The central Chabad-Lubavitch library in New York made 1,000 Passover Haggadahs, many of them rare, available on the Internet for browsing by the public. The Agudas Chasidei Chabad Library has one of the largest collections of the Passover orders of service in the world. ...
The posting at ChabadLibraryBooks.com represents close to half of the library's total Haggadah collection and is part of chief librarian Rabbi Sholom Ber Levine's goal of making the library more accessible to the public. All told, the library possesses more than 2,200 editions of the Haggadah. Although the rarest of the books, all handwritten, are not yet available, Levine is looking for ways to post them next year. Hebrew Books, directed by Chaim Rosenberg, collaborated on the project.
Those available online offer a snapshot of Jewish publishing history from the Middle Ages to the modern era. The oldest was printed in Berlin in 1527, while the most recent Haggadah was published in 1960 in Tel Aviv. ...
Rabbi Hirsh Chitrik donated the funds for the online library in memory of his father, Rabbi Yehuda Chitrik, a scholar who spent most of his life studying Jewish texts. ...
The online collection gives a virtual tour of the Jewish Diaspora throughout the generations. Haggadahs printed in the 1800's in Zhitomer, Ukraine; Königsberg, Germany; Prague; Vienna; London; Paris; Jerusalem; Bi?goraj, Poland; and New York track the movement and growth of Jewish communities across the world. Translations of the Haggadah in Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Ladino, Persian, Russian and Yiddish attest to the lingual integration of Jews into societies spanning the globe.
Workers at the library scanned the Haggadahs with special scanners that turned the pages with suctioned tips, thus minimizing any damage. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 4/22/2008 07:41:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
