Rare Books and Manuscripts Library

Highlighting our collections and the work that we do

Month: April 2013

“Things You Never Got To See” Tour to Include Special Collections in Thompson Library

Please join us for a special event on Wednesday, May 1st from 12pm-5pm in The Jack and Jan Creighton Special Collections Reading Room (room 105, Thompson Library). Thompson Special Collections will be a stop on the “Things You Never Got To See Tour”, part of the university’s Commencement Week activities. Everyone is welcome!

Items to view will include:

William Charvat Collection of American Fiction: Come see rare first editions of some of your favorite American authors. On display will be classics by Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Henry Miller, J.D. Salinger, James Baldwin and many more.

Rare Books & Manuscripts: On display will be some of your favorite works by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Rudyard Kipling. Take this opportunity to see the original publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Would you like to see the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle, the most complex and heavily illustrated book printed during the fifteenth century? What about Henry Billingsley’s 1570 translation of Euclid’s Geometry, the first geometrical “pop-up” book printed in sixteenth-century England? Have you ever wondered what the first edition of the King James Bible looks like? How about original seventeenth-century Shakespeare publications? Or would you like to handle and examine a range of medieval parchment manuscripts produced between 1100-1500? Authentic photographic prints of famous images like Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother and Harold Edgerton’s Shooting the Apple will be available, as well as a number of early daguerreotypes.  All of these items, and much more, will be on display for graduating seniors and their families at the Thompson Library Special Collections Reading Room during Commencement Week.

The Hilandar Research Library: The Hilandar Research Library (HRL) has the largest collection of medieval Slavic manuscripts on microform in the world. In addition to millions of pages of manuscript material on microform, Hilandar also has facsimiles of codices, and a small collection of original manuscripts and artifacts from the medieval Slavic and Eastern Orthodox world. We will have on display an original Slavic manuscript from the late 15th century, and a facsimile of a richly illuminated 11th-century Greek codex.

The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research InstituteEnjoy the beauty of stage and screen with costume and scene designs, models, and costumes by Broadway, regional, international, and Hollywood designers; film posters from the silent era on; and photographs of stars.

 

(Everyone attending will be asked to place their personal belongings in lockers just outside the reading room. A key to a locker will be provided upon your arrival). 

Rare Books and Manuscripts Celebrates the Buser Collection

Charles Aubrey Buser

Charles Aubrey Buser

Please join us at an end-of-the-year event to celebrate the American Indian Studies program at OSU and to mark the completion of a multi-year archival project to digitize and repatriate The Charles & Patricia Buser Collection Devoted to American Indian Languages and Cultures.

A reception will be held in 165 Thompson Library, beginning at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 16.  Following the reception, guests will be invited to move into the Special Collections Reading Room to interact with the collection.

In addition to members of the University Libraries and American Indian Studies communities the event will feature remarks from Stephen Buser, the son of the late Charles Buser and an emeritus professor at Ohio State, Margaret Newell, Associate Professor of History, and representatives from the Wyandotte Nation and the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation.


The Story of the Collection:

Charles Aubrey Buser (1922-2010) and Ardis Patricia Anderson Buser had a strong personal interest in Wyandotte language and culture.  They traveled widely, throughout the United States and Canada, making many enduring friendships along the way.  They explored the history and traditions of the Wyandotte, as well as other native peoples, gathered genealogical information, and in the process sought to record as much as possible of the languages, both in text and audio recordings.  Charles Buser‘s research proved to be valuable to the Wyandotte people on more than one occasion, and he was honored for his contributions.

Stephen Buser, Professor Emeritus of the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University, recognized the research value of his parents’ papers and was a major contributor to a digitization project that will make the collection available for research at the OSU Libraries.

The Buser collection in its original physical state, which is now held by the Wyandotte Nation in Oklahoma, consists of 13 boxes of photocopies, notes, books, pamphlets,  government documents, clippings, audio recordings, and a great deal of personal correspondence.  The finding aids maintain the order in which the collection came to us for scanning, and thus they are divided into box and folder categories.  Additional binders and boxes of note cards were used to track historical events and form the beginning of a dictionary.  The collection contains a wealth of information that will be an essential research resource for historians, linguists and genealogists.  The contents are of value for researching the history of the Wyandotte people in general, and individual families in particular.  Buser, who also documented cultural practices and details about clothing design, was at times consulted by the Wyandotte because of the extent of his knowledge in these areas.

Our Celebration:

We will have five visitors joining us for this event:
Chief Billy Friend, Wyandotte Nation, Oklahoma
Lloyd Divine, Culture Committee Chair, Wyandotte Nation, Oklahoma
Sherri L. Clemons, Tribal Heritage Director, Wyandotte Nation, Oklahoma
Chief Ted Roll, Wyandot of Anderdon Nation
Chief Glenna Wallace, Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma

We hope that you can join us in welcoming these representatives of the Wyandotte and Shawnee to OSU.