Hannah Arendt Papers Online

From: Margaret Alessi (maal@LOC.GOV)
Date: Wed Jun 13 2001 - 10:53:51 CDT

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    Message-Id: <200106131605.JAA24074@dns.ccit.arizona.edu>
    Date:         Wed, 13 Jun 2001 11:53:51 -0400
    From: Margaret Alessi <mailto:maal@LOC.GOV>
    Subject:      Hannah Arendt Papers Online
    To: mailto:IMAGELIB@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
    

    <pre> This message is being widely posted.

    Hannah Arendt Papers available on American Memory Web site

    The Library of Congress's Manuscript Division, in conjunction with its American Memory historical collections, presents a digital version of the manuscript collection relating to the life and activities of the author, educator, and political philosopher Hannah Arendt
    (1906-1975), whose papers are a principal source for the study of modern intellectual life. Users can access this collection at the following url:
    <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/arendthome.html>

    The papers contain correspondence, articles, lectures, speeches, book manuscripts, transcripts of the Adolf Eichmann trial proceedings, notes, and printed matter pertaining to Arendt's writings and academic career. Among these are correspondence with many of the leading literary and political figures of the twentieth century, including W. H. Auden, Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Thomas Mann, Dwight Macdonald, Eric Voegelin, and Norman Podhoretz. The collection also contains various drafts of Arendt's published work, in particular The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and the controversial and groundbreaking Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).

    The entire collection has been digitized and is available in its entirety to researchers in reading rooms at the Library of Congress, the New School University in New York City, and the Hannah Arendt Center at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Selected materials from the collection are also available for public access on the Internet.

    The digitization of the Hannah Arendt Papers is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

    Scanning Specifications

    During the course of the Arendt Papers project, the entire collection of 25,000 items was scanned, for a total of approximately 75,000 digital

    images. A selection of these is accessible on the Internet. The complete

    version of the digital collection is made available to researchers in the reading room at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, at the New School University's Hannah Arendt Center at the Fogelman Library, and at the Hannah Arendt Center at the University of Oldenburg,

    Germany.

    The Arendt Papers were scanned as 300 dpi grayscale images which were compressed using JPEG compression, producing images in the JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF). Typically, the National Digital Library Program (NDLP) has used grayscale to digitize historical manuscripts in order to capture and display the diversity of tones in manuscript items and the various nuances of handwriting in pencil and ink. The grayscale format can often also suppress the bleed-through typical of handwritten documents in the Arendt Papers. Because JPEG images require considerable

    time to download, grayscale GIF images were also created to provide convenient access using the NDLP page-turner feature.

    The materials were scanned on site by the NDLP paper-scanning and text-conversion contractor, Systems Integration Group (SIG) of Lanham, Maryland. The PULNiX MFCS-50 H/S Digital Overhead Scanning System, a fixed-array device capable of scanning 8-bit grayscale and bitonal images, was used to digitize all the items in the collection. These included manuscripts, bound volumes, and oversize materials. The Arendt production team and Systems Integration Group staff worked with the Library's conservators to ensure proper handling of the manuscripts during the physical processing of the collection and subsequent scanning.

    Please direct any questions to mailto:NDLPCOLL@LOC.GOV

    </pre>



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