Things I learned over the past two weeks: a list
So, this seminar that my fellow postdocs and I have been attending has been just swell in all kinds of ways. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned:
1. Librarians are the salt of the earth. (I knew this already, but it’s always helpful to have existing knowledge illustrated with splendid particular examples.)
2. The Library of Congress is magnificent. (See above re: knew already but examples at hand, etc.)
3. There are a surprising number of librarians-in-training who play in rock bands. I’m not sure whether this is a phenomenon limited to my own circle, or whether it’s part of a larger trend.
4. The chemicals used to de-acidify brittle books are basically the same as Tums.
5. Thomas Jefferson had the endearing habit of not signing his name in his books, but altering the page signature lettered "T" to read "TJ" in all of them. When my seminar-mates and I were shown an example of this, we all went "That’s so…sweet!" It really was.
6. I’ve been feeling a strong pull toward techno-geekery. But I’m also feeling a pull toward special collections. As you may have gathered from #2 above, we went to the Library of Congress on a field trip, and were taken to the Rare Books Reading Room to look at copies of Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Blake’s Book of Urizen, the Kelmscott Chaucer, and quite a few others, and my God, the aura!
7. It’s very likely that I’m also interested in information architecture. In a broad, all-encompassing, not-yet-specialized kind of way.
8. I think that at heart I’m more of a generalist than a specialist after all.
9. It’s all right if I don’t know everything about everything.
10. I very much want to travel at some point in the near-ish future. And settle in an interesting city. And learn to play the theorbo. And go to the opera as often as I can. And keep writing in any genre that appeals. (Not new knowledge either, but recently reinforced.)
11. Many of the assumptions about myself that I had as a graduate student — e.g. that I was hopelessly impractical and could never manage people and/or money, that I’d never get a job, that I lacked social skills, that I would never have much control over my career, that I had to trudge pessimistically through life — may not in fact be true. They may have been functions of my being in graduate school. Of all the realizations that have been clobbering me over the head lately, this one has been the most startling.
Hey, I know librarians who are jazz musicians! One, a saxophone player, is acquiring some serious local fame.
You’d be surprised how well the, ah, praxis of PhDish study in the humanities can carry over to many fields, especially if you feel the techno-geeky pull. Hell, software development is nothing more than the minute decomposition of problems, which, in a post-deconstruction era, feels very familiar.
Librarians *are* nothing less than the salt of the earth. I’ve been in awe of many research librarians.
Information architecture is an interesting field, and one that is just now starting to evolve. There are many different paths, but of course you might want to look at various XML schemas/DTDs. If you could come up with a decent XML schema for humanities publications (I don’t think there is one yet), that would be a killer.
You’re probably already familiar with most of this stuff, but, if not, I’d be happy to give pointers to research, web sites, publications, etc.
Congress Opera
Household Opera is at it again, making me jealous of her trip to the Library of Congress. And she has heard the call of techno-geekery.
I feel much sympathy for the way she describes realizing how her grad-school skills can carry over to the reel …
Librarians seem to have become sexy in the same way knitters have!
It’s good to hear you excited about this stuff, Amanda.
I thought librarians had always been sexy?
Always have been so to me, but last time I checked, no one has asked me to be the judge of the sexy and the sexy-not.