Class - September 23rd (Assignment 2 - Literature Review)

This week's assignment was not exactly what I expected. I really thought that it would be a rather easy and straight forward affair. However, it really wasn't. It took me much longer than I thought it would. While the different areas were well marked out, for some of the topics I would first have to go to the library encyclopedia that St. Kate's has access to in order to confirm what the topics were. I also found things that I hadn't expected when searching different topics. When I was looking up an article for Digital Preservation I found a great article that described the overall way preservation techniques and how it has developed. Which is rather good since I was having a hard time finding an article otherwise. It's not like typing the search term "Preservation" or "library preservation" into a search engine will get me what I wanted. There were WAY too many articles. I started to feel like a failure for a librarian. I should be able to find a simple article! Of course I did find it when I wasn't actually looking for that topic....Otherwise the major issue I was having was finding things no older than 2007. Occasionally I would forget to limit my search and then I would find the perfect article, and it would be from 2001 or from 1998. How annoying. In the end the assignment did allow me to look at a lot of different articles and learn how many aspects there are to so many topics withing the umbrella topic of 'Preservation'.

Class on Sept 23rd was interesting . The "rainy day story" was especially enlightening. I personally understand exactly why you would save items by freezing them, but I don't know if I would have immediately thought of it. Of course it was not a surprise me that the food service people wanted their freezer back after a couple weeks. It was especially interesting that you could use a freezer to dry books. I can see how this would take a really long time and would not be that easy, but for specialty items its a good way to help the items dry out. It makes me wonder about any other short-cuts or random ways that can be used to save books in emergency situations. Hopefully we will hear more in the future!