Undergraduate reports from the Reading Room

Today’s post features two accounts from students at The George Washington University who are in this semester’s Folger Undergradaute Seminar. Lyssa Meddin When I first heard about the Folger Shakespeare Library Undergraduate Seminar I was finishing up my freshman year at The George Washington University; from that moment on I couldn’t wait to be a senior.  At a time when e-readers were becoming popular, getting a chance to learn about how books were made and to be surrounded by them seemed like the best thing I had ever heard of.  It is about a month and a half into the semester and I am thrilled to say that this class has been everything I was hoping it would be.

Undergrads in the Library

Forty-five years ago, Folger Director Louis Wright used his annual report to describe the Library as a haven for student-weary faculty: The time has come when someone should give a word of commendation to long-suffering faculties, and provide them with a refuge from the slings and arrows of outrageous students. We are glad that the Folger Library can qualify as a mind-saving station for scholars weary with the task of trying to stir the undergraduate mind to rational understanding.  ((“Mind-Saving Stations,” Report from the Folger Library, February 1966)) If that was true in 1966, it’s certainly not today, when the stirring of undergraduate minds is something that happens inside the Library, in seminars and cheek-by-jowl with their professors in the Reading Rooms.

DIY newsbook

No, I don’t mean it’s time to write your own news sheet newsbook. It’s time to fold your ownnewsbook! Why would you want to do this? Well, for one thing, it’s a handy way to understand and demonstrate to others the general principle of early modern format: multiple pages are printed onto a single sheet in the correct order so that when folded, they appear sequentially. It’s like magic! Or, um, folding. Above is a numbered example of the same newsbook that I used as an image in my last post. The red numbers are page numbers: folded in the right way, you’d get an 8-page booklet in the order indicated. But if you look closely, you’ll see that the actual news sheet doesn’t have page numbers. Instead, there are signatures: at the bottom of the first page is a tiny, blotted “L”; at the bottom of the 5th page…

building a syallabus for early modern book history

I’ve spent a good portion of my summer thinking about how to revise my syllabus for the early modern book history seminar I teach. This fall will be the sixth time I’ve taught this course, and while it’s been working well, it’s also time to shake it up a bit. Too much familiarity with the material doesn’t breed contempt, but it can lead to a complacency. I’ve been browsing in the stacks, reading new finds, and thinking about what I want students to learn and how best to achieve that. There are some key factors that shape how I approach teaching this course. First, it’s a multi-disciplinary course, drawing students from different majors, primarily English and History, but also French, Art History, Theology, and Music. Because it’s important that all these students feel welcome in and learn from this course, it cannot be too oriented toward any single subject. On…

owning your words

In a Chronicle of Higher Education column, Jennifer Sinor writes about having one of her course syllabi used by a colleague at a different institution, posing the question “Is it plagiarism when a colleague borrows your syllabus and then uses it in its entirety for his own course?” It’s an interesting question. When do you own your words and when are they up for grabs by everyone else? Sinor’s experience suggests to her that although she feels she owns her syllabus, and its appropriation by someone else was plagiarism, the others she talks to are less certain. Her department chair’s response, interestingly, is that she doesn’t own her syllabus: the university does. As Sinor’s column goes on to discuss, the question of what aspects of a professor’s output are property of their employer and what are their own intellectual property are not entirely straightforward these days. But I’d like to…