Occupation for a Thursday afternoon

[aamcnamara]

Today was more exciting than I had expected.

I went in to work this afternoon assuming I'd be on the reference desk for a couple of hours, maybe work a bit on a side project after that, I might have to answer the telephone once or twice if it turned out to be a busy day...

As it turns out, GEMELA (whose web site I just looked at for the first time) is having a conference here on campus (and at UMass) next weekend. And Special Collections had said they'd get up a display-case-worth of our pre-1800 Spanish books for the library court, except no one got back to them until just today.

At which point, since the rare-books librarian is out until Tuesday and the display has to be up on Monday, the answer became "Well, Alena will be in for three hours this afternoon--she can just put something together!"

I would like to make note of a few things here:
1. I have never put together a display for Special Collections before.
2. I do not speak Spanish. (I really don't speak 1700s Spanish.)
3. I only know about pre-1800s Spanish history indirectly (from my History of the Americas class two years ago in high school).

But I was game to try--as I always am--so despite these facts, I managed to:
a) Take a list of books fitting the criteria in our collection and figure out which ones were vaguely relevant to the conference topic;
b) Go through them and find interesting things to show off--images, something I could write about, etc;
c) Figure out how many (and which) of the things I found would fit in said display case;
d) Lay them out prettily, with wedges under them and book-snakes to make them lie flat (sub-category of figuring out which things could be made to lie prettily with addition of book-snakes and wedges; also, use of huge Cantigas volume which I was instructed to put in the display);
e) Draft info-cards about the books/why all of the things were interesting.

Tomorrow, I will print the info-cards on nicer paper, attempt to get into the display case, put everything in the display case (with luck the estimate of its size is correct and all the things will fit), and then... well, go to class.

My big fear is that I have done something unspeakably stupid, in my selection of books or my description of them on the info-cards (I tried to check information in several places on the Internet, but there weren't always several English sources readily available). Ancillary to that, the fear said stupidity will cause the historians to think I am unintelligent and/or that Mount Holyoke is not a very good place. I kind of doubt any of them will even notice the display's existence, but--you know. I hate turning out any kind of rushed or only-passable product, even if I just had three hours to do it in.

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Academic historians are academic. If they see a mistake, they'll tell you because it's painful (and if you're a librarian you know what I mean), not because they think you're an idiot. They know perfectly well that nobody but them speaks Baroque Spanish. Academic-we are a lot like fannish-us.

[aamcnamara.livejournal.com]

Ah, yeah. I know/knew that, mostly--I think the last sentence of my post is the truth, really, that I hate being rushed on a project. Anyhow, thank you for being reassuring. Some days I do need that.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

OH YES. Being rushed makes everything worse. Good luck.