Looking back, looking forward

When I last posted to this blog, a month ago today, I closed with the words, "until tomorrow!" Well, it's not that tomorrow never came - it's just that tomorrow was cram packed with activities and blogging didn't make the list.

So, here I am, picking up the quill again, so to speak, and looking back over my last two days at RBS, while looking forward to the changes and enhancements I hope to bring to the Colborn Rare Book Room here at the Law School.

The end of the week at RBS always brings something fun to look forward to, and something sad too. Thursday nights are devoted to a very enjoyable evening activity for bibliophiles called Bookseller Night. Charlottesville is full of booksellers, many are located on the historic downtown pedestrian mall. They're nestled cheek by jowl with an interesting array of restaurants offering nearly any cuisine you have a hankering for. All in all it makes for a good night - you can browse through bookstore after bookstore, and then stop for a delightful dinner in one of the restaurants on the mall. Our entire class met for dinner Thursday with our instructor, Mike Widener, and his wife Emma. We had a lovely evening, dining outside in the pleasant evening air, discussing the week's activities and books we'd found in the stalls.

Thank goodness for my trusty notebook! Luckily it does a better job of remembering my activities that I do. I'm counting on my notebook to remind me of all the things we did in class Thursday and Friday. These days were devoted to the connoisseurship aspect of the course. Thursday morning we discussed buying books abroad and the regulations involved in that kind of purchase, as well as deaccessioning books that no longer fit the collecting scope.

We also worked on an exercise for a Collection Development Policy. I had already begun work on a collection develop policy at WVU and as luck would have it, I had a copy with me on a flashdrive. I used it as the basis for my collection policy but I changed it significantly, drawing on the materials I'd learned over the course of the week. I have a copy of it and it's on the desk beside the laptop as I type this.

The exercise was to focus, not broadly, on special collections as a whole, but to develop a niche important to your institution. I chose to develop a West Virginia legal collection policy. We were to draw together resources, such as supporting documentation like bibliographic materials, specific items that would be important to the development of the collection, and thoughts about what would and would not be acceptable additions to the collection. It was a well chosen and very interesting exercise. I will apply these techniques to the policy as I develop it here.

Friday arrived, and with it, the last day of class. It's a short class day with a long lunch break. A reception follows the last class period where there is time to say goodbye to all the people we met over the course of the week, exchange business cards, and take our turns mulling over the souvenirs in the RBS gift shop. Nothing like an opportunity to do a little shopping before you go. I came away with an RBS t-shirt for myself and my husband, as well as one of their nifty little pocket measuring tapes. I have a couple of these and I keep one in my desk drawer. They're handy little devices that can be whipped out at a moment's notice to measure a book, a window, an archival box, or anything else. I highly recommended having one of these little babies on hand.

The final class period was spent on another assignment. We were to describe a book from the RBS collections as one would be described by a bookseller. This was a fascinating exercise, as it placed the curator/buyer in the role of the bookseller. When holding a book in your hands to describe, you look for all the same things as you would when examining a rare book, but you look at it from a different perspective.

As an old bookseller told me years ago, "there's a way to describe a book that makes it sound like a war casualty and a way to describe a book to make it sound good to potential buyers. This is what you have to keep in mind as a seller. Book flaws can be described in many ways, and some of them are better than others. When talking about a book that has been exposed to strong sunlight you could say it's faded, or you could say it's "sunned." I think one sounds better than the other, but I'll let you make that decision.

And so, we've shared knowledge and learned a great deal. We've been exposed to new ideas and new perspectives. The easy part, the education, is over. It's time to gather up all our thoughts, return home and apply them!

That will have to wait, dare I say it, until tomorrow!