Archives and Special Collections

I enjoyed our visit the the archives and special collections. It was my first time being around a collection of books that old and rare and, I must admit, I was worried of accidentally ruining or breaking one of them. I enjoyed learning from the librarians about the different types of materials used to create and bind the books. Something I most appreciated about their lesson and lecture was the set-up of the room. I think it was helpful to have the materials sorted by location of origin. This helped me see trends in their binding and production styles. For example, at the east Asia table I noticed that many of the pieces used the stab stitch binding. This binding method reminded me of how I used to bind school projects, such as poetry packets, that we were assigned to turn into books. My main takeaway from this lesson was the extensive range of materials, design, and production styles used to share written works. I learned about the progression from scrolls to accordion folds, to codexes and the benefits to each. I also learned about many materials that were used as paper that I hadn't known about. These ranged from plant-based resources such as rice paper, papyrus, plant pulp, and tree pulp to natural resources such as clay, stone, and animal hides.

I also learned that something being an old, rare copy instead of the original source itself doesn't necessarily make it less valuable. I feel like I had the idea that anything that isn't the exact original source isn't nearly as valuable as what could be considered the "real deal" or the original text that was written on by its author. However, I learned about the benefits of copies, one of the most important of which is preservation. Copies allow text to be preserved; if an original text is ruined, copies allow the text and its content to live on. I could go into more detail about what else I liked about this class session, but these are the main topics that I enjoyed learning about!