Come view the fruit of my labor, part II

I spent part of the summer (a very small part, really, due to being extremely busy) processing the archives of the North American Coalition for Christianity and Ecology for the Yale Divinity School Library's special collection. The finding aid for the archives, created by me and edited by special collections librarian Martha Smalley, is here. (Not sure how accessible this is without a library proxy of some sort, unfortunately, and the part with my name on it spits out an error. But it is there!)

And! The libguide on patristic exegesis I created for IST 605 has been adapted for use in an actual library, again (of course) YDSL. It is much expanded and should be useful as a launching point for anyone doing research in early Christianity. Check it out here.

IST 511, Day Three

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.