Reimagining the Library: Reflections on the Digital Reconstruction of a Historic Jesuit Library

Join the University Library to celebrate Jesuit Heritage Week 2016 with a lecture on

Reimagining the Library: Reflections on the Digital Reconstruction of a Historic Jesuit Library

delivered by

Professor Kyle Roberts, Department of History, Loyola University Chicago (CNI)

Within a few years of the founding of St Ignatius College in 1870, Peter Van Loco, S.J. made a catalogue of the library’s holdings. The c.1878 catalogue, which lists approximately 5100 titles encompassing over 8000 volumes, provides a rare snapshot into the books European-born Jesuits needed to teach the sons of Irish immigrants in the booming metropolis of Chicago. One hundred and fifty years later, this long forgotten manuscript catalog has become a remarkably generative source for scholarship. The Jesuit Libraries Project has given students the chance to research and reconstruct the holdings data of the original St. Ignatius College library catalogue in a virtual library system. The Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project uses the social media image-sharing site Flickr to create a visual archive of the ownership marks in original books surviving in the Loyola libraries’ collections today and to foster a participatory community interested in the history of Jesuit-held books. Lunch will be provided!

2:00 pm
Murray Room, 5th floor, Lauinger Library
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