To The Libraries!

This week, I was back in a library
– three of them, in fact! I had almost forgotten how much I love being
surrounded by archival materials. I like looking at the stacks and nimbly
making my way through the folders to find what I’m looking for. There’s something
about holding important documents in my arms and the fresh smell of opening an
old book that pulls me in. And then, once I’m in, there’s no holding back – I’m
absorbed into something and somewhere and I’m absolutely thrilled.

           I was
overjoyed by having the same experience three times in a week in three
different places. Here’s where I visited:

• Special
  Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. DuBois Library, UMass Amherst: So
  close to home, but still a first for my time here at UMass. (I hope it’s not
  the last!) For my Public History Workshop, we’ve been studying the Mill River
  Flood of 1874. After the Williamsburg dam burst upstream, the reservoir poured
  through several villages down to Northampton, killing 139 people and destroying
  thousands of dollars worth of property. While our class has walked portions of
  the river, it’s a bit difficult to see it in full form with all the snow we’ve
  been having. Instead, we wanted to have a visual representation of the river
  and the old dam. We looked through several atlases and maps, as well as
  stereoscopic cards showcasing the damage of the flood. My professor also showed
  us how to access the Map Collection at DuBois Library, and the especially
  useful Digital Sanborn Maps for the area.
• Archives
  & Special Collections, Robert Frost Library, Amherst College: For my
  class focused on using Adobe InDesign to create a book catalog, we went to
  Amherst to investigate the history of the book. While our focus in the class is
  primarily on their digital counterpart (the e-book), we wanted to see the
  history of printing, the physical structure of a book, and talk about how print
  spread. The Head of Archives & Special Collections, Mike Kelly, gave our
  class a great presentation, with everything a leaf of the Gutenberg Bible to
  the unbound Pickwick Papers to “Whiteness” that only showed up under black
  light. For a person who basically lives in books (you should see my bedroom at
  home!), most of my modern editions look the same. It was awesome to see books
  of different shapes, sizes, and purposes.
• Hampshire
  Room for Local History, Forbes Library, Northampton MA: This was a library
  I’ve never been to before, but one I definitely have to go back to. It’s the
  only public library in the United States that is also a presidential library –
  Calvin Coolidge’s to be exact. But I wasn’t there to see the former POTUS’s
  documents (not this time, anyway.) This was another trip focused on the Mill
  River. In addition to looking at some awesome maps of Northampton and the
  changes to the Mill River’s route over time, I got to read articles of the
  Hampshire Gazette and journals of Sylvester Judd. Judd was a Unitarian Minister
  and novelist, but he spent his early life in Westhampton. He kept detailed
  notebooks describing the area of Hadley and discussing daily life, especially
  noting the regular floods of the river. His journals were surprisingly easy to read and packed with information. 

I’m sure I’ll be in and out of these places throughout the rest of the semester, but this week was pretty fantastic!