Bringing Bibliography to an Online Classroom
As it is common knowledge at this point, a pandemic hit the world in late 2019-early 2020. Plans were interrupted and significant changes had to be made in order to transfer daily life into the online realm. One such incident occurred to a friend of mine who was finishing up a Doctorate degree at the University of Texas and teaching an upper division French literature course, entitled 'Crisis and Conflict'. On the syllabus, he had scheduled a day to utilize the university's excellent archival collection housed at the Harry Ransom Center to introduce his students to using primary source material for the purpose of research. However, the archival staff member with whom he was organizing this lesson was not able to fulfill the session as the institution figured out its response to the shut down.
When I heard about this cancellation, I offered my services to throw together an online exhibit using Omeka and teach the class for the day! I had to use books that were either in my personal collection, or already digitized by various institutions. I had the instructor send me his class syllabus so that I could tailor the material to literature and time periods that the students were already learning about, while introducing basic areas of book-as-object study such as provenance, publishing history and binding techniques.
This was excellent practice for brushing up my Omeka skills, as well as a crash course in online instruction. One of the hardest parts of this was figuring out how to balance topics I tend to focus on when talking books that may be more visual and tactile like binding structure and paper quality, with topics that are easier to exhibit online through a more lectured format. It also was difficult to boil down all the knowledge and love of the subject into a single hour for beginners. I left the exhibit up online for students to refer back to and explore each item with more depth if anything caught their attention. I included some extra information features that a bibliographer may find notable within the description, to lead the students along in their individual exploration after the class. At risk of some embarrassment, I do have a recording of the class available to send anyone who is interested!
