rare book school, a recap

It's somewhat difficult to characterize Rare Book School. It was, in a word, marvelous in that way things are can be when you get to indulge in something you're passionate about along with others who share the same passion. In a world where what is temporary is valued more than what is lasting, it was so nice to come together around a belief in the enduring value and significance of the printed word. In a profession that is increasingly seduced by the promise of technology and electronic access for all, it was a breath of fresh air to be around people who understand the need to preserve the printed record and learn from past triumphs and failures.

I feel like I work in a profession that is so insecure about its own relevance and validity that it's willing to toss aside time-honored purposes and values for what seems to be the trend of the moment. It would of course be foolish to pretend that there's no need to embrace technological advances. I would just encourage the profession and its leaders to think about the long term implications of the direction we're heading in.

In a word: think.

Think critically, logically about the decisions that you make, and really consider the ramification of choices. That was really the underlying lesson of the course I took on scholarly editing last week. Pay attention to the details of whatever it is you encounter. Don't just dismiss or accept it blindly, but really consider how the new information you've learned fits with other facts at hand.

And as we thought deeply and barreled through an entire semester-long graduate course in one week, we began to understand how something as seemingly small as an editorial decision can impact what is believed to be true and good. It made me think more critically about how I build my collections at the library and how they can be used in scholarship. It also reinforced a thought that I've been thinking around for quite a while now. We in the library profession are too insular. We need to get out more. We need to read the scholarly literature of the disciplines we support. We need to be in conversation with faculty outside the walls of the library about the research they're doing and the concepts they're teaching their students. And we need to think carefully about how our decisions impact the people who use our collections most.

The more we know about any topic, the better we understand it, and with understanding, a deeper appreciation and interest develops in time.

It is as Michael Suarez, the RBS director, said in both his opening and his closing statements: "Knowledge conduces to love, and love conduces to wonder."

And we could all use a lot more wonder in our lives.

meeting of the minds

I've just passed the halfway point in my Rare Book School course on scholarly editing. There's so much that I could write about this experience, but it is getting late and my alarm will wake me sooner than I would like. The experience so far has been amazing. It is both exhausting and invigorating. We all come from such different backgrounds--librarians, graduate students, booksellers, private collectors, English professors--but we all come with a passion for books, which makes for a most beautiful meeting of the minds. The week will be over far, far too soon.

other types of writing

Every now and then I think about writing an essay (or series of essays when I'm feeling really ambitious) about growing up in rural South Dakota. And yet, for numerous reasons, I've never followed through with that. That may be in part because the genre--creative non-fiction--is a little foreign to me. I'm used to research writing, and its familiar cadences. Since I haven't practiced writing in that mode very much, I have a harder time sustaining the narrative. I will have bursts of great prose and then my thoughts fizzle out. I suppose practicing my craft would improve it over time.

The bigger issue that I have had this continual stream of academic projects: book #1, play indexing, various and sundry committee obligations, book #2, rare book school, digital humanities presentation, rare book school again. These are all good and appropriate things for me to put my time into, but it leaves me less mental energy for other types of writing (thus my absence from blogging for so long).

Book #2 should be published in mid-August, and our final review of the galleys is due next week. Next week is RBS #1 with the DH presentation following close on its heels. RBS #2 doesn't come around until the last week of July, right after my soon-to-be epic road trip to South Dakota. Oh, summer, why do you always slip by so quickly?

Maybe when all of the summer scholarship/professional development stuff dies down, not that something else won't quickly fill the void. I think I need to carve out time to write if I'm serious about it, which is unfortunately easier said than done. But like academic writing, creative non-fiction doesn't tend to happen in one fell swoop. It's one page, one paragraph, sometimes even one sentence at a time. I just need to start and then keep taking steps towards completion. Wish me luck!

unskilled

Napoleon Dynamite: Well, nobody's going to go out with me!
Pedro: Have you asked anybody yet?
Napoleon Dynamite: No, but who would? I don't even have any good skills.
Pedro: What do you mean?
Napoleon Dynamite: You know, like nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.
Pedro: Aren't you pretty good at drawing, like animals and warriors and stuff?
Napoleon Dynamite: Yes... probably the best that I know of.
Pedro: Just draw a picture of the girl you want to take out... and give it to her for like a gift or something.
Napoleon Dynamite: That's a pretty good idea.

