Continuing our tradition – started last week, of a summary listing of newly available Digital Library content to read, this week sees us traveling from broadsides and labor strife in Ireland to the confines of the elite houses of post-civil war New York society. Read along with:
Joseph McGarrity Books:
Larkin’s scathing indictment of Dublin sweaters.
[http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:277610]
Ireland. Where to go and what to see. A pictorial guide / issued by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, Manchester.
[http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:277333]
Little Mary the sailor’s bride : Together with The banks of Killaloe. Jemmy Mavilla Astore. Dear harp of my country.
[http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:277602]
Paudien O’Rafferty : Together with The coronation. What’s the use of fretting. The sun that lights the roses.
[http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:277606]
Pennsylvaniana:
In memoriam, Francis Anthony Drexel.
[http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Collection/vudl:92075]
Dime Novel and Popular Literature:
The New York Family Story Paper. 8 issues.
[http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Collection/vudl:277942]
A fresh lot of rube jokes : containing a selected lot of rube jokes, also stories & etc.
[http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:277943]
Un Hechicero Infernal.
[http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:278005]
The Bradys and Jockey Joe; or, Crooked Work at the Race Track and other stories / by a New York Detective.
[http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:277794]
The first two romances by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller that we released, The Bride of the Tomb; and Queenie’s Terrible Secret, have proven very popular. Fortunately, Mrs. Miller was an extremely prolific author, and we have a lot more in the pipeline. The first of many new proofreading projects is another double volume, Guy Kenmore’s Wife; and The Rose and the Lily.
These stories are now available at the Distributed Proofreaders project. If you are interested in helping us create new eBook editions of these nearly-forgotten (yet surprisingly memorable) novels, you can read more about our proofreading effort and then visit the project page.
As usual, we will post again when the final product is available for download; stay tuned!
With the transition to the newly updated VuDL Digital Library software, staff have been actively processing and adding descriptive data to newly digitized content, as well as to materials scanned months ago. Finding the newest content, often scattered over several different collections can be a chore, thus the inauguration of this our first “Content Roundup” posting, where we will provide links to the new resources and collection additions. We will experiment with the frequency of the Roundup and over the next few months settle on a regular, and hopefully eagerly anticipated, summary of the best and latest content!
Ardmore Chronicle (1904 / 1905)
The Gaelic American [http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Collection/vudl:266848] (selections from other years / most of 1916)
Dime Novel and Popular Literature [http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Collection/vudl:24093?type=AllFields] Many new items, but notable new content includes:
How to become an actor… [http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:276756]
Ben Brace : a tale of the sea / by Captain Chamier. [http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:277087]
The story of Robin Hood / by Bertha E. Bush. [http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:276616]
Wizard Will : the wonder worker. [http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:276546]
Happy days :a paper for young Americans. One issue. [http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:276528]
How to make electrical machines… [http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:269146]
How to solve conundrums… [http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:269216]
The Kneipp Water Cure Monthly. One issue. [http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:275118]
The Dime dialogues. Two new issues (19 / 31)
Attention all audiophiles: soon available will be the first chapter of a brand new initiative, podcasts to delight the ear and soothe the weary mind! Dime Novel and Popular Literature titles – only the finest and most choice of selections – will be read in their entirety in serial fashion! Yes, that is right, you too will soon be able to hear authentic audio versions of some of the most overlooked yet thrilling stories of yesteryear….
Busy in our deluxe sound studio, Demian Katz and Laura Bang are working around the clock to prepare for your enjoyment and edification our first offering…..
The Bride of the Tomb!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Listeners will:
FEEL Lancelot Darling’s passion … EXPERIENCE the SENSATION of Mr. Shelton’s charm … LEARN the SECRET of Fanny Colville and most of all CRY TEARS of LONGING with Lily… SO SWEET, SO INNOCENT … SUCH TRAGIC LONGING AWAITS…
STAY TUNED FOR THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS …….
This week we have a new title available for online proofreading. The current offering is a 19th-century guide to trains called How to Become an Engineer, part of the same series of instructional manuals that brought you one of our earlier releases, How to Fence.
In just about sixty pages, the book covers railroad history, technical details about engines, career advice for aspiring engineers, and detailed instructions on how to build a working model train set. The ambitiously-scoped text is accompanied by a wealth of illustrations and tables.
