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Illuminated Heritage

September 28, 2007

Hunting Down Those Rare Books

Ok, so this week I got wind of a book that looked like the answer to my prayers for researching the von Bieberstein family I have so desperately searched for for so many many years. On one of the Rootsweb boards that I’d forgotten about for a while, a fellow researcher mentioned he’d see “Die Geschichte des Bibersteins.” Oh boy! That sounded perfect (History of the Bibersteins) and I ran right over to WorldCat to look it up. Lo and behold! A hit! Oh my, this had to be fate, but fate that was tempered by the fact that only Yale and 2 libraries in Germany had it listed. Alas, in agony I trotted next door to my friendly reference librarian who helped me sort through the record, suggested I try Yale and then write the publisher. It was fairly new, 2005, I had hope. So I found the publisher’s site, dropped them a line and waited for the next morning to hear from them and our ever-bearing ILL person. Meanwhile I hunted down my fellow researcher’s e-mail and asked him for more information about the book.

Next morning, I find that Yale will lend it (for a fee) but I wait for the publisher – just in case. I hear back from my fellow researcher and WAIT, the book I have in my sights is from 2005 and he saw the book in 1997. Oops, this isn’t right – so after a flurry of e-mails and WorldCat searches we find this is NOT the book he saw, but another one. And doggone it all – it’s about the VILLAGE of Biberstein, not the FAMILY. Hopes dashed up against the rocks….if it’s probably too go to be true, well, you know how that goes. Much later I hear from the publisher – no longer in stock or being published but try the antiquarian dealers (cha-ching). So, thus begins my wild and crazy searching in about 3 different languages, just to see what’s out there. In order for us all to get some value out of this, these are the sites I’ve bookmarked that I found most useful in my search and that I’d recommend:

Ebay – I’d recommend setting up an automatic search that will e-mail you if anything with the terms you chose shows up. I’ve done this for some very obscure things and found it very helpful!

Alibris – You can set up BookFetch to notify you if the title you are searching for gets listed. I used this years ago to find an autographed copy of “Father of Radio” for the hubby.

Eurobuch – This is what the publisher recommended – it searches mostly German booksellers….be forewarned you better know some German and be quite adept at sorting out the jumble you get from Google Translate! The buttons are in English, but that’s about it…

BookFinder – This searches American as well as some European booksellers. I got some of the same hits here that I got from Eurobuch.

UKBookworld – based in the UK, of course.

AbeBooks – Has international partnerships so searches a lot of different places.

Powell’s – Once in a while, you’d be surprised what you find there! One of my favorite haunts – you can also set up a title search to notify you when the book you want becomes available.

Perhaps you already knew about a lot of these, but it never hurts to pass on some resources!

And what did I find? Well, the book my fellow researcher saw, which may or may not be useful, is mostly about the business dealings of the Biebersteins and yes, I found a few copies but at nearly $300 a pop, well, anyone want to buy it for me??? And no, I never found the one I had originally tried to search out so I will probably go back to Yale, pay the fee, and check it over myself.

And if anyone out there is researching the von Biebersteins/Bibersteins, drop me a line! I’d love to hear from you…I still don’t know what branch we’re on…

posted by Kay at 3:41 pm | Comments (0)

September 27, 2007

Excellent Reference for Photographic Processes

I ran across this EXCELLENT reference from the Library of Congress today about photographic print processes (limited to what’s in their collection – but really? What are they missing?). Each process is put in a time line, has a brief explanation of it and then sends you off to examples in the collection plus some other good solid links about that process. This is a fantastic resource and I highly recommend that you bookmark it somehow (del.icio.us works for me!).

posted by Kay at 9:49 am | Comments (0)

September 21, 2007

Medieval Manuscripts in Dutch Collections

I couldn’t let this announcement from The Hague about Medieval manuscripts in Dutch collections go by unnoticed! They just launched a website portal which inventories all Medieval manuscripts held by Dutch libraries, archives and museums. I’m hoping they expand on it by adding more images of the manuscripts! But, for now, there is a description of each manuscript with an image from it, along with its location and how you can visit it. You can zoom in fairly decently on the images they have up (look in the highlights, unless you know something to search for!). Anyway, I think it’s a nice collaboration between libraries, archives and museums over there which serves the purpose nicely, so take a look!

posted by Kay at 9:03 am | Comments (0)

September 11, 2007

Cook County Records to Go Online

In case you missed this last week, the Tribune reports that Cook County records (BMD) will be available online in January. They finished digitizing the 24 million records earlier this year and are uploading about a million records a week. For the full story…

posted by Kay at 1:52 pm | Comments (0)

September 7, 2007

Amazing New Image Technology

I don’t know if you’ve heard of SeaDragon or Photosynth yet but this video is mindblowing. These are digital camera or 300 dpi images he has on the screen – check out the level of detail on the zooming! I’d love to spend some time playing with this! It’s really hard to describe, so take the 7 minutes and watch it yourself! http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

posted by Kay at 11:01 am | Comments (0)

GeoGen

For those researching German or Austrian surnames, Geogen is a nice tool. It does surname mapping in Germany and Austria so you can find the areas of th highest concentration of that surname. Check it out…

posted by Kay at 10:59 am | Comments (0)