Back in the beforetimes, I submitted a proposal to the Shakespeare Association of America to run a workshop in the planned spring 2021 annual meeting in Austin on “Teaching with Special Collections.” My hope was to do the same thing that drives much of what I do—to help demystify the types of teaching that can happen in collaboration between faculty and rare materials librarians. And then came the plague. So I’m writing a note now about how things will look in the workshop in light of travel not feeling safe and universities and libraries not being open for in-person teaching as we’ve been used to it. If you’ve been considering this workshop but are unsure how it fits into the Covid world, please read on. tl;dr Remote participation is ok; we will talk about remote/digital-first teaching; sign up for workshops/seminars by September 15th. Here’s the official blurb that’s in the…
notes on feminist bibliography
One of my current projects has been thinking about what a feminist practice of bibliography looks like. As I’ve shared before, I struggled when writing my book to figure out how to build a feminist stance when I was focused on machines and processes rather than people. How do we create a feminist printing history when we’re not doing a history of a women printing? Over the past couple of years I’ve given a few lectures and led a few workshops on the topic, and I wanted to collect some of that work in a single place to help others join in this work. In December 2018 I gave the Lieberman Lecture for the American Printing History Association. You can watch “Working toward a Feminist Printing History” on YouTube (with or without captions); there’s also a transcript linked in the video description. I am grateful to Jesse Erickson and the…
reading for endings
I’m not sure how to talk about my reading this year. My downwards trend continued—58 books in 2019, down from 72 in 2018 and 102 in 2017. I don’t love reading any less, but I am having a hard time figuring out what to read—as far as I can recollect, there are 19 books that I thought I would read or abandoned part-way through. And those are surely as much of my year in reading as the ones I did read through. How do we know what we want to read? How do we pick out what our moods are and read in sympathy with those moods (sad books for sad days) or decide to read against those moods (fluffy books for difficult days)? I read both ways according to some emotional process that I let wash over me without understanding. Sometimes I misunderstand and think I want fluff when…
blogging days of yore
Remember how once upon a time I used to find weird old printing things and get excited about them and then blog about them? That was fun. I’m going to try doing that again, only this time in newsletter form. The tl;dr version is that you can head over to sarahwerner.substack.com and sign up for Early Printed Fun to get periodic (twice a month?) emails from me about some bit of early printed nerdery. It’s free, it’s easy, and it’ll replicate some of what I used to do here and at The Collation. The longer version is that I decided to do a Substack newsletter because I’m hoping, if I can build up enough momentum, to introduce paid subscriptions. There will always be free posts, I promise, because I can’t bear the thought of not providing some free excitement about books. But I also am shelling out money to run…
libraries and climate change
Today is the Global Climate Strike. I don’t know how anyone can look at the world around them and not be worried about how the climate is changing and how we are not taking action to prevent disaster. About a year and a half ago I started thinking more seriously about the relationship between libraries and archives and climate change, due largely in part to the ongoing work and activism from archivists Eira Tansey and Ben Goldman. So when I was invited to give a talk about whether digitization is a form of preservation at the Society of American Archivists meeting in August 2019, I jumped at the change to consider our complicity with the coal industry. I’m reviving that brief call to arms today to mark the climate strike. The talk itself is short. Take five minutes to watch (or listen) to the video below. And then browse through…