Wednesday, June 22, 2011

General Update (aka Busy is Good, Right?)

Whoof. Where does the time go? I'm back in Portland now for a couple weeks during the RBS break weeks (and avoiding, for good or ill, the RBMS and ALA conferences in Baton Rouge and New Orleans).

The remainder of the first RBS session as well as the second week went swimmingly. I was tremendously pleased to assist David Pearson with his Provenance: Tracing Owners & Collections class, which was really well received by the students. They got to do some really neat work with books from both the RBS and UVA Special Collections holdings, so if you are at all interested in provenance research, keep this class on your list. The week's other classes also went well, though I didn't get a chance to see much of them.

I can't remember now if I mentioned it or not, but the full schedule of this summer's RBS lecture series is now up: they begin anew with Selby Kiffer's well-timed talk on 4 July "Printing the Declaration of Independence - and Selling It."

On Sunday I came back to Portland and have been working on settling in in the new apartment, at last. I still have loads of books to unpack (in fact they're all still in the boxes), and will try to finally get something written up about the whole moving process in the near future. And of course I've been back LibraryThing full time this week; we've been able to get out some new features and are moving ahead with some that will be really exciting for the ongoing Libraries of Early America project, among other things. One nifty new thing is a "what should you borrow?" feature, showing books one LibraryThing members might be interested in from another's library. Check out Jefferson and Adams ...