LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week Five
Day Twenty-Eight: The National Science and Media Museum
EXTERMINATE!

“It only works when the metadata is correct”

Paul Coleman
Associate Curator of Television and Broadcast
The National Science and Media Museum

Vicky, Vicky, Vicky. I owe you a frosty adult beverage of your choosing the next time we meet in person (if that ever comes to pass…)

Your recommendation of The National Science and Media Museum did not disappoint. Paul Coleman and colleague Claire Mayoh gave me a good overview of how they use media in their facility. Their own archive is limited, as they rely heavily on the British Film Institute, the BBC, and other media sources for their exhibits. Though Claire Mayoh discussed wanting to do more with the media they do have on hand. Paul Coleman mentioned the media they have from an early, early broadcast format from the late 1920’s called Phonovision. Paul told me he had the complete transfer of the recordings “on a CD in my desk”. Tidbits like that never cease to amaze me. A CD holds up to 700 megabytes. That is a tiny, tiny amount of data in the video world. For the entire contents of the NSMM’s phono vision archive to fit on a CD, the means the images are very low resolution compared to today’s HD, 4K, and 8K media

The way the NSMM weaves media into their exhibits helps tell the story of broadcasting, though I was privy to the planning for new exhibits and how they will be changing up how they use media in the exhibits. Paul and I lost access to that room before he could give me too much insight, as the conference room with the plans outlined on the walls was scheduled to be used for another meeting, so we had to vacate within a few minutes of our arrival.

Walking through the exhibits with Paul and getting the individualized tour was excellent! I had the chance to ask my “weirdo” questions, but I found myself a bit too fascinated a few times to remember why I was there, and I was just geeking out over the exhibits and the gear.

Paul brought me to the archive room to show off the daguerreotypes, the calotypes (which he called “the Talbot photography”. For a little background on the difference, read this short article). The big draw for me, and where we spent the lion’s share of our time, was in the large equipment storage room. In here was where we first discussed the phonovision archive, and wandered the physical technical history of broadcasting from the very beginning of the medium. This room was fascinating to me for the obvious reason that it not only contained gear I knew and used in my career, but things I’d only heard about. And they may or may not have had the optical device used in Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody video. Paul wasn’t optimistic that it would be authenticated, but he did have a relationship with the archivist for Brian May, so if it can be authenticated, he already has the connections to do so.

3.9 miles/10,100 steps/8 flights climbed
Total miles driven London to Bath to Liverpool to Bradford to Harrogate to Edinburgh: 729 miles

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week Five
Day Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Nine: BONUS Colleague Interviews
Vicky Gets TWO Shout-Outs This Trip!

“Oh, great. I got a haircut for this.”

Graeme Hanks, Freelance Editor

My intrepid road trip to interview additional sources for my paper began the Sunday after classes concluded. I left London via a shiny red rented automobile to swing though Bath, Liverpool, Bradford, and Harrogate before ending up in Edinburgh to meet my friend Shauna for some Scottish Holiday Hijinks.

An American colleague (VICKY!!) recommended I visit the National Science and Media Museum (NSMM) in Bradford, and originally after consulting “The Googles”, I figured it was just too far away to fit into my limited time between end of school and traveling with a dorm-room’s full of luggage on trains seemed like a lot of extra work… but when I started talking with my other colleagues in Liverpool and Harrogate, it turned out that they were perfect candidates to interview for my paper, yet I never knew this! The things we don’t talk about on Twitter or Facebook! Then I noted Bradford, the home of the NSMM, is smack-dab between the two. A plan was hatching!

The more I mapped out the best way to fit in interviewing Graeme, Rick and the staff at the National Science and Media Museum, plus adding a trip to see my retired BBC colleagues in Bath, whom I visited on my last visit in 2008, the more a road trip seemed to be the only rational solution.

So learning to love driving on the other side of the road from the other side of the car was apparently inevitable.

Though sitting in restaurants talking to Graeme and his wonderfully patient and funny partner, Charis, and then Rick were fascinating for me, describing a conversation in a blog is probably not quite as dynamic for the reader, so I will just say they are both knowledgeable in their own right(s), and each will add to the information in my paper. Both are considered freelance. Graeme’s main client is a film company in Liverpool, and Rick’s primary clientele are corporate entitles doing live events. Their different perspectives and use-cases will add to the comprehensiveness of my paper.

