________________________________ Mendele Personal Notices and Announcements
July 4, 2012 To minimize wear and tear on the untershames, three requests: 1. Send time-sensitive notices well in advance. 2. Send material as plain text: no HTML, other coding,or attachments;and write MENDELE PERSONALS in the subject line. 3. Correspond directly with the person who or organization which has posted the notice, *not* with your ever-beleaguered untershames. ____________________________________________________________________________________ From: Joshua Price [email protected] Date: July 3, 2012 Subject: Spielberg Library now searchable by idishe oysyes The Yiddish Book Center’s Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, a fast-growing collection of online Yiddish books, is now searchable in Yiddish (Hebrew) characters. The non-profit Yiddish Book Center began digitizing Yiddish books in 1997. In 2009 it placed 11,000 volumes online, free of charge, through the Internet Archive (www.yiddishbooks.org). Those books have since been downloaded 300,000 times. Until now, however, the Spielberg Library has been searchable only in “romanization,” or transliterated English characters. That’s proved frustrating for users abroad, for whom the Center’s Library of Congress transliteration is far from intuitive. Now, for the first time, new technology will allow users to search for Yiddish books in their original alphabet. For example, a reader seeking a work by Sholem Asch, a best-selling Yiddish writer of the last century, will no longer have try out variant spellings such as “Asch,” “Ash,” or “Asz”; a single search for אש will turn up everything. To make the search process even easier, the Center has added a “virtual Yiddish keyboard” to its standard search page (www.yiddishbookcenter.org/books/search). You can also enter Yiddish characters directly from your keyboard if you have software that makes this possible. Because of inconsistencies in Yiddish orthography – Yiddish spelling wasn’t standardized until well into the 20th century – the Center has removed diacritical marks (pasekh, komets, dekhele, and pintele) from atop and beneath the letters. Yiddish alphabet searching is available for author, title, and keyword. Romanized searching remains available as well. For details, please see the explanations in About the book search tool (http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/about-book-search-tool). For further information, technical or otherwise, please contact Josh Price at [email protected]. _________________________________________________________ Please do not use the "reply" key when writing to Mendele. Instead, direct your mail as follows: Responses to Mendele Personal Notices & Announcements should be sent directly to the person whom or organization which posted the item. Material for posting in Mendele Personal Notices &announcements,typically ,announcements of events, commercial publications, and questions not of general interest to the membership,should be sent to: victor.bers at yale.edu (IMPORTANT! in the subject line write "Mendele Personal") Material for postings to Mendele Yiddish literature and language, i.e,inquiries and comments of a non-commercial or publicity nature:and likely to interest the membership in general, should be sent to mendele at mailman.yale.edu IMPORTANT: Please include your full name as you would like it to appear in your posting. No posting will appear without its author's name. Submissions to regular Mendele should not include personal email addresses, as responses will be posted for all to read. They must also include the author's name as you would like it to appear. In order to spare the shamosim time and effort, we request that contributors adhere, when applicable, as closely as possible to standard English punctuation, grammar, etc. and to the YIVO rules of transliteration into Latin letters. A guide to Romanization can be found at this site: http://www.yivoinstitute.org/about/index.php?tid=57&aid=275 All other messages should be sent to the shamosim at this address: mendele at mailman.yale.edu Mendele on the web: http://mendele.commons.yale.edu/ _____________________________ _______________________________________________ Mendele mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/mendele
