Weeks 8 & 9: Westerns and Science Fiction Totally Go Together, Right?

The past few weeks I finished up the work on my exhibit.  I finished writing my labels, and Becky made a few comments but approved them.  I was given my own shelf and a half in the stacks to place my materials until the exhibit can go up (which ought to be in the Spring semester).  I am very pleased with how the process went, and I cannot wait to see it on display.  Writing the labels was difficult, but I think I managed to make them interesting and informative without having them be too insanely long.  I decided to do a few longer narrative labels instead of having individual labels for each item.  Each author and each theme has a label.  I hope that successfully provide useful overviews of each author's work that can be appreciated by both sci-fi fans and non-fans alike.  The other weekend, my parents came to visit and in addition to seeing some of the exciting items in the collection (such as the Oscar you can now see me holding on the blog sidebar), I also showed them some of the items that will be in my exhibit, as well as items I like but didn't think fit into the exhibit thematically.  They were duly impressed :)

Last week, after I moved my items, Becky decided that, in addition to returning to some reference duties, I could start to help her with an exhibit on John Ford's films that she is curating for the spring.   IU is opening a new film center in January (assuming it doesn't get delayed) and this exhibit will go along with that.  Working with the Ford manuscript collection has been a lot of fun.  My favorite part is looking through the movie stills we have, though the print materials we have are fun, too.  A few of my favorite items are the notices about foreign release and censorship.  Apparently, there were a few complaints from abroad that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance being in black and white hurt its marketability.  The one comment speculated that it was probably for financial reasons, though everything I've read since said that it was a stylistic choice on Ford's part, and one that he had to fight for.  There were also a few letters relating to the fact that Stagecoach's story did not fit well with the Production Code.  Apparently, nice prostitutes and sympathetic revenge killings are bad...

As much as I enjoyed working on my own exhibit, it has been nice to get back to doing some reference work.  One question which Dave passed along to me was from a man coming to do some research on extraterrestrial intelligence, both in non-fiction and fiction.  Finding materials for him was fun.  I was pleased with some of the cool non-fiction items I found, and I hope he enjoys working with them.  I am glad that this internship has confirmed that I enjoy doing reference work (at least, online reference work).  Even if I'm doing something potentially tedious, like pulling items to scan for patrons, I get to go into the stacks and work with the collections, which is always fun.