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Erin Blake

is currently the Senior Cataloger responsible for art and manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. From 2000 to 2014, Erin served as the Folger's Curator of Art and Special Collections. In 2014, she became Head of Collection Information Services. After a four-year tour of duty in senior management, she happily returned to working hands-on with the collection in 2018. In addition to her Folger work, Erin teaches The History of Printed Book Illustration in the West at Rare Book School, and is a member of the RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee.
Folger Tooltips: Making a spreadsheet from raw Hamnet data
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Folger Tooltips: Making a spreadsheet from raw Hamnet data

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Erin Blake

Hamnet, the Folger’s online catalog, is more than just a searchable inventory of printed books, manuscripts, engravings, paintings, and other resources in the collection. It is also a giant data set, freely available for machine analysis. But there’s a catch: library catalog data is encoded…

Photostats, or, The more things change, the more they stay the same
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Photostats, or, The more things change, the more they stay the same

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Erin Blake

Five weeks, and seventeen back-and-forth notes and letters. That’s what it took for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s first director, William Slade, to overcome the architects’ doubts that the library really did need a costly No. 4 Photostat machine and that it really was worth…

Meet the Hamnet HBCN ("Handy Butt-Cover Note")
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Meet the Hamnet HBCN ("Handy Butt-Cover Note")

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Erin Blake

When libraries replaced card catalogs with computer catalogs, researchers lost a crucial piece of information: an at-glance indication of relative trustworthiness. Consider this thin slip of paper from the Folger’s card catalog, for example: Accession-level record from Folger card catalog Looks fairly preliminary, right? That’s because…

Taming a tight binding
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Taming a tight binding

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Erin Blake

You know how some old bindings gently let a book stay open on its own, at a comfortable angle? And how other old bindings seem to willfully resist, taunting you by starting to close just as you get the book weights perfectly arranged? This post introduces a simple tool that…

Knowing your Adams from your Adams: decoding library catalog citations
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Knowing your Adams from your Adams: decoding library catalog citations

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Erin Blake

Picture, if you will, a 16th-century Continental edition of Ovid, an 18th-century illustrated history of London, and a 19th-century book about the American west. Now picture which one of the three might be “in Adams.” Which one did you pick? Years ago,…

Acquisitions Night: February 5, 2015
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Acquisitions Night: February 5, 2015

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Erin Blake

Got your tickets yet? Acquisitions Night is just over a week away! This once-a-year event directly supports the growth of the collection by giving people the chance to “adopt” selected items acquired over the past year—that is, reimburse the purchase price to the library so…

Out with the old? The A.L.A. Portrait Index of 1906
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Out with the old? The A.L.A. Portrait Index of 1906

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Erin Blake

To create more work space, we’re starting to sort through the hundreds of “ready reference” books that fill the shelves in the shared staff areas on Deck A, pulling out volumes that really don’t need to be kept that handy. For example,  it’s…

Mezzotint!
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Mezzotint!

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Erin Blake

Simran Thadani’s wild guess for the December Crocodile Mystery, backed up by Martin Antonetti and Deborah J. Leslie, is our winner. This month’s image is a close-up of the lower right edge of a mezzotint engraving. The lines that look…

Folger Tooltips: The limits of "Set Limits" in Hamnet
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Folger Tooltips: The limits of "Set Limits" in Hamnet

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Erin Blake

Following up on last month’s post about the new-and-improved “Limit location” in Hamnet, the one that lets you quickly limit your search to one of four locations, including just Vault material, I thought I should say a few words about the limits…

Folger Tooltips: New Hamnet URL and search limit
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Folger Tooltips: New Hamnet URL and search limit

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Erin Blake

We’ve recently made two small but significant improvements to Hamnet, the Folger’s online catalog—not enough to be worth a fanfare of “New and improved!” but probably at least worth pointing at while saying “Still old, but less irksome!” The first change is so obvious…

Folger Tooltips: Getting raw Hamnet data
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Folger Tooltips: Getting raw Hamnet data

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Erin Blake

Non-librarians out there, have you ever clicked the “MARC View” or “Staff view” link in an online catalog record? In Hamnet, the Folger’s online catalog, it’s the third choice at the top of each record. I vividly remember the first time I did.…

Free cultural works! Come get your free cultural works!
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Free cultural works! Come get your free cultural works!

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Erin Blake

It’s official: pictures in the Folger’s Digital Image Collection are now licensed CC BY-SA! That is, they can be used under a Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4.0 International License, one of the two Creative Commons licenses “approved for free cultural works.” That’s almost…

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