So with this, I’ll just leave you with a few pretty pictures from my road trip, and The National Science and Media Museum gets its own blog entry!

Bath: 2.6 miles/6,100 steps/8 flights climbed
Liverpool: 6.1 miles/16,400 steps/16 flights climbed
Harrogate: 6.5 miles/17,400 steps/18 flights climbed

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week Four
Day Twenty-One: Bristol
Interview with a King. Ben King.

“You first have to climb a hill taller than the tower!”

Deb Eschweiler, Hill Climber, Tower Ascender, Muscle Puller

I took a day trip to Bristol to interview Ben King, Head of Post Production for FaceFilms. I had some time to explore the city before meeting up with Ben and designer, photographic art director and his significant other, Charlotte McCarthy, for dinner and conversation.  (Okay…it was more of an interview).

Getting to Bristol, of course, required a train. This particular train departed from Paddington Station. This was noteworthy for two reasons. First, I was able to revisit the spot where I stood staring at the map on my phone trying to figure out which direction to go when I first arrived on the Heathrow Express three weeks ago. Spoiler: I chose poorly. I now know which exit goes where! Second, since I had time before boarding, I could visit my childhood chum, Paddington Bear. I don’t who I’ve spent more time interacting with over the years, Paddington Bear or Ben King.

I first met Ben at the National Association of Broadcasters Conference in Las Vegas in the mid-2000’s, so we are pushing right about a decade and half now. Ben has been a reliable source of information for a number of years as he’s an established expert in the field. He is very much in-demand, and is internationally recognized for his expertise. He is also a moderator on the Los Angeles Creative Pro User Group (LACPUG) forums. Ben and I have spent many an hour in person and online engaged in rousing conversations about codecs, file formats, and the proper pronunciation of “Beta”.

Before we were schedule to meet for dinner and resume our jocular yet technical confabulation, I had other tasks to accomplish. There were interviews to schedule, and towers to find, and apparently hills to climb. Since I am from the vast, vast flatness of the midwestern prairie, this wasn’t as easy a task as it may have been for someone who has been residing in someplace like San Francisco or some other über-hilly region.  The effects were…significant. Here I am, two days later, and I’m still finding it difficult to fully extend and contract my calves!

As for the interview itself, Ben and I were able to get through only a portion of my questions. The three of us had some catching up to do, but also Ben’s breadth of knowledge is so vast that he has a tendency to wander slightly off-topic. I am always more than willing to follow because it’s always incredibly interesting and relevant…just not in the way one expect at the outset.

I put the remainder of the questions into email form the next day. Within a few hours I had a reply that essentially began, “Sorry this is dashed off. I’m a bit busy today” and then continued with fully thought-out  and complete responses. He obviously put some quality time into the email. Must be the British equivalent to “Minnesota Nice”!

7.8 miles/18,400 steps/25 “flights” climbed

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week Three
Day Eighteen: National Army Museum
Pithy Subtitle Goes Here

“But I didn’t take any notes this time, so I won’t have a quote or any pithy titles”

Deb Eschweiler, Video Editor, Media Asset Manager, Audiovisual Archivist, Almost Former Student

Eunice needed to go the National Army Museum to work on her research into Southeast Asian family and military records. I tagged along because it was a beautiful day, and why not, Canadians are some of my favorite humans!

I was immediately impressed with how well the Museum incorporates audiovisual media into their exhibits. Most museums have some sort of multimedia display happening, often it’s a focus, but feeling somehow divorced from the material surrounding it. Sometimes it feels like an afterthought, as if they decided to shoehorn in an audio or video oral history or another video presentation into an existing exhibit. At the National Army Museum, it feels more intentional, as if designed with the media in mind from the start. It all fit together with the physical parts of the exhibits and helps to tell the stories more intentionally.

Once we found ourselves on the ground floor, I noticed the Templer Study Centre. At first the front desk was unstaffed, but upon my second pass, friendly faces appeared, so I mentioned to Eunice that there were PEOPLE in there. She decided to go in and enquire about the military records of her grandfather and another family member to see if they would have the records in their collection, or if they would know where she might find them (Spoiler: they did not have them. But they gave her good information on where to look next. Some of this information she already had. Unfortunately, that answer was “Glasgow”).

