books of the brave
Gary Frost will direct a two week project to install a comprehensive exhibit of the treasures of the Library of the Recoleta in Arequipa Peru. This education exhibit will depict the amazing story of historical libraries in this highland colonial city. Brought together over four centuries and across four oceans these books introduced European learning into equally complex indigenous culture and so advanced dynamics of empire still in motion in the Americas. The exhibit will also project legacies of book craft and book art that now suggest a lively future meaning for these collections.
The project team includes on-site cataloger and exhibit content author, Helen Ryan, on-site specialist bibliographer, Alvaro Meneses, UI Libraries conservator Gary Frost, assistant and support specialist, Joyce Miller and Center for the Book student Bill Voss.
learning library conservation 2.0
There is probably a relation between AIC certification and library conservation training, both dormant. The limbo of students without a school is accentuated by a limbo of AIC certification. What is the larger impasse here? What factors of sustainability are unmet or unmanaged?
Perhaps the target of certification is not appropriate. Another option, rather than certifying students, is to certify the certifiers. AIC and its specialty enclaves could certify instructional programs. These can range widely and may comprise composites that may not include a graduate conservation training program.
Once identified and certified the array of instructional programs can provide a wide assortment of opportunities for the interested student. The student need not follow a linear sequence, but graduate from one to another, perhaps with a recommended goal of a three year sabbatical. A clearing house office, modeled on the PBI, could be maintained and lend a name to the composite training sequence.
There is a legacy logic to the learning sabbatical derived from apprenticeship, but the important adjustment to contemporary needs is circulation between various instructional programs. The student is both sampling and sequentially advancing. Typical student epiphanies and rebellions are easily accommodated.
Another needed layer is high diversity of instructional programs, from municipal craft centers, to academic book studies, to technical and scientific courses, to studio workshops and factory settings. The diversity must be wide to engender a whole ecology of learning which is now so prerequisite for practice.
This multi-context learning approach, taken seriously, will breed its own details. The students will learn, the instructional programs will learn and the certifiers will learn and that dynamic will be sustainable and invigorating.
hmmm…
“But, maddeningly, the cause or causes of the market’s wild swing remained elusive, leaving what amounts to a $1 trillion question mark hanging over the world’s largest, and most celebrated, stock market.”
It was interesting to watch the attentive counting of paper ballots in the recent English election. The very close result, slowly tabulated, is apparently trusted. At the same time other sectors of stock exchange and automotive engineering continue analysis of unintended effects of transition to electronic delivery. We can also wonder, as libraries transition to mixed print and screen services, about surprises in culture transmission.
midnight bus
(See you some weeks later with reports on AIC, Peru and RIT Future of Reading…..)