Lost in the Stacks

For the last 31 years, I have lived by a bell schedule and always had papers to grade or lessons to write.  All of a sudden, my days have become very free-form and my schedule nebulous, and I sometimes feel a little lost without the school-day structures.  While I am free to explore the Library's online collections, and wander through as many virtual stacks as I'd like (and go to the bathroom whenever I feel the need), I have found myself jumping on more tangible projects right away, because I am so used to producing or accomplishing something in a short amount of time.  A couple of my Learning and Innovation Office colleagues today reminded me that I can be patient, that they expect me to explore for now, and that the "production curve" should be very low at this point.  Part of the process is to dive into ideas, note what I'm thinking about them, and keep track of where I find them (since it's easy to get lost even when the stacks are virtual).  When something makes me want to share its discovery with someone, that's the time to start writing.  This takes some getting used to.*

On the other hand, I do have a couple small projects to work on.  One of them involves research on a particular topic, and the other two involve actual writing.  One of the latter is for a blog post introducing myself on the LoC blogs.  I'll link to that when it gets posted.  Which won't be until October.  Because nothing just "gets posted" to the LoC blogs.  There is a lot of editing that happens, and I have been warned that anything I write will come back to me with lots of "red ink" indicating what needs fixing and rewriting.  Three things jump to mind when I hear this.  The first is something my dad told me when I was a freshman in high school: "There's no such thing as 'good writing', there's only good rewriting."  And a now-retired colleague from the English Department, who was an informal mentor to me, told me "Peter, once you write something and send it off, it's no longer yours, but it's better to get it out there and let it benefit from the collaboration."  This is all good advice that I try to live by, but the third thing I think about was the time that another friend from the English Department and I sat in each others' classes for two weeks.  She did the math homework and took the quizzes on logarithms, and I completed the writing prompts and essays for Crime and Punishment.  She pulled no punches when grading those essays, and after I got over the shock of having that red ink on my essays (despite those earlier aphorisms), I did learn something about myself and my writing.  So, thanks, Laura; those two weeks talking with you about what it's like to be a student in our classrooms and growing as a teacher and a learner were really important to me.

So where in the stacks was I lost this week?

• How primary sources can be used to meet the needs of diverse learners, particularly the needs of differently-abled learners.  And a history lesson on the intersection of the Civil Rights movement and the Disabilities Act.  Here's the link to a video of that webinar if you're interested.  (Scroll down to the June 3rd webinar.)
• The Montana Farmer-Stockman newspaper from the late 1940s to early 1950s represented data about raising turkeys and sheep in all sorts of different graphs and charts.  The Chronicling America website is a gigantic treasure trove of newspapers, and I may be writing about what the various representations reveal about the data on turkeys and sheep.
• The Geography and Maps Division of the LoC has a mind-boggling array of items, from portolan charts and survey maps to data sets (and not just Census data!) from many countries and mapping COVID strains.  John Hessler, one of the specialists in that division provided me with so many avenues of research, I spent two days poking around in those collections, and I'm not alone.  Researchers for the courts and for Congress access this kind of material quite often.  Portolan charts are one of the things I've gotten really excited about, and I'll probably write about those at some point.
• The National Book Festival is going to be amazing this year.  (Not that it wasn't amazing in previous years, but the work that so many teams did this year to make it all virtual and available to everyone is incredible.)
• The LoC has a great many blogs with really interesting posts that I won't ever have the time to finish reading.  I did find one that described how a scientist relied on crowd sourcing to gather data about the Leonid meteor shower of 1833.  (That's not a typo; I really mean 1833.)  I forgot to copy the link for that one at first and had to retrace my steps to get it.  Took a while.  This is what I mean about getting lost in the stacks.

... and I have several dozen links to other ideas I still want to explore.  I am really grateful for this time I have to indulge my curiosity.  And I'm also grateful for the folks in my Office and the various other divisions who have been really kind about sharing information with me and pointing me in new and interesting directions.  Thank goodness this is all online for now, otherwise I really would need help finding the bathroom.

 

*To folks teaching or learning remotely, on a hybrid system, or even in-person right now, not having a bell schedule probably seems like a lame complaint.  It is, and I'm not really complaining about it, just noting that the shift in thinking exists.

Image Source: Library of Congress. Interior. Book stack. [192-?] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2005681088/>.