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Voyages of Discovery: Information for Reference Consultants

Greetings, free-range librarians, and thank you for volunteering your crucial time and skills for this event!

We will be providing at least one Windows laptop for your use, and wifi for both it and your personal laptops (thank you to those who have volunteered to bring yours!). We will also have a binder listing all the reference books available at the event, which will be in your immediate proximity; that will also be used to track those same books, so if you would like to bring books of your own, please know that we will be keeping track of them.

We will be conducting an expedition to the Harvard library system the week before the event – is there a reference book that you would love to have, but just can’t get your hands on it? Please send the citation to molly.eskridge@gmail.com by Thursday, 23 October, at noon, and it will go on the expedition request list!

Some potentially useful links:

General Medieval Bibliography from the University of Illinois

What Every Medievalist Should Know

The ORB: Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies

Internet Medieval Sourcebook 

Translated Texts for Historians (Harvard)

The British Library’s Catalog of Illuminated Manuscripts

The Middle English Dictionary

Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary

Medieval Cookbook Search

Textile Production at Coppergate

Mandragore (Bibliotheque Nationale de France)

Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland

SCA Medieval and and Renaissance Music Home Page

The Labyrinth

Early English Books Online (Harvard)

JSTOR (Harvard)

 

Discussion

4 Responses to “Voyages of Discovery: Information for Reference Consultants”

  1. Ana Ilevna and I plan to come and bring some reference books. We are heavy on Viking and Saxon. Are there particular reference books you’d like to see at the Colloquium?

    Posted by Anarra Karlsdottir | October 2, 2014, 1:41 pm
    • How wonderful! We don’t have a particular list that we’re looking for, although I will be making a library run the week of the event for some of my own favorites. My only suggestion for selection (if you’re trying to narrow a list) is to bring the references you find yourself returning to often, or the books you most find yourself showing/loaning to other people.

      Thank you!

      Posted by dreda | October 2, 2014, 3:07 pm
  2. We have a couple of weighty tomes about heraldry. I have (both on paper and on digits) “Medieval Garments Reconstructed: Norse Clothing Patterns.” I have “History of Ukranian Costume,” “The Tudor Tailor,” and possibly other costume books that I can’t find right now. I have Latin and Old English textbooks and texts (three versions of Beowulf, including one that’s a college text plus the Heaney translation), a Greek New Testament and doorstop-size lexicon, and some Russian area history books. We also have lots of old SCA publications (TI, Creative Anachronist), some of which surely were lacking in their research credibility.
    Let me know what you think I should bring.

    Posted by Laura Dickerson | October 2, 2014, 3:16 pm
    • That is a wonderful array! Is that Norse Clothing Patterns the one that was recently made available for download? It looked fascinating. I would incline towards books that cover things that are harder to find online, although I would agree with you that some of the older TIs and CAs are a bit lacking in credibility. They can still be a good source of other sources, though!

      Posted by dreda | October 6, 2014, 8:41 pm