Week 5: And By 1980, We'll Have Permanent Colonies on the Moon...

The past week was a pretty quiet one for me, internship-wise (when it came to one of my jobs, it was absolutely insane!). One Monday, I got to sit in on a meeting with a student and professor from the English Dept. (if I'm not mistaken) who are working on putting together an online exhibit about Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Becky showed them some of the things that showed up in IUCAT (the school's online catalog) that might be useful, as well as giving them some suggestions of manuscript collections to explore. One of the funniest things we came across, however, were the subject headings for one copy of A Christmas Carol that we looked at on IUCAT. For those who do not know, subject headings are words or phrases attached to books and other items in catalogs to help users find works on certain topics. And I think we can all think of some obvious possible headings for A Christmas Carol, such as ghosts and maybe, I dunno, Christmas. Here were the three headings that showed up in the record:

• Poor families
• Crippled children
• Misers

Yup. We had looked at these before the professor showed up, and when we told her about them she started laughing. It was pretty awesome. One of the things Becky told them that I will do my best to keep in mind for my exhibit (though it may be difficult) is that people respond better to images than words in exhibits. Illustrations, book covers, that sort of thing. I really enjoy getting to sit in on these meetings. The more I work with Becky, the more I realize that she knows more about the collections at the Lilly then just about anyone else. It never ceases to impress me.

I also got to pull some items for another class presentation and sit in on the class. It was a class in what I believe is called Hispanic and Portuguese Studies. It was a history class, and they were particularly interested in the conquest and post-conquest in Latin America. It was fabulous to listen to the students look at and touch documents that have survived for hundreds of years. They are all in such awe. It pleases me that undergraduates can still be impressed by these things. And some of them were actually asking intelligent questions about how old these things were and what they were written on and made out of. I think that I will cry the day that we cease to be in awe of these types of items. Here's hoping it doesn't happen in my life time.

I spent the rest of the week looking through items for my exhibit. I've still been doing some work with Boucher's writings. He interviewed a whole group of science fiction writers for a round table to be published in Playboy, and I began looking through some of those documents on Friday. I have a great deal of respect for science fiction writers and the things that they can come up with, but reading about their predictions for the future was sometimes hysterically funny. These interviews took place in 1963, so years before Apollo 11 brought the first men to the moon. One of the writers correctly predicted that we would have landed on the moon by 1970, but then the next obvious step was that we would have permanent stations and such on the moon by 1980. If only. There were also some interesting discussions of sex in the future, which naturally included sex with aliens (one person had some interesting speculations about sex involving telepathy). But there was also an interesting discussion of whether nationalism and national boundaries would be carried into space. Some said yes, some said no. Well, there's an American flag on the moon, but we now have an international space station. So, I guess we have a bit of both, but I'm glad to see that we seem to be moving in the less-nationalistic direction. There were also tons of other things, but I really shouldn't go on about this forever.

So, I should be talking the Becky about my concept for the exhibit this week, and I will probably have my usual routine of reference questions and exhibit work. And now that the last week of insanity for one of my paying jobs is out of the way, the rest of the semester should be smooth sailing!