JMU was recently successful in its bid to get a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. This has been a long time in coming since the first two attempts to get a chapter were unsuccessful. For those of you unfamiliar with PBK, it's the oldest academic honor society in the United States and was founded at William and Mary in 1776. I was inducted into the Alpha chapter of South Dakota as an undergrad, and now that JMU has a chapter, any faculty or staff members who are already PBK are considered charter members.

We had an organizational meeting last week Friday. Part of our discussions revolved around which majors and courses would make a student eligible for induction into PBK. PBK supports and honors traditional liberal arts and sciences education, and evidently any course or major that is "skill based" is automatically discounted. Business, education, and journalism are suspect because "they involve skills."

This leads me to assume that as a PBK member I must be unskilled. I just wanted to let you all know in case you ever expected me to accomplish something that involved the use of practical skills, you will be severely disappointed as I am highly educated but completely unskilled.

why I love the English grad students

English grad student: "Sometimes I see you helping some other student at the reference desk, and I have to admit, I get a little jealous because you're ours."

time has flown

When April began several weeks ago, it seemed so full of promise and opportunity and time. Time was what I was most excited about. I would have time to work on my play indexing, time to complete a few more book chapters, and time to exercise and lose those irritating pounds before my sister's wedding. Of course, that time was whisked away by planning for the impending construction of Starbucks in our reference area, reassigning reference books, countless meetings, a general slump in motivation outside of work hours, and a little bit of personal drama for kicks. Then just when I was recouping from all that, allergies hit with a vengeance, followed by a particularly evil sinus infection, from which I am just now recovering.

The bottom line is yesterday I finally woke up from all that yuck and funk of the last 6 weeks and realized that it's nearly mid-May already. How did that happen? I need that time back! No seriously, I need that time back. Somehow I don't think I'm going to get a rain check on this one. The coming weeks don't look good for productivity either. C'est la vie!

This post brought to you by the number 13, the color gray, and a general overwhelming sense of gloom and doom.

poor pinkie

Saturday I spent the day at the University of Virginia's Alderman library. I researched and I wrote. I wrote and I researched for seven hours straight. I didn't even break for lunch. I was in such a zone and got so much work done. Seriously, I have eight single-spaced, typed pages to prove it.

The other unexpected outcome was a hand injury. I woke up Sunday morning with the worst pain in my right hand between my pinkie and ring fingers. It was incredibly sore (still is). I guess I used my pinkie finger to hit the delete, return, shift, and arrow keys a few hundred times too many.

The sad thing is that this is not my first typing injury. The first happened back in March 2004 when I wrote 25 pages in 24 hours for my Master's comps. That time it was the center knuckle on my left pinkie. To this day that knuckle aches when the weather changes.

In spite of my aching hand, I had a fabulous day at UVA. I really needed a productive day like that to help me feel not quite so panicked about my book. Plus, it was so nice to research in a "real" library. Yes, I know I work in a library, but it's an undergraduate library not a research library, and there's such a vast difference between the two. I have collection envy now. I want to work at a research library :( Sniff. Pout.

I'm going back on Friday to spend another full day at their library. I just hope my hand feels better by then and that I don't injure it again.

when old becomes new

Today I dazzled and amazed a class of 400-level French students with dictionaries. Yes, you read that right - dictionaries. Not fancy online databases with tons of bells and whistles, not archival products that contain crazy amounts of information, not even online dictionaries. No nothing of the sort. Just your run-of-the-mill dictionaries.

They might have been in French and some were bilingual, but really there wasn't anything special about them. Even so, the students were amazed to learn that such things exist (and in a library of all the crazy places). I suppose if I had grown up with Google and Wikipedia as our students have, maybe I wouldn't have guessed to look in the library for them either. Having grown up before everything was done online, I would think that the library would be a natural place to look for something as basic as a dictionary. Apparently this is not true anymore.

I know that most things go in cycles, so perhaps the old "technologies" behind printed materials will one day become new again for this and future generations. Today's students weren't even freshman. They were juniors and seniors who were just now realizing that they could get these basic resources in the library. Not just dictionaries but grammars, thesauri, verb charts, etc. How different would their experience as a French major been if they had realized that or someone had told them 3 or 4 years ago?

On a related note: you should check this film out:

at long last

Somethings are just a long time in coming. Two of those things would be the sidewalk in front of my apartment and a journal article I wrote with one of the English professors. Both are finally complete :)

After two months of ducking under ever-fading caution tape, I finally have a nice new cement sidewalk leading up to and past the front door of my apartment. Happy days! I'm still slightly irritated with the management that it took two months (TWO WHOLE MONTHS!!!) to lay 15 feet of sidewalk, but all griping aside, the new sidewalk is lovely (if sidewalks can be such a thing).

