Martin Heijdra
Chinese Bibliographer and Head of Public Services, East Asian Library

Old Scripts, Rare Books, and Modern Computer Systems

An innocent question asked on a Unicode listserv on a purely theoretical issue on how exceptions in Mongolian were supposed to work led surprisingly to an invitation to do some very practical work: the development of a script system for Mongolian and Manchu for Microsoft’s then-upcoming, now-arrived Vista Operating System. This turned out to involve digging through 19th-century grammars and dictionaries in multiple languages, flying to Redmond to learn an undocumented software application, creating characters and fonts, getting familiar with 18th century Chinese-Tibetan-Sanskrit-Mongolian-Manchu pentaglot secret formulas, and would lead to some interesting discoveries among our own Princeton East Asian rare books… without knowing Mongolian and Manchu. Learn how.

David Hollander
Law and Legal Studies Librarian

Princeton’s Longstanding Tradition of Legal Scholarship, Education and Reference

While Princeton does not have a law school, it does have a rich, important, and largely unheralded tradition of legal scholarship and education. Shortly after arriving at Princeton from the law school world, David Hollander realized that Firestone Library has developed a tradition of interdisciplinary legal reference to support Princeton’s largely interdisciplinary legal scholarship and education.  This is largely unknown to law school librarians, who as a profession, are struggling to effectively support the exploding volume of interdisciplinary legal research conducted in law schools.  David began to write a paper arguing that because legal reference at Princeton has always been interdisciplinary, Princeton can offer many helpful ideas to law librarians unfamiliar with providing reference in an interdisciplinary environment.  This paper was published in Law Library Journal in December 2007.  While conducting the research for that paper, David discovered that the history of legal education and scholarship at Princeton was far richer than he imagined.  The result of this discovery was a second paper detailing this history (which includes a short-lived law school), to be published in Law Library Journal this spring. 

Wednesday, January 30, 2008
3:45 pm
010 East Pyne

Reception to Follow

Sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty. 
Please join us for the third of our annual Library Research Seminars.