For Immediate Release

Home Economics Archive Grows by 60%

Ithaca, NY — Cornell University’s Mann Library is pleased to announce that HEARTH, the freely available digital library of Home Economics, Research, Tradition and History, has recently added over two hundred new monographs and four important new serial titles to its collection at hearth.library.cornell.edu. The total number of pages in HEARTH currently stands at over 638,000.

For the first time, users may now freely access the full text of serials such as Harper's Bazaar, America's first fashion magazine, and Good Housekeeping, an early popular magazine concerned with and advocating for issues important to women which continues to be published today, and In addition, HEARTH has added further volumes to its run of The Journal of Home Economics (now the Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences); every issue of that journal, from its inception through 1997, is available.

There are now thirteen different serials in HEARTH, with over four hundred volumes total. In the words of Cornell professor of fiber science and apparel design Charlotte Jirousek, “These journals are an important document not only of fashion, but also of the life style and current issues that shape social identity in the day. Since dress is an expression of culture and identity, journals like Harper’s are invaluable in providing insight into the values and concerns of the times.”

Along with the new journals, HEARTH’s expansion has also added a wide range of new books of interest to students of American history, women’s studies, popular culture and related fields. These include classics such as The American Woman's Home, or Principles of Domestic Science by Catharine Esther Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Anna Cooley’s The Teaching of Home Economics, as well as gems such as American Lace & Lace-makers by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel and Elizabeth C. Barney Buel. Also now available are the proceedings of the Lake Placid Home Economics conference, which helped establish the field of Home Economics. In all, two hundred and twenty four new monographic titles have been added, bringing the total number of books in HEARTH to 1,174.

And there’s more good news: Over one hundred public domain books from the HEARTH collection are now available at Amazon Books via the library’s new “print on demand” arrangement with the online store. More titles will be available later in the year. You may find these titles at http://bookstore.library.cornell.edu or at http://www.amazon.com.

A full list of monographs and journals available in HEARTH, as well as an annotated list of subjects covered, may be found in the HEARTH’s browse section. There, users may browse for books either alphabetically or by date range (from 1620 to 1999). A “recent additions” section shows a sample of the newly added titles.

Questions about HEARTH may be directed to Mann Library’s Preservation Librarian Joy Paulson at jp243@cornell.edu.

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