More than 1,200 novels, known as yellowbacks, have been digitized using a cutting-edge robotic digital book scanner purchased from Kirtas Technologies by Emory Libraries in 2008. The Kirtas machine enables the libraries to scan thousands of rare and out-of-copyright books in its research collections.
Yellowbacks were cheap, 19th century British literature sold at railway book stalls, with colorful, sensational covers to attract buyers. While some were well-known books such as "Sense and Sensibility," many of the yellowbacks were obscure titles by authors unknown today. "They were the equivalent of a popular novel you'd read on a plane today," says David Faulds, MARBL's (Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library) rare book librarian.
[Clip]
The project has taken about six months and is almost finished, says Kyle Fenton, leader of digitization services and digital curation, whose team worked to digitize the collection of yellowbacks. Of the 1,235 books digitized, nearly all of the titles are available online and can be downloaded by readers for free.
MARBL has the second largest collection of yellowbacks at an American university library, behind UCLA. The nickname comes from the yellow glazed paper of the illustrated covers.
The genres and topics include romance, detective fiction, war, biography, medicine, horse racing, hunting and fishing.
How to Access the Yellowbacks (These Instructions Come Direct From Emory)
+ Visit the Emory Libraries home page at web.library.emory.edu
+ In the discoverE search box on the right side of the screen, type the word "yellowbacks" and click the search button
+ At the next screen, under results on the left side of the screen, click "online resources." You can also narrow by genre, topic and author.
+ Click on the title of the yellowback you wish to read.
+ Scroll down under details, and at the second blue arrow, click "PDF version."
+ The yellowback will load; note the first page is usually blank. You can then save the novel to your desktop or a flash drive and read it at your leisure.
Don't let these directions intimidate you. The very first time we tried them we were ready to click on a link to download a PDF in under a minute. Of course, after a few more searches the time should only get faster.
Today, the story was posted by the AP so it's likely the reason the PDF download times are a bit slow.
Also, as you learn the collection and want to share it with others, you CAN (for example) add a terms, names after the word "yellowback" for example: yellowback austen.
Why Austen? The announcement points out that a couple of books by Jane Austen are in this collection.
The Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin has announced an online database for its medieval and early modern manuscripts collection. The collection contains 215 items going from the 11th to the 17th century. Unfortunately not all the items are digitized yet, but 27 items have been completed for a total of 7,288 digitized pages. The collection can be accessed at http://research.hrc.utexas.edu/pubmnem/.
The FreePint Family is a family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success.
'FreePint... provides most of my professional development because it won't come through work and [other resources] just don't cut it.'
FUMSI Forum: Do you have a research question? Post it to the FUMSI Forum, where professionals share Q&A and useful tips on how to Find, Use, Manage and Share Information. It's free.
FreePint Shop:
VIP LiveWire:
