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!

Last call

Thursday night. My last evening at RBS. It's beautiful this evening. Ribbons of crimson clouds stretch across the dusky sky. It's a wonderful night to be outside.

Tonight is Bookseller Night at RBS. Most booksellers, and there are quite a few here, stay open late for RBS students. Downtown is just a mile away and I walked with a friend I met here last year. I guess you could say we're serial RBS students. Both of us are attending for the third time. We had a great time strolling downtown, poping in and out fo shops, seeing classmates everywhere we went. We stopped for dinner at Basil on the way back. I love that place. After a week loaded with carbs it's pure delight to have one of their incredible salads!

I'm taking a few books back home with me. I was pleased to find a bright first edition of Gordon Keith, by Thomas Nelson Page, in the binding designed by Margaret Armstrong. Bindings by Miss Armstrong are the strength of my personal collection. I hope to find all 345 bindings designed by her. I'll add this one to the entry I'm preparing for USC's Student Book Collector's contest next spring.

But enough about that. It's time to return to work and the day's work was exhilierating. The discussion began with donor relations. It can be a tricky business, dealing with donors. Personal collections are just that, personal. A collection is representative of a person's point of view, their own take on what' s important and that can make donor relationships challenging. It was said that the number one reason donors give their collections to institutions is to keep them together, in tact and away from the children. Yes, donors have the most to fear from their own children. After all, it's not their collection and they're more than likely to break it up and sell it. Shivers!

Security was a big issue as well. Discussion centered on several easy solutions to common problems that could enhance security in reading rooms including:

• Registration: Know who's using your collection.
• Keys: Sign in and out, know who has what key and when.
• Item requests: limit the number of items a patron can request.
• Enclosures: Remove all items from boxes to prevent theft.
• Folders: Archival materials should be dispensed one folder at a time.
• Marking: All items must bear marks of ownership.
• Inventory control: Know what you have and you'll know if it's missing.
• Detailed records: Should theft occur, detailed records will help in identification.

The afternoon session was packed with presentations, exercises and a visit to the digitization center. After viewing the digitizing facility I believe all of us came away with what has been referred to among some students as "equipment envy." A 24 foot long flatbed scanner called the Cruse scanner was designed for maps. Two fine Digibook scanners were facing retirement due to incoming upgrades. There was also a terrific digital camera set up and yes, a couple of standard table top flat bed scanners.

With all this equipment the digitizing center is able to produce 3 - 400,000 images a year. It's not all online though. There is a roadblock to their progress and it's called metadata. This is somethiing that they're still working on and conversations about this subject tended toward the revolutionary. According to our host, cataloging will take up the metadata work for scanned images but the detail level of records will be greatly reduced in an effort to get the material online. This is their prediction for the future, all records will be at a minimum level for all materials, print included. It's going to be a different world.

There was also lots of discussion about digital repositories for managing digital images. Fedora is used here at UVA.

The afternoon was all about archives after that. Jackie Dooley at UC Irvine, who teaches a new course this year, Archives for Rare Book Librarians, discussed tools and processing. I found this conversation to be very interesting. I haven't had any experience with archives and was unclear about the means of processing a collection. Jackie did an excellent job explaining the process to non-archivists. I'm moving her class to the top of my RBS class list.

We closed the class day with an exercise. Jackie's class joined ours and we divided into groups of three. We were given three web sites and a specific item to search for at each site. The next step was to rank the sites for ease of use, define the best features in three short sentences and then draw a wireframe representing our design for the interface. Lots of fun and very helpful when considering usability studies for university sites.

Tomorrow's our final class day. Soon we'll head back to our lives, our work and our familiies. But we won't leave empty handed, we'll be taking so much back with us.