I was looking forward today, because this afternoon we got down and dirty with real-live books at the Bird Library. We began our tour in the basement of the library, where Peter Verheyen, the head of preservation and conservation, showed us books from the library's circulating collections in the process of being repaired. A lot of this was at least vaguely familiar to me, since I spent a year as an undergrad repairing books at the undergraduate library at the UW. Conservation is not really something you get an MSLIS to do, so I am probably not going to be playing with the books, but as Verheyen's colleague David Stokoe pointed out, you're not supposed to read the books you're fixing, and I'd want to do that. Stokoe, upstairs in Special Collections, showed us some older books he was working on, including a sixteenth-century English translation of the New Testament from the Vulgate that predates the King James by a few decades. You can tell from the fact I was reading the book instead of examining the restored binding that maybe conservation is not what I'm called to do anyway.
Then Professor Ken Lavender took us on a "romp through the centuries," really the millennia, because it began with a cuneiform tablet. And those gorgeous illuminations in medieval Latin texts were not left out. This one, from the Le Louchier Hours, is amazingly vibrant in person.
Given my interests in classics, early Christianity, and old stuff in general, it should come as no surprise that special collections is an area I'd like to explore, and I'm hoping to take Ken Lavender's preservation course at some point when I can be on campus and play with the books.
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