff journals here.

To quote Robert Frost’s 1923 poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.

And we too, have many miles of library shelves to go, and many, many items from our expansive collections to digitization before we sleep. A few more highlights from the recent group that helped to push us over the 300,000 mark:

Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des Trois Vertus, ca. 1475

Histoire des nobles & vaillans cheualiers, Lyon, 1568

The muses garland, London, 1603

Gertrude Stein at Radcliffe College, circa 1894