If you want to help with the proofreading efforts, you can join in at the project page. To learn more about our proofreading efforts, see this earlier post.
Yet another of our proofreading projects has been completed.
This week’s offering is The Shadow of a Sin by Charlotte M. Brame (alias Bertha M. Clay), a dime novel romance examining (in high melodramatic form) the long-term consequences of a single impulsive action.
This book is considerably more sedate than our previous romantic offering, Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller’s The Bride of the Tomb; and, Queenie’s Terrible Secret. While Mrs. Miller’s stories are filled with dramatic incident and sudden violence, Brame’s are considerably calmer, concerning themselves more with British society and emotional misunderstandings than with kidnappings and fiendish conspiracies. That is not to say that there is no drama here or that Brame’s heroine suffers less than Millers’; however, The Shadow of a Sin is less likely than The Bride of the Tomb to shatter preconceptions about 19th century popular fiction.
The book can be read online or downloaded in a variety of popular e-reader formats at Project Gutenberg, which also has a variety of other works by Brame.
To learn more about the book and its author, see our previous post about this project.
The Falvey Library is pleased to announce the launch of our new Digital Library interface.
The new interface features a JavaScript-only page zoom, faster hierarchical browsing, and enhanced searching that includes both item and collection descriptions in the results.
The public front end is built on VuFind 2.0, which has not yet been officially released, but is available for testing here. The backend is running the latest beta version of VuDL (release spring 2013), which has been re-architected to use a Fedora-Commons repository.
A more detailed article describing the new Fedora-Commons data model and Solr integration is forthcoming.
For now, we encourage you to explore this new site, and to provide any feedback to us directly.
Regular Blue Electrode readers will remember that we discovered a hidden cache of “dime novels” (and other turn-of-the-century popular literature) last summer and that we are adding some of our digitized titles to Project Gutenberg’s distributed proofreading project. We are pleased to announce the combination of these efforts with the completion of our first dime novel to go through the Project Gutenberg process: The Bride of the Tomb; and, Queenie’s Terrible Secret, a two-in-one volume, by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller, now available to read online or in a variety of electronic formats for various ereading devices.
Demian and I both read this and we had a lot of fun! Both of the novels in this two-in-one edition were full of clichés and extremely predictable plot “twists,” but they each also had a few surprises, which was nice — not quite the formulaic romance novels we were expecting! Both of the stories have fairly similar basic plots (people who seem to be dead but are not really dead and instead have been abducted), which is probably why they were packaged together, but they each have their own slightly different twists and turns. Of particular interest, the women characters in these stories are much more active than the men, even the supposed “heroes” (but of course the women still do their fair share of swooning). Queenie also makes use of some unexpected narrative devices, such as nonlinear storytelling (it may not be done particularly well, but it’s still noteworthy in a late-19th-century text).
If you’re into marginalia, you should make sure to look at the page images of this book in our Digital Library as well. This book was part of our original dime novel discovery, so we believe the writing may be that of Dr. Charles Magee, language professor and literary adviser to The Villanovan in the 1920s (we’ll have more about Dr. Magee later). There are many brief (mostly one-word) notes on the plot and literary devices.
Although they may not be paragons of literature, these stories are quite fun and they do offer several surprises. And if you’d like to join our Mrs. Miller fan club, just let us know!
Another proofreading project is has been completed, and A Little Fleet by Jack Butler Yeats is now available for online reading or download in various popular eBook formats.
The attractively-illustrated children’s book describes the construction of several model boats and chronicles their adventures sailing down a river. It’s a pleasant blend of craft manual, childhood nostalgia, and imagination, and it should still appeal to children (and the young-at-heart) today — though some readers will be alarmed by the tendency of the author to play with fire!
The finished eBook can be found at Project Gutenberg here, and more can be learned about its author in our online exhibit, Jack B. Yeats: Drawings & Illustrations.
Following the recent completion of our Atchoo! project, we have unveiled another example of George Niblo’s vaudeville comedy for proofreading. This time, the title is What’s Your Hurry? A Deck Full of Jokers. As with past examples from the Street & Smith Humor Library, this book gives a glimpse of comedic tastes from over a century ago, and sometimes they aren’t pretty — be prepared for some offensive stereotypes in between the puns.
If you aren’t put off by the subject matter or the hard to read decorative font, you can help with the proofreading efforts at the project page. To learn more about our proofreading efforts, see this earlier post.
