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…
Tag: libraries
how do you use digital special collections?
I’ve been thinking about the digital landscape of special collections recently (hi, RBMS16!) and while I have lots of thoughts on how I come across and use the digital incarnations of rare books and manuscript libraries, I’m curious about what other people do. When I think of the digital landscape of these libraries, I’m thinking of everything from social media (institutional and personal accounts) to digital collections and exhibitions to user-generated websites and projects. How do you encounter and interact with that landscape? Are you looking for specific images? Are you browsing for pretty pictures? Are you following social media feeds for entertainment? Are you researching specific topics? Are you bored? Are you inspired to create your own work from it? Does it never, ever occur to you to look for or look at special collections online? I’d love it if you wanted to share your thoughts in the comments below, whether…
what those libraries were in The Toast
I thoroughly enjoyed “How To Decorate Your Dream Library” by Amy Collier for The Toast. But because I am me, I was made insane by the lack of captions identifying any of the libraries pictured, so I went ahead and worked my way through them. Go read the article, laugh heartily, and then come back to find out the libraries and photography credits. (A side note: How hard is it, really, to include this information in the original article? Most of the licensing on these images is some version of Creative Commons Attribution. But where’s the attribution in The Toast? It’s bad form. If I were a friend or family member of Jorge Royan, who took a slew of these and whose work is stunning, or any of the others, I’d be pretty pissed that I made my work available under an open license and that places couldn’t be bothered with…
questions to ask when you learn of digitization projects
Some days you wake up and you see announcements of a new project to digitize a collection of primary source materials. Perhaps an archive that covers centuries of technological and commercial changes, perhaps a collection of newspapers that encompasses the history of African-American politics and culture, just to name a couple of purely hypothetical examples. I don’t know any details about such agreements and neither do you, unless you happen to be one of the top-level executives at one of the holding institutions for these collections or at one of the companies doing the digitization. And because we don’t know any details, we don’t know whether such projects are great or not. But we can—and we should—ask some questions when we hear about them: Who financially benefits from such agreements? It is certainly the company doing the digitization and the institution holding the documents, otherwise neither would be doing it. But…
how to destroy special collections with social media
I just got back from a wonderful trip to Rare Book School to deliver a talk in their 2015 lecture series. It was the last week of their summer season in Charlottesville, the week when the Descriptive Bibliography course (aka “boot camp”) was in full swing, and the weather was in all its hot, glorious humidity. I wanted to keep things light as well as make some points I feel very strongly about: the importance of librarians and researchers using social media to help sustain special collections libraries. Below are the slides and my notes for my July 29th talk. Since RBS records and shares the audio of their talks (go browse through past RBS lectures and listen!) I have, with their permission, also embedded the audio of my talk here so that you can listen and read along if you’d like (there are some variations between the two, though nothing substantive—I’ll leave…