The Library of Congress' Rare Book and Special Collections Division has released a digital presentation titled "The Lewis Carroll Scrapbook Collection," which is available on the Web at http://international.loc.gov/intldl/carrollhtml. This new collection is part of the Library's Global Gateway Web site of international materials.
"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 and1872 and contains approximately 130 items, including newspaper clippings, illustrations and photographs. These items were personally selected and arranged by Carroll, giving the user insight into his interests and collecting habits. The scrapbook also includes a limited number of handwritten annotations, some presumably by Carroll. The scrapbook was sold after Carroll's death in 1898 to Frederic L. Huidekoper, an undergraduate at Oxford, during 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. He has prepared an introduction to the scrapbook, a time line of events that occurred while Carroll made the scrapbook, a time line of Carroll's life, a list of Carroll's key works and a portrait gallery of people whose names appear in the scrapbook. Another Lewis Carroll scholar, August Imholtz, assisted Wakeling in preparing bibliographic notes for items 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 collections from around the world that are available through the Global Gateway Web site. These collections can be seen at www.loc.gov/international. In the "Collaborative Digital Libraries" section are materials from Brazil, the Netherlands, Russia and Spain. The "Digital Collections" section provides links to thematic presentations, including "Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age," "The Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures" and the extraordinary "Prokudin-Gorskii Collection" of photographs of Russia taken just before the 1917 revolution.