After Eunice spoke with the staff, I stepped away with her to allow other patrons to do the business thy needed with the staff, and Eunice wrote a few notes. This gave me a few moments to reflect on the audiovisual display whiting the museum, and I wondered how much connection they had to the holdings within the archive. Professional experience tells me there is a chance that they are not necessarily related, although it is likely they would have wanted dot use material form the collection, if they had access to anything relevant. So I decided to ask about their audiovisual materials.

After a brief discussion, I walked away with contact information for the woman who would be the best person to answer my questions regarding this. And that I could expect a response within “21 days”. I’m hoping that is just the boiler-plate they say because that is their internal deadline for all enquiries… because my paper is due in about, oh, not too much longer than 21 days or so… And I’m really hoping/planning to have it done sooner rather than later!

2.8 miles/7,500 steps/2 flights climbed

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week Three
Day Seventeen: The Wiener Library
for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide

“We do want people to come in and use the space”

Leah Sidebotham, Digital Asset Manager, The Wiener Library

Due to the sensitive nature of the material at the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, wanted to be respectful, so today I also dialed back my humor on the titles, subtitles, and quotes. I didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about how I would approach a client with “serious” media, and that I can pivot to be respectful when the need arises.

But, truth be told, media is media, to a degree. To organize it well, it doesn’t matter if it’s Marx Brothers short films, a corporate media center’s backlog of training and event video, the Netflix catalog, or the rare material such as Leah Sidebotham showed me during our tour of the cellar of the Wiener Library. As Digital Asset Manager, the care and consideration of the physical media in possession of the Library has fallen under the Leah’s purview.

What the library has in their stores is a mixture of audio tape formats, vinyl audio recordings, microfilm, and about 4,000 or so VHS tapes. Of which none the state of is known. Leah and I discussed several topics, including copyright (who really owns the material on some of the recordings), to the potential state of health of the items, based on age and storage conditions, both current and over time. There are several red flags among the physical media for Leah in the old wine cellar that is their vault. There are a lot of questions about how to make the material accessible, but at what cost? The Library is completely funded via donations, so where in the “pecking order” large digitization efforts fall when budgeting rolls around is a valid point.

Leah did say they have had offers to digitize the entire collection, but the price has always been that that digitizers want to retain a copy for themselves. Archivists and librarians alike will understand the issues of copyright, ownership, and donation records. The Library doesn’t have the right to give the material away like that. They would need to go back to everyone who donated, or everyone who participated in an oral history project, etc., and get new releases signed. It’s just not practical.

So the tapes and other recordings sit. Until either another solution arises, or the technology to replay the material disappears, or the media itself disintegrates beyond the point where it is playable.

But the audiovisual archive at the Wiener Library isn’t all doom and gloom! They do have a series of oral histories digitized and accessible via two terminals in their reading room. They are on self-contained systems, separate from the rest of the network, and not internet-accessible. Old-school media management. Don’t let the internet corrupt your media! They have a server on the landing of the third floor, but Leah said it’s not optimal for many reasons, mostly climate control-related, and they are looking to move to a cloud-based service where the backups are automatic, and somebody else’s daily responsibility.

I could go on about their catalog, and their Explorer-based organization system for some of the media, but I’m going to go ahead and save that for my paper!

2.7 miles/6,700 steps/No flights climbed

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week Three
Day Sixteen: Middle Temple Law Library
Let’s just admit it, Shakespeare had a thing for lawyers

“The first rule of librarianship is to not be noisy”

Renae S., Librarian, Middle Temple Law Library

I really wanted to use that famous Shakespeare quote about lawyers from King Henry VI, Part II, but that has mean-ish undertones (depending on the interpretation, I gather, from some of my more Shakespearean-centric dramaturges) and the librarians at Middle Temple Law Library were incredibly accommodating of us, so I don’t want to come across as someone who demeans the profession, even for a pithy quote at the head of my blog post. That just wouldn’t do.

