UCL LIBRARY SERVICES EXHIBITS IN DIGITAL FRONTIERS EXHIBITION
14 JUNE - 20 DECEMBER 2013
OCTAGON GALLERY, WILKINS BUILDING, UCL BLOOMSBURY CAMPUS

Ever wondered what the prisoners would have eaten in Jeremy Bentham's ideal Panopticon building? Or what terrible things he did to earwigs when he was a boy? Or what one of the first weather charts looked like? Fancy trying your hand at transcribing a Bentham manuscript?

Find out by visiting the new Octagon exhibition, Digital Frontiers, launched this week and running until the end of December. The exhibition not only displays original Special Collections material - manuscripts from the Bentham Collection, including his suggestions for prison recipes, and one of the first weather charts, from the Galton Collection - but also enables you to zoom in, using touch screens, on digital images, transcriptions and information alongside the originals, so that you can try reading and transcribing the documents yourself. The exhibition also includes a wonderful range of items from UCL Museums And Collections.

The digital technology of the Octagon display cases represents a pioneering development in exhibiting rare books and archives, making it possible for visitors to engage with the text while viewing the original documents, something that in the past has been a challenge for conventional library exhibitions. We hope that you will enjoy trying this out for yourselves.

UCL’s Dante Collection is extraordinarily complete and wide-ranging, dating from the 1470s onwards. To celebrate the completion of a cataloguing project that gives access to the collection as a whole, we shall be holding a Dante day on 18 May, in collaboration with UCL Italian Department and the Warburg Institute. The programme includes introductions to Dante’s life and works, readings from his Divine Comedy, and an account of how the work survived in print. Early and rare editions from the collection will be on display, and facsimile copies of a beautiful Art Nouveau 1911 edition will be available for sale. Details and online booking are available here (Early booking is advised.)

Special Collections’ series of public weekly readings from Dante’s Divine Comedy continues this term, in collaboration with UCL Italian Department and the Warburg Institute. Each week, a selection of rare and early editions from UCL's outstanding Dante Collection will be shown and introduced.

https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/events/2013/02/07/at-the-gates-of-heaven-a-beginners-guide-to-dantes-paradiso/

UCL Special Collections is using its current restricted on-site accommodation to explore taking some of its treasures beyond the UCL borders. The first pilot trip was to The Wallace Collection, where members of West Ealing Deaf Minority Women’s Group saw and discussed items related to travel, cultural and linguistic exchange, and the history of the Dutch East Indies.
http://treasuresfromtheeast.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/workshop-with-ucl-special-collections-and-west-ealing-deaf-minority-womens-group/

Members of West Hampstead Women’s Group joined Special Collections staff at UCL Art Museum to see one of the library’s treasures, a beautiful illuminated Torah.
http://treasuresfromtheeast.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/west-hampstead-trip-to-ucl-art-museum-4th-july-2012/

UCL Special Collections has unfolded a parchment charter that is unlikely ever to have been read since it was sealed over 200 years ago. The charter was one of the items chosen by a UCL PhD student to show to four community groups as part of Special Collections’ support for The Wallace Collection’s Treasures From The East project. Conservators spent two weeks gradually humidifying the document until it could be opened safely, enabling the student to read and transcribe it, and members of the community groups to be among the first to view it.
http://treasuresfromtheeast.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/trip-to-ucl-art-museum-and-special-collections-27th-june/

Members of Aaina Women’s Group visited UCL to see early books, manuscripts and prints relating to the history of the Dutch East Indies as part of a seminar devised by one of UCL’s PhD students from the Dutch Department. The visit supported The Wallace Collection’s Treasures From The East project to celebrate refurbishment of its Dutch painting galleries. Aaina Women’s Group is an Asian Women’s Association support service offering health and child care for Asian women, muslim women and asylum seekers.
http://treasuresfromtheeast.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/trip-to-ucl-art-museum-and-special-collections-17th-may-2012/