Chapbooks Reveal Unhappy Fairy Tale Endings

University of Guelph library holds more than 600 titles

Seated: PhD student Sierra Dye. Standing, left to right: Post-doc Andrew Ross, librarian Melissa McAfee, visiting PhD student Dara Folan from the National University of Ireland and Guelph undergrad Jeremy Dechert.

GUELPH, Ontario - September 25, 2013 at Guelph by Andrew Vowles

Happily ever after? Not really, says Adrienne Briggs, a recent Guelph history grad. Fairy tale endings are for Disney. To learn about the original and often graphic stories of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and the like, you might look over some of the hundreds of Scottish chapbooks in the U of G library archives.

That’s what Briggs and other students did earlier this year for a pilot project in their U of G history class that will see old-time chapbooks meet modern communications technology.

Chapbooks were popular booklets containing songs, ballads, poems and short stories written for the increasingly literate Scottish masses of the mid-1700s to mid-1800s, says history post-doc Andrew Ross. Between eight and 24 pages in length, they covered such topics as romance, travel, comedy, politics, fairy tales and social customs.

The books were sold town to town by peddlers, or chapmen, says Ross. Eventually, chapbooks were supplanted by newspapers and other periodicals....read more

Sheet Music From Canada's Past

Sheet Music From Canada's Past

If you love Canadian history and music, you will most find this site most fetching. Created by the Library and Archives Canada, the site brings together intriguing and historically important sheet music from the past 150 years.

The collection exists due to the diligence of Helmut Kallmann, a young CBC music librarian who began to collect sheet music in the early 1950s. Today, the archives contain over 20,000 pieces of sheet music, many of which are available online. In addition, the site offers a handful of musical clips that represent pre-1921 Canadian musicality.

Visitors can Search Sheet Music to get started or browse the Gallery area. Here visitors can look around via themes, including Colleges, Flowers, Summer Sports, and Winter.

It is worth noting that although we reviewed the English site, the archives are also available in French.

Visit the site at: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/sheetmusic/

>From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout 1994-2012. http://scout.wisc.edu/

Library and Archives Canada and Canadiana.org partner on digitization, online publication of millions of images from archival microfilm collection

OTTAWA, Ontario August 29, 2013 - Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and Canadiana.org have strengthened their long-standing partnership to considerably increase access to Canada’s documentary heritage by way of a large-scale digitization partnership involving about 60 million images from numerous collections. Over the coming years, this partnership will triple LAC’s digital content on the Web, and allow Canadians to access tens of millions of additional images regardless of where they live, at no charge.

Canadiana.org is a not-for-profit charitable organization dedicated to building Canada’s digital preservation infrastructure and providing the broadest possible access to Canadian documentary heritage. Members of Canadiana.org include a Canada-wide network of public and research libraries that share tools and capacity, lead innovative open-access initiatives, and plan the future of digital preservation in Canada.

LAC’s 10-year agreement with this longstanding partner covers the digitization, indexing and description of millions of personal, administrative and government documents, as well as land grants, war diaries and photographs. There will be no change for those Canadians who wish to access these collections at LAC.

Canadiana.org also will also transcribe millions of handwritten pages, and create related descriptions. Enhanced search tools facilitating access to these records will be available to Canadians free of charge at LAC, as well as at hundreds of subscribing libraries in regions across Canada. For a small monthly fee, Canadians will also be able to use the enhanced tools online to conduct advanced searches without leaving home.