The history of the Middle Temple goes back to, you guessed it, the Knights Templar. But only sort of. The area, once “vacated” by the Knights Templar, was “repopulated” by lawyers due to an old rule about not being able to practice law within the city limits of London (for those unaware, the actual City of London proper is one square mile… that’s another story for another day… But here’s a link to a video that tells you about it if you can’t wait: The (Secret) City of London, Part 1: History (thanks for the link, Dr. Welsh!)

The legal profession is practiced much differently in the U.K. than it is in the U.S. My Legal-Eagle friends back home may (or may not) be surprised to know that one need not have a law degree to practice law in the U.K. A degree is required, but not necessarily a JD. The description of the process by Renae S., Librarian for the Middle Temple Law Library, was fascinating, but was lengthy and would more than exhaust the length of this blog posting. Needless to say, it’s more like a sponsorship and an apprenticeship leading to a chance “to hang one’s own shingle”. To gain a sponsor and access, the barrister-in-waiting (I made that term up. I don’t know if that’s a proper one. I hope it’s not offensive!) must join one of the four “Inns”, Middle Temple being one of the four. Each has specialties in the law, so one should choose carefully.

The library was modernized when it was rebuilt in the 50s due to damage during the Second World War, as were portions of the other Middle Temple buildings. The two globes on display, one celestial and one terrestrial, are only seen together at the Middle Temple Law Library.

One of the first things I saw when I walked into the library (other than the prominently displayed, rare globes, of course), are tax books. Reminding me that we paid our quarterly income taxes this week… (thanks for the tax prep, Nate!)

Renae told us about a case that went back to medieval times to find precedent, but then said usually the oldest cases generally are looking to no earlier than the 16th century.
No. Earlier.

They have 50,000 titles and 250,000 volumes at their disposal to cover these needs.

3.7 miles/9,300 steps/13 flights climbed

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week Three
Day Sixteen: The National Museum of Computing
Megabytes, and Gigabytes, and Petabytes! Oh, My!

“People are the weakest link”

Robert, Tour Guide, The National Museum of Computing

There was so many tales of computer history told at the National Museum of Computing on the Bletchley Park campus. We didn’t even get up to the era of computing when my dad entered the field (around the time I was born… you do the math…) before we had to end our tour. There was still half a room of large whirring machines to go through, at least.

Those early, heady, heady days of racks upon racks upon racks of valves (er, also known as vacuum tubes to you Yanks on the other side of the Atlantic) and literal tape drives… punched paper tape… 

We didn’t know how good we had it with 40 megabytes of hard drive storage and 4 MB of RAM in the early ‘90s (my first wholly-owned personal computer).

While my inner-nerd was fascinated by the computer history, wondering if any of the skills I have working with computers as an editor would have translated to working with these types of computers had I been born in another era (er… perhaps if required for my work, I would have stronger math skills. I fear this has always been my weakest area. But also of lesser interest. Had I viewed it as more necessary for my future, perhaps I would have put in more effort, as well), the true history and purpose of Bletchley Park cannot be ignored, for it is all around you here at the site.

The history of intelligence gathering during the Second World War lives here. We began with the codebreaking of Germany’s first cryptographic machine, the Lorenz. The story of which is more lengthy for my humble blog post (truly, all the stories told this day are). My headline today (HQIBPEXEZMUG) is the code that broke that encryption, and it was broken because a human did a dumb thing, hence the quote from our tour guide, Robert. You can read about it on your own at the above link, and also in the Galleries on the National Museum of Computing’s website.

We spent a lot of time hearing about the machines that were used to break the German encryption. Although they were computers in one sense, they were not computers as we understand them today. They were single-purpose machines. They were built to compute, but to achieve one goal, to break cyphers.

The most famous, of course, are Enigma, a series of which were used by the Germans in WWII, which was famously broken by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman using Bombe in Hut 8 at Bletchley Park (if you’ve seen the film The Imitation Game with Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightly, it’s not “historically accurate” on many fronts, according to our guide, Robert, who referred to it as “The Irritation Game”, but to lay-folk who are unfamiliar with the origin of computing, it does a reasonable job of exposition to those of us with untrained gray matter. But I would agree that it’s not meant to be a documentary).

