Competency #2 -- Blog

I knew finding other blogs focusing on special collections in universities or museums would be fairly simple. Finding a blog that focused on special collections in public libraries though I knew would be a little more challenging. I used Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/) to try and find a public library's special collections department that maintained a blog.

After some searching I was able to find a blog entitled Notes for Bibliophiles. The tagline for this blog is "The official blog of the Special Collections department of the Providence Public Library." The blog URL is http://pplspeccoll.blogspot.com/ This blog seems to feature different items and resources in their collection. I particularly found the "Crew lists on a whaler" post from Saturday, January 10, 2009. The URL for the blog post is http://pplspeccoll.blogspot.com/2009/01/crew-lists-on-whaler.html

Here is a sample of the posting:
"Maritime voyages often evoke romantic images (either grandiose or tragic), but what most people forget is that they were always business ventures. As such, they generated an awful lot of paperwork, from fitting out the ship to the financial disbursements after she came home (these could take decades or longer). If some happening on the voyage generated a lawsuit, or if the ship was seized lawfully (by a privateer) well, the paperwork became quite heavy. Shown here is an example of a crew list, done for the whaler Thomas Hunt on a voyage in 1880… In the PPL we have several dozen crew lists, and other maritime collections have them as well. Most of the extant crew lists related to American whaling are in New Bedford, MA. In fact, you can search crew members by name here: http://www.newbedford-ma.gov/Library/Whaling/Whaling.html This database is a comprehensive index of men and ships on whaling voyages from the New Bedford Customs District from 1807 through 1925. Fabulous."

For anyone interested in learning more about the Special Collections department at Providence Public Library should visit their website: http://www.provlib.org/resources/books/special/special.html.

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I also found another blog I would be remiss if I did not mention it. It is titled Confessions of a Curator. The blog URL is http://niurarebooks.blogspot.com/ I particularly like this blog because the author states the following "I'm the Head of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University, a teaching and research collection with a special emphasis on American popular culture materials from the 19th and 20th centuries. I blog about items from our collections, and around the web, that are of interest to me, and possibly, our users." I particularly like the Google Reader Round-Up posting she does. The URL for one of these posts is http://niurarebooks.blogspot.com/2009/01/google-reader-round-up-ala-midwinter.html

Here is the posting:
Here's what you may have missed while attending ALA Midwinter:

• Robert Darnton says smart things as usual about Google Books and settlements and libraries.
• Penn's Van Pelt library has just received a large collection of comics.
• LISNews has been busy. They have stories on OCLC's records sharing policies, a birth at Denver Public Library, an interesting article about mentoring programs in academic libraries, a discussion of why you can't find a library book in your search engine, a tool for verifying digital records, and a discussion about the digital disappearing act with the head of the British Library.
• Also, sadly, John Updike passed away.
• ArchivesNext has a great guest blog about diversity in the archival profession. I hope that once the RBMS Diversity Committee publishes our toolkit (which should be soon), they might find some of it useful.
• The Michigan Library Consortium will be hosting a preservation workshop. via Kevin Driedger's Library Preservation blog.
• LibLime has announced a new digital archiving product called Kete. Via LISWire.
• The SF magazine Realms of Fantasy is, sadly, closing its doors.