Virtual reading rooms (VRRs) started to become more common during closures due to Covid-19, as institutions increasingly created set-ups to allow for interactions with librarians who can facilitate live, responsive research, in real time, with physical objects. Now, we hope they will become embedded in research, teaching, research-led teaching, and public engagement.
Tag: library based
Speed dates and workshops with rare books at KU Leuven (Belgium)
KU Leuven Libraries Special Collections gives yearly library sessions on manuscripts and rare books to dozens of students of KU Leuven and – at a lesser degree – of UCLouvain. We decided to organize a speed date with rare books for students in their third year of history, art history or language and literature. This was realized in collaboration with the Flanders Heritage Library, who is responsible (among other things) for the Short Title Catalogue Vlaanderen (STCV).
Book Materiality Exploration Kits
This classroom activity was a collaboration between a special collections librarian and a library and archives conservator, testing a new approach to engaging students with books as material objects. The conservator developed book materiality exploration kits that were individually paired to books from the library’s rare books collection. The special collections librarian used these kits with a graphic design class, which came to the special collections to explore historical (rare) books and contemporary artists’ books as inspiration for their own book design project later in the semester.
So Now What? Lessons from a Year of Virtual Special Collections Visits
Like so many others, my introduction to remote teaching was an abrupt and rapid process of trial and error. I started as the curator of the University of Florida’s rare book collection in the summer of 2019. I spent the next semester and a half establishing connections with faculty and bringing courses in to do in-person instruction: single sessions per course, often a combination of show and tell and hands-on activities and discussion. In mid-March, as warnings became more dire, I had a group of thirty students coming in to the collections to see a facsimile of the Codex Murúa, a 16th-century Mesoamerican manuscript, and discuss its materiality. The instructor wanted the whole …
Pandemic Pedagogy: Marginalia in the Marguerite Hicks Collection
Editor’s note: In the spring of 2020, Megan Peiser (Assistant Professor of English at Oakland University) was teaching a capstone…