Library of Congress Global Gateway: Lewis Carroll Scrapbook Now Online

[Laura Gottesman]

Please excuse any cross postings.

The Library of Congress's  Rare Book & Special Collections Division
is pleased to announce the release of a new digital collection, The
Lewis Carroll Scrapbook Collection, available on the Library's Global
Gateway Web site at: http://international.loc.gov/intldl/carrollhtml/ 

The Lewis Carroll Scrapbook is an original scrapbook kept by Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Oxford.
 He is better known as Lewis Carroll, the Victorian-era children's
author of such titles as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and
Through the Looking-Glass (1871).  The scrapbook appears to have been
kept by Carroll between the years 1855 and 1872, and contains
approximately 130 items, including newspaper clippings, illustrations,
and photographs.  These items were personally selected and arranged by
Carroll, giving us insight into his interests and collecting habits. 
The scrapbook also includes a limited number of handwritten annotations,
some presumably by Carroll himself.  The scrapbook was sold after
Carroll's death in 1898 to Frederic L. Huidekoper, an undergraduate at
Oxford, at a sale held at the Holywell Music Rooms.  The Library of
Congress acquired it shortly thereafter.

The online collection includes special presentations by Lewis Carroll
scholar, Edward Wakeling.  Mr. Wakeling has prepared an introduction to
the scrapbook; a timeline of events for the years that Carroll added to
his scrapbook; a timeline of Carroll's life; a list of Carroll's key
works; and a portrait gallery of people whose names appear in the
scrapbook.  Another  Carroll scholar, August Imholtz, assisted Mr.
Wakeling in preparing bibliographic notes for items that appear in the
scrapbook.

The collection was processed with optical character recognition (OCR)
software and hand-encoded in SGML to allow users to search the full text
of the scrapbook for a word or phrase.  This feature enhances the
usefulness of the site by allowing users to search not only titles and
authors, but also the full-text of items.

This online presentation of the Lewis Carroll Scrapbook joins other
world history collections available through the Library of Congress's
Global Gateway Web site:
http://international.loc.gov/intldl/intldlhome.html . The Lewis
Carroll Scrapbook Collection may be found under the heading: "Individual
Digital Collections." 

Please direct any questions regarding this collection to the Global
Gateway inquiry form at:
http://www.loc.gov/help/contact-international.html.