Latest Posts

Food Conservation in the Home and Recipes in the Archives

Reading Time: 2 minutesFood is a way to understand a place and a culture. Sharing a meal is a bonding ritual that transcends many cultural boundaries. The recipes of the past can also teach us about history, with useful tips for today’s challenges. That is the case for Blanche Armwood Perkins’ Food Conservation in the Home:  A Collection of War-Time Recipes. 

Reading Challenged Books

Reading Time: 3 minutesBook challenges of the past can seem eerily similar to book challenges today. During the John’s Committee Investigations at the University of South Florida (USF) in the mid-1960s, a number of books and readings, including some written by USF faculty, came under scrutiny for vulgarity, anti-religious sentiment, communist leanings, and pornography.

Arsenic in the Archives

Reading Time: 3 minutesThe Poison Book Project at Winterthur Library is an “ongoing investigation to explore the materiality of Victorian-era publishers’ bindings, with a focus on the identification of potentially toxic pigments used as book cloth colorants.”  By using the Arsenical Books Database created by the project, USF Libraries Tampa Special Collections have identified a few books in our own archives that are likely colored with arsenic. 

Pets in the Archives: Cats and Dogs and Alligators… Oh my!

Reading Time: 4 minutesFrom cats and dogs to lizards and snakes, pets enrich our lives and bring us happiness on a daily basis. Nothing is better than coming home after a long day and being met at the door by an excited pet, ready to give you snuggles. As proud pet moms, the authors of Digital Dialogs would like to celebrate National Pet Day with a look at beloved pets as seen through our USF Libraries’ Digital Collections.