News

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

  • Director Edwin C. Schroeder Announces Plan to Retire in Summer 2021

    June 23, 2020

    Edwin C. (E. C.) Schroeder, director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and associate university librarian, will retire next year on August 31, 2021, at the conclusion of his current term and after more than 30 years of service with Yale University Library, beginning as a catalog librarian in 1989 and as director since 2011.

  • Celebrating Juneteenth with the Solomon Sir Jones films

    June 19, 2020

    IndieWire called Jones’ films “the most extensive film records we have of Southern and urban black life and culture at the time of rapid social and cultural change for African Americans during the 1920s, the very beginning of the Great Migration, which transformed not only black people as a whole, but America itself.”

  • Black Lives Matter

    June 10, 2020

    From University Librarian Susan Gibbons, June 9, 2020 From Beinecke Library Director Edwin C. Schroeder, June 10, 2020: Last week’s Beinecke Library e-...

  • 16th Century Playing Cards with Kathryn James (That Shakespeare Life)

    May 18, 2020

    ... we turn to Kathryn James, Curator of Early Modern Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. She joins us today to share about the collection of 16th century playing cards in house at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library with some key insights on the economics, design, and appearance of playing cards from the life of William Shakespeare.

  • Preserving the Great American Opera (Humanities Magazine, NEH)

    May 12, 2020

    After combing through the opera’s early performance materials, most of which are housed at the Library of Congress and at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Shirley has produced a critical edition of Porgy and Bess and, in collaboration with the Gershwin Initiative, has also produced the opera’s definitive performing edition, including newly edited orchestral and piano-vocal scores, and a new choral score.

  • Spotlight: Gordon Bunshaft (ArchDaily)

    May 9, 2020

    In the early 1960s, Bunshaft started receiving commissions from cultural and educational institutions. His addition to the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York (1961) featured a glassy black box floating over a stone podium, and for the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University (1963), he used thin panels of Vermont marble to allow filtered light to pass into the main space, a large volume housing a mountain of bookstacks. He also designed his own house, called the Travertine House, in the Hamptons in 1962, and the Johnson Presidential Library in 1971.

  • Emily Bernard: Creativity in Isolation

    May 5, 2020

    We asked scholar, critic, and prize-winning essayist Emily Bernard what she has been thinking about, working on, and reading in this time of isolation and...

  • The Bullet/The Amulet (LA Review of Books)

    May 3, 2020

    Writing a biography begins with detective work, but it’s not simply that. My work on Sidney Howard, for example, entailed months of reading in the National Archives, talking to his family, reading his correspondence from Berkeley to the Beinecke at Yale. I collected shards of meaning, but how to look at these discoveries was informed by Sam. From his readings of Darwin’s writing to his self-appraisal of his own professional performance, Sam understood that the conundrum that the thing observed and the subjectivity of the observer are always intertwined.

  • The Calm of Collage (Austin Kleon)

    May 3, 2020

    Here’s a great video of Donald Margulies in his basement studio: I find that during this bizarre time that we’re living in globally, I’m not able to write. I’m just not able to focus and put words together in any satisfying way. I’ve found tremendous solace and release in collage.

  • Belonging at Yale – Focus on Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

    May 1, 2020

    Beinecke and other Yale Library special collections steward important collections of contemporary Asian American authors, creators, and communities. Illustrative highlights in the Yale Collection of American Literature include archives of poets such as Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge (2021 winner of the Bollingen Prize) and Arthur Sze – see Contemporary Asian American Poets: A Top Ten List for links and ideas on searching the collections. Recent additions to the Yale Collection of Western Americana include Japanese American family photo albums such as those compiled by Komao and Eiko Baba that include more than 550 photographs documenting their lives, relatives, and acquaintances from 1917 into the 1990s. There are similar holdings for the Torii, Nobuyama, Matsukane, and Ichiyasu families. Several Yale records document Japanese American incarceration during World War II. The guide to those records highlights the important work by the Reparative Archival Description Working Group to provide guidance on the remediation of the description of these collections.

  • The digital Dark Ages (Yale Alumni Magazine)

    May 1, 2020

    As knowledge of our predicament spreads, data professionals, tech leaders, and journalists have raised the question of whether the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries will become a digital dark age, a time from which few records will survive for our successors in the centuries and millennia to come. If we do nothing, it seems likely that much of what we write, think, and create will pass out of human knowledge. But a slowly growing team of data devotees, hardware nerds, librarians, and scrappy volunteers is hoping to take the first few steps to keep our era from oblivion.