By the time we got to the room with EDSAC, Hollerith HEC-1, and the WITCH, my brain was full, but I was able to answer the trivia questions of what is a vacuum tube (sorry, sorry, “valve”), and a transistor. Egads. Am I a relic, too??

There was more, but we were all running low on capacity, though I always find giant 3 foot, 4 MB of storage platters fun.

If you are interested in understanding Alan Turing’s work in “plain English”, Robert recommends reading retired Boston College Associate Professor, Peter Kugel.

We then toured the grounds of Bletchley Park, where they use audiovisuals, props, and games exceedingly well to tell stories, before returning to London. Upon which I immediately departed for an event that I had been invited to by a colleague to celebrate the best and brightest of young app inventors. It was an Alpha an Omega day, going from the dawn of computing to seeing the creativity that students as young as 13 are coming up with and to consider how much has changed in our world since my own parents were born because of the computer.

I can’t believe how many times I have wondered how we managed to get around Europe in 1990 without the world of information in our pockets (but we did manage, thank you very much!!)

4.8 miles/13,100 steps/16 flights climbed

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week Two
Day Twelve: National Maritime Museum Caird Library & Archive
Tow the Line? Toe the Line?

Drat! A boat cruise down the River Thames. Guess we’ll just have to learn to cope with all these variant transportation options in London.

Arriving at the National Maritime Museum after stopping at Sir Christopher Wren’s Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich for a photo opportunity with the Business School class offered great views of the Thames for a few moments before we went our separate ways for the day. Walking up to the National Maritime Museum was again another striking facade of a building.

The Caird Library and Archive is primarily library and archive for those interested in maritime history and exploration, including the World Wars, British Merchant and Royal Navies, as well as astronomy and timekeeping, and genealogies.

The library and archive hold primarily four types of objects: 1) manuscripts and original documents, 2) printed materials, 3) atlases, maps & charts, and 4) electronic resources. These include items concerning the Lost Franklin Expedition to the Arctic. Queries Gentles has fielded have included, “Who are the decedents of the East India Company, and can I speak with them?”

According to Archivist Susan Gentles, of the 5,000 visitors the Library and Archives enjoys annually, 50% are academic in nature, with the remainder looking for information on family history, or “general interest”.

The objects shared with our class included a beautifully illustrated 1492 Cosmographia by Claudius Ptolemy, the “heavily conserved” Journal of Edward Barlow covering his life at sea from the late seventeenth into the early eighteenth centuries, and Captain of the Titanic, Edward John Smith’s, Master’s Certificate. By “heavily conserved”, this means it had been taken apart and many attempts had been done to rescue it, oftentimes from previous preservation attempts, that they had decided to put the individual pages into inert poly sleeves and “leave it be”.

LuLu, Eunice and I followed up our class with a trek up the hill to the Royal Observatory Greenwich. While I’ve been to the southern most point in the both the continental (Key West, Florida) and the 50 (Ka Lae, Hawaii) States, crossed the Continental Divide numerous times in several US states and Canadian provinces, traversed the Tropic of Cancer three times, and have been to the observatories at the summit of Mauna Kea, this was my first time simultaneously standing in two hemispheres! (for more fun, see Wikipedia’s List of extreme points in the United States. Apologies for the gratuitous use of Wikipedia here. Since this was an “aside”, I figured this is where Wikipedia is considered “useful”.)

4.7 miles/12,500 steps/4 flights climbed

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week Two
Day Eleven: V&A National Art Library
This Place is Lousy with the Renaissance Men!

“This is the best collection in the world for sales catalogs and exhibition catalogs”

Vicky Worsfold, Senior Librarian, Head of Onsite Access at Victoria and Albert Museum

The main difference between the V&A National Art Library and the other libraries we have visited so far is that the V&A (Victoria and Albert) looks at the book as primarily an object, and then as an information source. The V&A Museum itself is first and foremost an institution based around design and manufacturing, and in Victorian fashion, its original purpose was to allow “the working classes” an opportunity to better themselves in the hours they were not working in the shops, factories, or other non-creative endeavors to support themselves and their families.

