In mid-July of 1969, William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon, delivered prepared remarks and instructions (In Event of Mood Disaster) to be used in case the Apollo 11 mission failed. In mid-July of 2020, the folks at MIT’s Center for Virtual Reality delivered an intriguing “deep fake” video of Richard Nixon delivering those remarks written fifty one years ago. Take a look…

If you’re teaching information literacy this fall, I can’t think of why this project wouldn’t make it on your short list for inclusion in your curriculum.

Last Friday, I and two colleagues visited the University of Chicago to attend the 6th Biennial Kathleen A. Zar Symposium. The focus of this year’s gathering was exploring the different ways that librarians, non-library faculty, and administrators can collaborate to help undergraduates engage and succeed in meaningful research experiences during their college years. Most, but not all, of the speakers were from academic libraries. Lots of institutions were represented and it was a delight to see some folks from Miami University (my first archives gig) presenting on first-year research program.

The highlight of the program was a panel on undergraduate research featuring Univ. of Chicago folks, including Christopher Wild and James Sparrow. My colleague, Steve Oberg has also written about the symposium and this particular panel.

…students must understand the “provenance of their knowledge” and this understanding “only comes from [traditional] library research.”

Wild cautioned against using analogies like the library as the “laboratory of the humanities.” These sorts of comparisons privilege a particular discourse around knowledge and research and should be avoided. Sparrow emphasised that students must understand the “provenance of their knowledge” and this understanding “only comes from [traditional] library research.” He pointed out that digitization is a key part of the library’s role in the preservation and dissemination knowledge. Sparrow also noted that digital texts both “presuppose” that folks can be “hooked” in the same ways that print and physical objects and give the biggest boost to folks who already “know and have experienced knowledge and scholarship in a particular way.” In short, novice researchers (i.e. undergraduates) are most disadvantaged in a digital-only space while experienced researchers are most advantaged.

Sparrow and Wild offered some ideas that teachers can use in helping students to understand the “provenance of their knowledge.”

• Present students with a corpus of materials that have been pre-selected but not completely mined as the basis for a research project.
  
• Create a course that is built around an exhibit (online or physical) in which all student work feeds into the final exhibit.
  
• Make sure that we remember that “genuine” student research need not be publishable nor completely original. Students need space to practice and explore.

These are all ideas that will make student learning more rich and can be the basis for fruitful collaboration between librarians and classroom instructors.

July has been a whirlwind of travel for us as we’ve trekked over 3,000 miles covering Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York (and of course Illinois).

Faith has long had a yen to take the Amtrak on an overnight, multi-state adventure and visiting her family in upstate New York proved to be just the ticket (no pun intended). She is a talented travel agent and everything went off without a hitch. The most tricky part of the trip was actually leaving the house. By which I mean getting all five of us (baby included) down to the Metra Station (only 1 mile from our front door) without leaving our van in one day parking. Hint: the solution involved both the van and Lyft.

Out train was nearly two hours late leaving Union Station and the kids were a bit weary of waiting, but not weary enough to fall asleep. Their excitement about the trip had been building for weeks and sitting on a non-moving train for nearly two hours did little to damped their enthusiasm. If anything, it increased it to a nearly unmanageable degree. The train departed just as they were approaching peak travel fever…

We finally go underway around midnight and spend a restful restless night headed to our final destination.

After more than 24 hours of travel we arrived at my mother-in-law’s house on Friday afternoon and spent a pleasant Saturday with family. On Sunday, we loaded up our rental car and headed west. More specifically, we headed back toward the Great Lakes to visit Faith’s grandmother Joy near Lake Ontario. Joy is a delightful and spry lady of 83 and Faith and I are grateful the girls were able spend some time with their great-grandmother. She loves art (we share a passion for the work of Andrew Wyeth) and expresses her skills in quilting.

On Monday is was time to head east, back to Albany.

On Thursday it was time to head south to catch up with some of my wife’s college friends for a terrific 4th of July get-together in the Catskills, just south of the Schoharie Valley.

Before we knew it, Friday had rolled around and it was time to head west and home.

We arrived back home on Saturday afternoon and began preparations to head north. But, more about that next time.

In his preface to If This Is a Man, Primo Levi writes

…many people – many nations – can find themselves believing, more or less consciously, that ‘every stranger is an enemy.’ For the most part, this conviction lies burning in the mind like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and is not the basis of a system of thought. But when this happens, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, stands the [camp]. It is the product of a conception of the world carried to its logical consequences . . . The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister signal of danger.

Levi is describing the burning hatred for the European Jewish community stoked by the poisonous re-imagining of them as sub-human obstacles to racial purity. He is also alluding to the dangerous, but relatively common, fear that many humans have of one another. Another race, another class, another gender, a citizen of another country, a member of another party or faction. Far too often we humans understand, even defined, ourselves in opposition to others.

The efforts to overcome this, especially in schools, are laudable though often ineffectual. Perhaps one of the least effective and potentially dangerous ways some teachers attempt to engage students is through “living history” in which students dress up and “act like” someone from the past to “really understand” what is was like. As if folks from an earlier era walked around thinking how “exciting” it was to be wearing a wig and living in the 1640s. I would suggest that instead of playing what is, in essence, dress ups we encourage ourselves and our children to read widely. If you want to foster empathy in yourself and your children don’t buy them a powdered wig, enroll them in a summer reading program.

One of the things that reading offers us is the opportunity to overcome our innate biases against others and see the world through their eyes. In his book An Experiment in Criticism, the writer C.S. Lewis argues that in reading great literature

I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

I’m not so naive as to suggest that reading widely always makes one a better or more ethical person, there are plenty of counter examples. I am suggesting that as a way to develop empathy and compassion it beats a costume box.

It’s been quite a while since I posted anything personal on my blog. It’s also been two years this week since I started a new job at Wheaton College. Here’s what I’ve been up two in the last two years.

California
Shortly before we moved, Faith and I took a short trip to Southern California. We enjoyed the exploring San Diego, hiking in Joshua Tree, exploring a mission, and just spending time together.

 

 

Job
I started a new position at Wheaton College (IL) as the librarian for outreach and promotion and the group leader for the teaching and outreach group. I’m grateful to have been welcomed into a wonderful community of scholars and friends.

 

We Moved . . . Again.
We lived in three different homes in under three years, leading our middle daughter to ask a few hours into a road trip, “where we were going to be living now?” When we first moved from Cincinnati we rented for a year to give us time to get a sense of the neighborhood and one year ago we purchased our home in Wheaton, IL. Nevertheless, we’ve had lots of fun exploring our new neighborhood and places nearby.

 

 

 

 

Charlotte
We welcomed a third little girl to our family, Charlotte Ruth.

Travel
One of the more exciting aspects of my job has been participating in the planning project for a proposal to expand the college library. Part of the planning involved a fair amount of travel. Between travel for meetings, conferences, and committee work across the last couple of years I was able to visit nearly twenty other libraries. Here are some of my favorites:

Conclusion
It’s been a great two years but I’m looking forward to a few less changes in the next two.

“In the human mind, the word library seems to sit alongside other pregnant and evocative words such as garden, forest, galaxy, and labyrinth. Book lovers speak of their possessions as beautiful flowers, verdant leaves, precious fruit, flowing fountains. Books are stars and planets and meteorites. To browse library shelves is to wander in a maze or a mirror gallery. Cemetery is another neighboring word. Libraries have always been a matter of life and death. They are places of reverence, homes for things long gone. Through books, the dead speak.” Read the rest here.