Huntington Library

Treasures of the Huntington Library

http://www.huntington.org/LibraryDiv/LibImages.html

The Huntington Library is not in the business of sharing its collection with the general public. Only PhD’s and PhD candidates are invited to apply for reading room privileges so much of their collection stays on its shelves. Where it seems they like it.

Collection Principles:

Being that the collection is not accessible to the common person I was expecting the online branch of their collection to be wide so that the general public could enjoy it. Not really. The Huntington boasts of housing 5,400 incunabula (2^nd only to the Library of Congress) and thousands of other rare books yet only digitized 16 images of various books and manuscripts. There is no introduction or background information about the images nor is their selection explained. They even have a microfilm copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls (written between 200 B.C. and A.D. 68) – a major attraction, but no images. Nothing.

Metadata:

There is metadata provided with each digitized object: title, author, what material the text was printed on (only listed twice), place of publication and date. There also appears to be what might be the item’s call number.

Object Characteristics:

Each digitized image is a thumbnail that can be enlarged. The images are of manuscripts, rare books and black and white photographs. Some images appear to be scanned (color) others appear to have been images taken by a digital camera. File format is unknown – jpeg, tiff???

Who is the intended audience?

Everyone the Huntington wants to keep away from their reading room. The Huntington doesn’t seem too concerned with sharing its collection at the library or on their webpage.