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Digital collection features more than 8,000 items

November 11, 2013 - Alicia Dietrich

Digital collection features more than 8,000 items

The Ransom Center has launched a new platform of freely available digitized images of collection materials on its website. The new site contains more than 8,000 items and will continue to grow as newly digitized images are added on a regular basis.

Presently the collection includes photographs by Lewis Carroll, manuscripts by Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Harry Houdini’s scrapbooks, works by artist Frank Reaugh, and items from the Ransom Center’s extensive circus collection, which includes materials related to showmen such as P. T. Barnum, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey.

The digital collections platform provides access to the Ransom Center’s collections for students, scholars and members of the public who are unable to visit the Center. It also provides a way for visitors to access fragile materials or collections that exist in challenging formats, such as personal effects and costumes. One example is a collection of glass plate negatives that documents theater performances in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The fragile collection was previously inaccessible, but the negative plates were digitized and converted to positive images for the digital collection.

Visitors to the Ransom Center’s website can search within collections or across collections, often revealing related materials.  Additional tools provide users with the ability to virtually flip through books, enlarge images and compare page images with accompanying transcripts, which are text-searchable.

Collections are being added on an ongoing basis, and planned digitization projects include the photographs of nineteenth-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and photographs and ephemera from the Fred Fehl dance collection.

This project was made possible with funding from the Booth Heritage Foundation.

Please click on thumbnails below to view larger images.

Signed title page of Charlotte Brontë's "The Green Dwarf." September 2, 1833.
Signed title page of Charlotte Brontë’s “The Green Dwarf.” September 2, 1833.
Sherlock Holmes’s inauspicious first appearance was in the 1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual. The 27-year-old Doyle wrote the novel in three weeks and received only £25 for the full rights.
Sherlock Holmes’s inauspicious first appearance was in the 1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual. The 27-year-old Doyle wrote the novel in three weeks and received only £25 for the full rights.
Alfred Junge's set designs of Mother Dorothea's office for "Black Narcissus," 1946.
Alfred Junge’s set designs of Mother Dorothea’s office for “Black Narcissus,” 1946.
Poster from magicians collection for “Kellar in His Latest Mystery/Self Decapitation” printed by Strobridge Lithographing Company in 1898.
Poster from magicians collection for “Kellar in His Latest Mystery/Self Decapitation” printed by Strobridge Lithographing Company in 1898.
Page from “Bouts Rimés,” with poems by John Tenniel and illustrations by Tenniel pasted into a bound volume, with some sheets attached so as to fold out.
Page from “Bouts Rimés,” with poems by John Tenniel and illustrations by Tenniel pasted into a bound volume, with some sheets attached so as to fold out.

Filed Under: Digital Collections, Research + Teaching Tagged With: Art, Charles Dodgson, Charlotte Bronte, circus collection, digital collections, digital humanities, Emily Brontë, Film, Frank Reaugh, Harry Houdini, Lewis Carroll, magic collection, Manuscripts, Norman Dawn, Performing Arts, Photography

About Alicia Dietrich

Dietrich edited the biannual print newsletter Ransom Edition and monthly email newsletter eNews; promoted exhibitions and public programs; produced press releases; and worked with media.

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