Emeritus Faculty

Library Digitizes Jazz Age Magazine

The University of Chicago Library launched a website last month allowing visitors free access to The Chicagoan, an arts and culture magazine fashioned after The New Yorker. Neil Harris, Preston & Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History and Art History, discovered the nearly complete run of the magazine in the Regenstein Library in the late 1980s. He later edited a book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, exploring the magazine’s ambitions and situating it in the historical context of 1920s Chicago.
 
The magazine was digitized using the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library’s Digitization Laboratory’s new Zeutschel overhead scanner, which allowed the library to scan bound volumes in house, in a face-up position. “As an online, searchable resource, the Chicagoan facilitates new avenues of study and the ability to zoom in and out on images, while preserving the original print volumes from excessive handling,” said Alice Schreyer, Assistant University Librarian for Humanities, Social Sciences & Special Collections and Curator of Rare Books.
 
Digital copies of The Chicagoan, which lasted from 1926 to 1935, can be found here.
September 23, 2013

Grant Awarded to UChicago to Preserve Endangered Urdu Periodicals

The University of Chicago recently received a £52,247 grant from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme to preserve sixty rare and endangered Urdu periodicals through digitization. The digital images will be produced at the Mushfiq Khwaja Library and Research Centre in Karachi, Pakistan, and will be available through the University of Chicago Library as well as the British Library. C.M. Naim, Professor Emeritus in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, will participate in the panel of Urdu scholars responsible for selecting the magazines and journals to be archived. “Thanks to the easy technology and low cost of litho printing, the only accepted form for Urdu script texts across South Asia, Urdu weeklies and monthlies began to appear in the 1870s,” Naim explains. “It was in the periodicals that all major modern writers and political and social figures made their debuts and gained popularity. And it is only in the periodicals that we can discover the full extent of many literary and political controversies that are only now beginning to gain the attention of scholars.” To read the full article, click here.

November 6, 2012

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