Not surprisingly, the V&A suffers from many of the same maladies as any other institution; they are running out of space, building maintenance deferment has become an issue to the safety of the collection(s), and they have a backlog in their digitization efforts. No one will ever finish their digitization project(s), it seems. There will never be enough money or time to get it all done unless an institution comes to an unprecedented decision to “go all in” on digitization and fully staff and fund the effort with goals,  timeline, and realistic plan. These are all issues that are at their foundation budgetary in nature. The catalog is never 100% a priority until someone high above decides it is.

The eclectic nature of the collection at the V&A means the library to support it also has a variety of materials, as well. They are among the top 4 art libraries in the world, holding court with the likes of The Getty (Los Angeles), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and The Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris), with one million items in the collection, growing constantly with at least 50 new periodicals every week.

No one probably can escape this tour without a huge sigh and swoon over seeing The First Folio. Yes, Trish. That First Folio. Being in the same room with the likes of this volume is probably something that won’t be repeated in my lifetime. Unless I go back to the V&A National Art Library and BEG. Or make an appointment after signing up for a reader’s card. Then maybe they’d let me see it again. If I had a good enough research topic. But probably not. They were kind enough to show it to us, but this was one volume they requested none of us turn pages, which is common with the rare book collections. Look, but please don’t touch.

We did not get to see the da Vinci notebooks, known as the Codex Forster I, II, & III. Seeing those in addition to The First Folio up close and personal would have personally sent me over the moon. I suppose had I looked in the catalog earlier, I would have known that Codex III is on display in the Wolfson Gallery (Medieval & Renaissance, Room 64). When I go back to do a little pre-departure shopping, I shall pop in for a look. Though assuming it will be under glass it won’t be quite the same as seeing it sitting on a collection sofa in the Library.

4.5 miles/11,700 steps/14 flights climbed

LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums)
MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science)

Week Two
Day Ten: King’s College Maughan Library
A 90 Tonne Cell? Surely He’s Joking??

“The older the book, the less the preservation challenges”

Katie Sambrook, Head of Special Collections, King’s College London

Everywhere in London is an abundance of history. King’s College Maughan Library is no exception. The gorgeous Victorian Neo-Gothic exterior brings gazes ever skyward. That clock tower? That’s not a clock tower. That was for the water reservoir for firefighting. The windows? They are not there to be beautiful and to let in light. They are there to lessen the need for artificial light, which was a fire hazard in 1851 when construction began. England was responding to the burning of the Houses of Parliament in 1834, and fire-proofing new construction was serious, serious business.

This building was not built to be the library, however. It was acquired by King’s College in 2001 and renovated. Its original function was as the Public Records Office. The building was originally a series of “cells” to house the racks of scrolls that were produced as official documents for the realm. The history of site, however, goes back to medieval times and the Knights Templar. There is one remaining partial archway left from the original medieval building that Gift Collections Coordinator, John Wilby, pointed out on our tour of the building exteriors and interiors. Another fun fact is that the original doors to the individual storage cells weighed half a ton, while the rooms themselves, with all the wrought iron racks, slate shelves, and stone walls and floors, each weighed 90 tons. The building contained 300 cells.

The contents of the Foyle Special Collections Library shared with us by Katie Sambrook, Head of Special Collections, and the rest of her team, were quite extraordinary. The signed Charters of the Province of Pennsylvania and City of Philadelphia by B. Franklin, the copy of Thomas Payne’s Common Sense, and the hidden letter in the back cover of a medical text, it’s printed contents overshadowed by the hidden letter to the exiled Jacobite Court.

Katie went into detail about the MARC 21 records for several of the books, and discussed RDA and DCRM(B). (For the non-librarians reading this, skip to the next paragraph. Explaining the alphabet soup of cataloging is something you really don’t want me to do.) We didn’t get into the MARC 21 fields for rare books too much in my cataloging class, and I wonder now how much time Dr. Lesniaski spends on it in his Advanced Cataloging class at St. Kate’s. There is so much here to unpack. 

The Reading Room at The Maughan Library is designed after the Reading Room at the British Museum. Though much smaller, the resemblance cannot be ignored. It is beautiful and awe-inspiring still. It is also one of two zinc ceilings in the building from the original structure. Not for decorative purposes, but again for fire-proofing. Both are painted to appear more decorative than their construction material belies.

3.6 miles/8,400 steps/12 flights climbed