When Good Intentions Create Chaos: The Spanish Play Collection at the University of Illinois

Last year, the Conservation Lab took on a sizeable project: disbind and rehouse almost 12,000 19th and Early 20th Century Spanish plays. Sounds fun, right?

This project garners several questions: why so many? why are you disbinding them? Who wanted 12,000 plays in the first place?

All great questions and only a few good answers.  Continue reading “When Good Intentions Create Chaos: The Spanish Play Collection at the University of Illinois”

Reflecting on the Cavagna Sangiuliani Exhibit: An Interview with Chloe Ottenhoff

Recently, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library exhibited a portion of its 85,000 item collection purchased from Count Antonio Cavagna Sangiuliani’s estate in Italy. The exhibit entitled “Building a Library: The Cavagna Sangiuliani Collection at Illinois,” focuses on several themes found in the collection’s materials including the sciences, the arts, genealogy and heraldry, and social life and customs.  This vast collection has many interesting pieces and a fascinating history of its own.

To learn more, we talked about with the exhibit’s curator Chole Ottenhoff. Ottenhoff serves as Principal Cataloger and Cataloging Project Manager at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

To see more photos of the exhibit, visit its gallery page.

Continue reading “Reflecting on the Cavagna Sangiuliani Exhibit: An Interview with Chloe Ottenhoff”