It's October — Halloween season — and people are donning pointed hats and dark capes and heading to Salem in droves for ghoulish holiday fun. But what's the real story about Salem and witchcraft? We interviewed Danvers historian and archivist Richard Trask who presides over a massive collection of printed materials related to the 1692 witchcraft hysteria to get some history behind this autumnal tradition. (Read more...)
Sid Berger wears many hats: He is currently the Ann C. Pingree Director of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, which houses many of the original transcripts of the witchcraft trials along with a vast collection of other historical, artistic, and genealogical materials. He's the owner/operator of a press (in his house), for which he hand prints books of poetry and other works, some by Pulitzer Prize winners. He's a paper maker. He has been an English, Communications, and GSLIS professor at Simmons since 2002. (Read more...)
The September issue of Computers in Libraries (v.29 no.8) has two articles by GSLIS students: Stephanie Buck, "Libraries in the Cloud: Making a Case for Google and Amazon" (pp.6-10) and Katharine Dunn and Nick Szydlowski, "Web Archiving for the Rest of Us: How to Collect and Manage Websites Using Free and Easy Software" (pp.12-18). (Read more...)