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Scholars! Academics! Friends! If you love print culture and book history, perhaps the single most effective thing you can do personally to foster & pass on that knowledge is to encourage your students to engage physically with local special collections — especially in person.
This is a tall order in a pandemic, and many institutions have struggled to join the dots between physical holdings and virtual usage. This will tend to leave the EEBOs and ECCOs of the world better off at the direct expense of local collections.
The databases are wonderful tools, and naturally we are all in awe of what the most well-heeled institutions can do with substantial resources. But it is also sad to contemplate a world in which only large & prestigious libraries are valued.
Perhaps, for example, you might be interested in a virtual class visit to a repository. Is there one on campus which might be able to help? Do you know? Are you familiar with their holdings and expertise? If not, this might be a good time to find out!
Some of this may require us to re-organise our thinking and teaching somewhat. Without wishing to go back to the "bad old days" of ONLY having access to local collections, what does it mean for our teaching and course designed to be shaped and informed by local context?
What does it mean to work directly with a local special collections? How might those partnerships look? How might they grow & sustain students over time? How might they offer a contrast to the episodic & extractive model of text engagement databases are designed to facilitate?
We have a certain ulterior motive in promulgating this vision, of course: users who struggle to situate texts in a material context are unlikely to bring informed & critical perspectives to the resource allocation challenges which threaten print collections all over the world.
Even more so, there is much good in encouraging people to contemplate the labour of human hands and human minds, the ingenuity & tragedy which underwrites human endeavours, or the long & often capricious chains of events which lead old books to new hands. Start where you are!
