Indiana University (IU) is America’s Dictionary Destination: Lilly Library Establishes Merriam-Webster Archive and Acquires the Complete Madeline Kripke Dictionary Collection
When America’s top dictionary editors and language scholars find themselves at a loss for words, where do they turn? For decades the illustrious Dame of Dictionaries, Madeline Kripke, answered the call. Her stockpile of more than 20,000 linguistic books and ephemera was often referred to as the world’s largest and finest dictionary collection. In fact, Michael Adams, Provost Professor and Chair of the English Department at Indiana University Bloomington, says Kripke spent the last decades of her life dedicated to building the collection and amassed “the most important collection of dictionary and related materials that has ever been curated by anyone.”
National Dictionary Day is Oct. 16 and marks the birthday of the father of the American dictionary, Noah Webster.
In celebration, the Lilly Library announces the establishment of the Merriam-Webster Archive, as well as the acquisition of the complete Madeline Kripke Dictionary Collection, of which the archive is a part.
Lindsay Rose Russell is the Executive Director of the Dictionary Society of North America as well as an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the significance or charm of Madeline Kripke’s collection: It’s not just that it’s big or that it contains all kinds of really important dictionaries. It’s that, in it, pristine leather-bound volumes of field-defining dictionaries sit next to little-known or heavily-annotated dialect glossaries, tattered broadsides of underworld jargon, and all kinds of other invaluable lexicographical oddities few have heard of or thought to collect,” she points out. “And all of that material has the distinction of having literally lived with the most important dictionary collector of all time.”
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.
Here’s the Full Text of HathiTrust Announcement: HathiTrust, a member-based organization hosted by the University of Michigan, has received a 5-year, $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to fund ...
From UMass Amherst Libraries (Full Text): The University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries are pleased to announce the publication of The UMass Amherst Libraries Falcon Curriculum: An Open Source, Common Core PreK-12 ...
From the Annenberg School of Communications/U. of Pennsylvania: In a new report, “Americans Can’t Consent to Companies’ Use of Their Data,” researchers asked a nationally representative group of more than ...
From Fast Company: More than 50% of academics have used piracy websites like Sci-Hub in order to bypass paywalls for research they want to access, according to a recent study published in ...
AI Models Spit Out Photos of Real People and Copyrighted Images (via MIT Technology Review) California: Orange Unified School District Reinstates Digital Library After Parent Concerns (via Voice of OC) ...
The article linked below (full-text) was recently published Reference Services Review. Title Libraries Advancing Health Equity: A Literature Review Authors Amanda J. Wilson National Library of Medicine Catherine Staley National ...
From the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board: Anyone who has spent time on a bookmobile has learned enough to know nothing withstands the change of time. Still, we lament the slow ...
From The Library of Congress (via a 4 Corners of the World Blog Post by Anchi Hoh): The African and Middle Eastern Division is delighted to announce the rerelease of the ...
From the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA): The chart [monitoring report]…is an updated version of previous monitoring reports. Where a country has been updated or added since ...
Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Seeks to Hire Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Developing a Globally Fair Pricing Model for Open Access Academic Publishing (via cOAlition S) Majority of ...
From The NY Times: In 1931, the first library in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, opened its doors — to white patrons only. Nearly a century later, Kenyans dressed in the slinky ...
From Berkeley Law: As part of its broader commitment to considering and fostering diversity and inclusion within its storied stacks, the Berkeley Law Library staff have taken on one prominent example of ...