The journal article was written an entire year ago and just made it into print last week. Those of you who are friends with me on Google Talk would have seen the random link all last week. I was just a bit slower getting that announcement to the blog. The article is very academic. Heck, it has the word pedagogy in the title. But seriously, this is me we're talking about; it can't surprise you. If you're interested in taking a look-see at it, I've put the citation and URL below.

Bankert, Dabney A., and Melissa S. Van Vuuren. "Stranger in a Strange Land: The Undergraduate in the Academic Library. A Collaborative Pedagogy for Undergraduate Research." CEA Forum 37.1 (2008). http://www2.widener.edu/~cea/371bankertvanvuuren.htm.

I am fairly positive that you should be able to access the article from any computer because the journal is open-access. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

In other news, I still haven't dropped the ESL class. I know deep down that I really need to, and I convince myself that I'm going to do it each and every time I spend an entire evening prepping for the class. And each and every time I tell myself that after I get home from class I'm going to e-mail Deb to tell her I'm stepping down. But then class happens, and I see how eager the students are to learn and how grateful they are and I chicken out and don't send the e-mail. The thing is that I do enjoy it and definitely see the value in it, but the time commitment is just too great. Sigh.

approved

A while back I mentioned briefly that I might get the opportunity to write a book. Today I found out that the editor at the publishing house really liked my proposal and is offering my a contract to write the book. Apparently the series editors received the draft contract on April 25, but somehow I didn't receive the official notification. It's possible that it was sent in hard copy to the library, and I missed it since I'm not working this summer.

If I haven't told you, the book will be a guide to literary research on Victorian and Edwardian literature (that's British literature from 1830 to 1910). Yes, it's very academic and would not be the type of thing you'd just read for fun. No, I will never be rich or famous for this type of publication, but that doesn't really matter. The point is I'll be a published author, not just of articles but of a whole book. I'm so excited. It will be a ton of work, but it will be worth it.

warning: too much mental exertion may be hazardous to your health

No one is quite sure what's causing it, but this semester seems exceedingly more stressful than the average fall semester. We see it on a daily basis in the library just as the teaching faculty witness it in the classroom. The students have been uber stressed out from day one of this semester, and unfortunately, their stress levels don't seem to be declining and it's only midterms.

It's not just in the academic units on campus that student stress levels are apparent. Student support services have reported that they've had increasing numbers of referrals to counseling services and increasing numbers of concerned parents calling in (this is also an after-effect of the Virginia Tech shootings).

Today in the library 2 students passed out within 20 minutes of one another. The first passed out at the circulation desk; the second passed out at the reference desk and hit her head. The first student was unable to stand steadily when the paramedics came and was primarily concerned about the paper that she needed to hand in for her 11:15 class.

I sometimes think that we (society) are putting too much pressure on these students to be high achievers, be involved in extracurriculars, do community service, hold down a job (or 2 or 3), and have a clear sense of their career path. Is that a bit much for a 18 to 22 year old?

I don't think this is just occurring at the college level either. Just today, one of my co-workers was commenting on how friends of hers have children in kindergarten and first grade who have an hour of homework every night. An hour of homework a night for 5 and 6 year olds?!? That seems so excessive.

When did we decide that it was OK to rob our children of their childhood just so they can get a jump start on adulthood and their careers?

sweet!

I just received the following e-mail at work:

"Governor Kaine granted eight hours of special recognition leave in honor of the Virginia visit of Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, II and His Royal Highness, Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh. All full-time classified and 12-month faculty at James Madison University may take this special recognition leave between May 3, 2007 and June 30, 2007. The leave must be used in the full eight-hour increment."

Well, I guess, if you twisted my arm, I might be willing to take an extra 8 hours of leave. If you insist...

I love it! Who knew that HRM's visit would work out in my favor :)

This is just one of many cool (and totally random) perks of working for a university. You all should be so lucky ;)

student tenure

When I worked at the IU libraries, there was a reference assistant at the main reference desk who had been working there, part-time, in that position for 10 years.  The reference department always joked that he's the only student worker who had been there long enough to get tenure. 

While that's funny in a sense, it's also really sad.  I can't imagine working in a part-time position for that long.  For one, I can't imagine that it would even come close to paying the bills.  Also, wouldn't you get frustrated knowing that there's pretty much no chance of promotion or raises? 

Maybe it's a personality thing.  Maybe some people are really fine staying put or at least complacent enough to stay.  I guess I just don't understand that type of thinking.