- Trial Court Law Libraries
Last month, the American Antiquarian Society created and mounted an online resource to present #hamildays: A Hamilton-Inspired Journey Through the Stacks. This #InstaArchive is the work of Amy L. Tims, project cataloger at the AAS Library, and her colleagues. She used “the social media platform Instagram as a method to link material in the AAS stacks with the lyrics and structure of Hamilton: An American Musical.” Her words follow:
“In addition to being a fan of Hamilton, I’m also a rare book cataloger at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), an institution dedicated to preserving materials printed in what is now the United States through 1876. I work in a building with miles of shelves that hold materials documenting the history of the United States, including the Revolutionary War and early Republic, and some of it is directly associated with Alexander Hamilton. . . Thus began #hamildays, my exploration of AAS’s holdings inspired by Hamilton, a journey which I recorded on Instagram. . . Ambitiously, I decided to see if I could find materials that connected to all forty-six songs in the musical. . . I used the lyrics as a springboard to wind my way through AAS’s collections . . . By the end of the #hamildays project in March 2016, I had posted fifty images from twenty-eight collections, taken hundreds of pictures. . . Now, #hamildays has become the first AAS Instagram Archive.”
A treat for the rest of us.