The L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library is anticipating the arrive of volume 7 of The Saint John’s Bible.

The Saint John’s Bible is the first entirely hand-written bible in 500 years. The library has acquired one of the few full-sized reproductions of this amazing set of books.

Recently Special Collections held an open house for library employees with the six volumes in our collection on display.

The open house was a great success. The scale of the books and the richness of the detail do not come across in photographs. The library staff enjoyed seeing the bible in person. In the future the library will install a display with an open volume so that everyone can have access to these great books.

A new exhibition in the Harold B. Lee Library traces the origin of the idea of national parks back to the leading poet of the English Romantic Movement, William Wordsworth. Wordsworth inspired millions of hikers, climbers and artists as well as later American authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Edward Abbey.

The library’s exhibition includes both Wordsworth’s writing and examples of those who followed him. On display are first editions of Emerson’s Nature, Thoreau’s Walden, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Also displayed is John Muir’s 1901 Our National Parks. Each of these books is distinctly American, yet each also manifests a debt to Wordsworth and the transatlantic Romantic tradition. All of these American writers grew up on Wordsworth’s writings. Emerson even visited the aged poet in 1833, and his Nature was in some ways an attempt to complete Wordsworth’s work. Nature, in turn, became a major influence on Thoreau’s Walden.

William Wordsworth And The Invention of National Parks is located on level 3, the main level of the library. Admission is free and it is open during all library hours. It will be in place until October 2013.

If you need a little more help you can chat with a librarian right on the page.

Link: http://ask.lib.byu.edu/a.php?qid=150147

A classic scenario is a student who, facing a long day researching a topic for a paper, chooses to clean the oven, or chooses to match socks, or some other mundane yet productive task rather than work on the larger project they know they must complete by the end of finals week. The mind rationalizes the procrastination of a research paper by arguing that other productive work, i.e. kitchen cleaning, must be done. Cleaning is a constructive, necessary and respectable use of time and therefore it justifies the avoidance of work on the long-term intellectual task the student has been dealing with for weeks or months. The student can rationalize that constructive work is not the same as goofing off. It is a more valuable use of time than avoiding work by going skiing, watching a movie, or playing computer games. One could even argue that the act of performing constructive work allows the mind to relax and it is possible that the student’s paper may benefit from new ideas that arise during the meditative state produced by working on a mundane task.

We hope that is true, but here in the library we have a suggestion to make. If you are a student who is dreading the last few days of school and is scrambling to finish a paper we can help. If you need scholarly sources for your work just walk up to any Help Desk in the library and ask for information on your topic. We all want to help you get a better grade.

If you have been avoiding leaving the house to work on your paper and you now realized that you are too shabby to be seen in public, we can still help. Click on http://guides.lib.byu.edu/browse.php and select the subject guide for the topic of your paper. One of our great team of librarians has probably studied the subject you are working on and they have a special web page with resources that will help you out.

If you have been so busy cleaning the oven, the bathroom and doing laundry that you have nothing to wear because all your clothes are in the dryer and you are too tired to even search for a subject guide, relax, it is okay. We can still help. Click here and you will go to http://ask.lib.byu.edu/, the library’s knowledge base. The knowledge base holds the answers to questions students before you asked. Now is a good time to remember that you are not the first student to take a tough class and you will not be the first, or last, student to ask the library questions so you can boost your grades.

If you have a friend at BYU who needs help fast, you can tell because their bathroom is sparkling and their paper is nowhere to be seen, send them this link: http://lib.byu.edu/researchrescue/, this page has all the links they’ll need to get started.

*In the end the graduate students completed their scholarly tasks. One, Dr. Rebecca Casper teaches at BYU Idaho, the other Margaret Layton is an English instructor at Utah Valley University.

Suppose you are reading a book in the middle of the night and you come across the name Aldus Manutius. How would you learn more? Certainly you could get a quick update through a variety of web sites*, but you can get even more through the library even if the building is closed. A few years ago we created an exhibition on Aldus Manutius and there continues to be an online version on the web. Sure, it looks like a product from the 90s, because it is. But it is still a great way to learn more. the best part is that once you’ve learned enough online you can visit Special Collections and continue your research with the actual books.

What ever topic you are interested in chances are that the library has a robust collection of materials that will support you research. Best of all, most of the best resources cost money to access. They library makes these resources available to you.

http://lib.byu.edu/digital/ This link will take you to materials in our library that we have digitized.

http://lib.byu.edu/cgi-bin/SubsUtility/dbresources.pl This link is for faculty and students who have 24 hour access to our great collection of databases.

http://sfx.lib.byu.edu/sfxlcl3/az?param_perform_value=searchCategories And this link connects you to a list of journals that people at BYU can access.

* If by chance you looked up Aldus Manutius and his press on Wikipedia you would learn one of the best places to learn about him is at BYU.

If you want to know more about Aldus Manutius, click here http://lib.byu.edu/exhibits/aldine/

Join us this Thursday at 2:00 pm in the library auditorium located on level 1. Matthew Mason will present The Civil War and the Blueprint for Modern America.

Robert Sabuda, the New York Times best selling book creator will be coming to the Harold B. Lee Library on September 26. He will speak at 2:00 pm in the library auditorium on level 1 of the library.

Sabuda is sometimes called a “paper engineer” but he says that is just a fancy title for people who make pop-up books. Regardless of what he is called, Sabuda has created some of the most amazing and popular pop-up books. One of the great things about him is that he is happy to share his knowledge about paper. He even shows visitors to his web site how they can learn to make their own pop-up books.

We hope you will join us on September 26. The public is welcome and admission is free.

“Our Country, our country — who would have ever of thought — that we would have seen such times.” (Letter from Gavin Drummond Hunt to Mary D. Craig, May 9, 1861)

The L. Tom Perry Special Collections of the Harold B. Lee Library is installing a new exhibition titled Voices of the Civil War: Evidence and Artifacts. The exhibition features highlights from the library’s collection of Civil War materials.

Visitors to the exhibition will be able to read letters from families divided by the war, see photographs of the people who fought the war, and get an up-close look at artifacts from the era including bullets, coins, and even a cannonball. They will learn how residents of Utah followed the war through the Deseret News in 1861. They’ll see an original copy of Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, and they’ll discover the music of the era through samples of sheet music.

The exhibit will also highlight will also the enduring legacy of the Civil War through the eyes of Hollywood with artifacts from Gone with the Wind and even the confederate battle flag used in the film, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

Voices of the Civil War will open for Education Week, August 13, 2012 and run through winter semester of 2013. The exhibition is located on level 1 of the Harold B. Lee Library in the center of Brigham Young University’s campus. The exhibition will be open during regular hours for Special Collections. The public is welcome and admission is free.

Yes, we have the travel bug, and there is no better symbol of summer travel than Yellowstone National Park. Over the last few years, the library has expanded its collection of Yellowstone materials and we now hold one of the top 5 collections. The collection includes books, ephemera (flyers and pamphlets), and a lot of great photos. You can view many of the early photos through our digital collections page at  http://lib.byu.edu/digital/historic_photos/. Just type in the keyword “Yellowstone.”

If you visit our regular digital collections page at http://lib.byu.edu/digital/ a quick search will help you find links to a wider variety of materials related to the Yellowstone area.

Below are samples of materials in our Yellowstone collection that go back more than a century.