Shift #8 - IFP Webinar on Rare Books and Manuscripts
Tuesday, May 28, 2024 | 10-11 am PST/12-1 pm CST/1-2 pm EST (1 hr)
Details
Michelle Hurt, student/intern
Jennifer Gonzalez, practicum supervisor
These are two screenshots from the webinar I attended on Rare Books and Manuscripts. This webinar was hosted by the Internships and Fellowships Program of the Library of Congress. They encouraged interns to engage in the chat, by stating their internship program and where they are located (as well as any questions they have).
The next shift I worked today while in Seattle was the IFP webinar on Rare Books and Manuscripts. I was really excited about this presentation, because it was something outside of the Law Library (a nice change of pace, I thought). The first presentation was about Rare Books and from it, I learned that there are 10 staff members in the Rare Book division. There is a specific Rare Book reading room located in the Jefferson Building and is fashioned after Independence Hall. There is another room used by the Rare Book division, which is the Rosenwald Room that is used for programs, classes, and presentations. The Rare Book division has 100 special collections with more than 1 million items. The presenter, Amanda Zimmerman, pointed out that there is a benefit of the rare book items being digitized - people can zoom into each work and can see greater detail than what they could see in-person. I learned what makes a book rare - it was published before 1801 (before the Industrial Revolution), it has interesting binding, paper, printing techniques, and/or annotation, and it has important provenance (ownership history). These rare books and their components help us to learn of the culture of the time.
The second presentation was by Edith Sandler of the Manuscript department. She explained what a manuscript entails, using the definition from the Society of American Archivists: "1) a handwritten document, 2) an unpublished document, 3) synonymous with manuscript collection and 4) an author's draft of a book, article, or other work submitted for publication". Edith had us thinking about which definition is best to use and what the Library of Congress means when they say "manuscript". At the Library of Congress, the focus is on a document that has not been published. This could be a picture of a document with edits (like Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence) or a journal of many pages. The Manuscript division has more than 70 million items, which are unpublished papers that document the history of the United States. In this presentation, I also learned how manuscripts are acquired - by way of gifts, purchases, loans, transfers from other agencies, and copyright. The division has to decide what manuscripts they accept by looking at the item's research value, its impact on resources, and capacity for processing it. Not all manuscripts are accessible by the public because some have restrictions imposed on them by the donor, some are off-site in storage, and others are classified by the U.S. government.
These two presentations were so fascinating! It really makes me thankful for the resources we have in our country and the great lengths people past and present have done to preserve our culture and history.
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