Two items today, and an announcement: On this day (December 4) the following notices appeared in their respective publications: - - - - - - - - In the 4 December 1847 "Daily Republican" (Springfield, Mass.) page 2: In Philadelphia, a daguerreotypist has taken a family group, consisting of a matron of nearly five score, her daughter, her grand- daughter, her great-grand-daughter, and her great-great-grand-daughter. * * * * * * And in the 4 December 1846 "Daily Evening Transcript" (Boston, Mass.): W H I P P L E ' S D A G U E R R E O T Y P E MINIATURE ROOMS, No. 113 Washington street, (late junior partner of the firm of Litch & Whipple." No pains will be spared to produce the most perfect Daguerreotype Miniature Portraits of in- dividuals, and copies of Paintings, Crayon Drawings, Engravings, &c., that the art at its present stage is ca- pable of producing. Being aware that a poor Daguer- reotype likeness is a very bad investment of funds, and a source of much dissatisfaction to one's self and friends, it is my desire that none of my patrons should feel under any obligations to purchase a Daguerreo- type which is not pleasing to those whom it may con- cern. I can take them equally well in cloudy as in pleasant weather; it only requires a longer sitting on a cloudy day, it being easier for the eye. I am now enabled in a strong light to take miniatures of chil- dren instantly. Also family groups from 15 to 20 on a single plate. Any one wishing to examine specimens, I should be happy to see at my Room, 113 Washington street. JOHN A. WHIPPLE. tc dec 4 * * * * * * Joan Hostetler sent me a note awhile back regarding the following site. Let me say that this represents, in my opinion, perhaps the best example of how terrific the Web can/should be. I plugged in the keyword "daguerreotype" and my search results were 366 matches! My first hit resulted in locating another appearance of the Saxe epigram "On an Ugly Person Sitting for a Daguerreotype" in an 1873 issue of "Appelton's Journal." Without this sort of search capability, I doubt that I would have ever come across the citation. The site is well worth some leisurely exploration. UM Making of America site -- 685,885 pages now online http://www.umdl.umich.edu/moa/ The University of Michigan Digital Library Initiative is proud to announce the completion of the first phase of its Making of America project, now including approximately 650,000 pages of books and journals from the latter part of the 19th century. This tremendous resource now contains 1,601 books and ten journals with more than 49,069 articles documenting America's social history. Based on feedback solicited in earlier announcements for the resource, as well as local user studies, the current implementation adds functionality in a number of areas. Notable features of the current system include the following: Users may search the full text of the 685,885 pages, retrieving results almost instantly. The system now includes browsable bibliographies for the journal articles and the monographs. The UM MoA resources have been encoded in a simple SGML form (a 40 element DTD conforming to the TEI Guidelines); consequently, we are able to seamlessly integrate both automatically processed (i.e., "raw") texts, and texts whose OCR and encoding is carefully evaluated (i.e., "cooked" texts). Users who encounter a "cooked" text will find attractively rendered HTML with links to page images, while "raw" texts are presented as page images until resources can be found to improve them. -------------------------------------------------------------- 12-04-97