Museum PR Announcements News and Information

New York Historical Society Receives Council on Library and Information Resources Award

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) announced that the New-York Historical Society has received a 2011 Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives award, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for the American Almanac Collection.
This two-year year project, led by Henry Raine, Director of Digital Programs and Library Technical Services, will allow the New-York Historical Society to catalog a collection of approximately 5,500 eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century American almanacs, greatly increasing scholarly access. Most of the collection’s almanacs, including an estimated 600 almanacs dating from before the year 1801, were published in New York State, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, but it also includes representative examples from other states east and west of the Mississippi. Highlights include the only known copies of early eighteenth-century editions of Daniel Leeds’s American Almanack, printed in New York by William Bradford; the earliest almanac printed in New Jersey, Poor Roger, 1760; and Confederate almanacs printed in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Mobile, Alabama, and Charleston, South Carolina.
More details on this year’s CLIR hidden collection projects can be found at http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/awards/index2011.html.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *