From the Kislak Stacks
Join us for these monthly lunchtime presentations (noon – 1 pm) by Kislak curators, faculty, and students focusing on specific works or small archives/collections found among the holdings of the Kislak Center.
- Lecture
When to Keep and When to Let Go: Re-purchasing an 18th century Law Book for the Penn Libraries
Mitch Fraas, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
This event has already occurred
What libraries value changes over time and sometimes this means as librarians we get a chance to reconsider past institutional decisions. This past year, the Penn Libraries acquired a 1762 volume of Pennsylvania laws…for the second time. That is, the book had been in the Penn Libraries for many decades before being de-accessioned and sold sometime in the mid-late twentieth century as a duplicate. Why did we decide we should reverse the decision of our predecessors? Why have multiple copies of the same book? This talk will explore these tricky curatorial questions and more.
Event Series
Mitch Fraas
Mitch Fraas is a senior curator for special collections at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. He holds doctoral and master's degrees in history from Duke University and earned his bachelor's degree at Boston College. His doctoral dissertation examined the legal culture of British India in the 17th and 18th centuries. He is currently a principal investigator on a multi-institutional project to digitize over 500 manuscripts from the Islamicate world held in Philadelphia and New York libraries. In addition to the history of law and imperialism, he is especially interested in the history of printing and the book and in the digital humanities, as well as the future of scholarly publishing and copyright.