Making the best of pandemic era conditions, the Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s (RBML) Sean Quimby announced via Zoom that he’ll be leaving the directorship at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library for a new post at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s accepted the role of Associate University Librarian for Special Collections and Director […]
Going to Columbia While Living At Home
President Bollinger stated in his fall term update that while the surges of the pandemic continue, we “must drastically scale back the number of students we can accommodate in residence on campus.” Columbia has not always been a residential college and, in fact, one of Bollinger’s predecessors believed strongly in students staying at home. […]
Teaching With Digitized Archives, Some Challenges and Opportunities
Over the past several decades libraries around the world have spent enormous amounts of resources digitizing unique special collections. At latest count, the Digital Public Library of America contains more than 40 million documents. As instructors plan for remote learning, this wealth of digitized archival material presents an opportunity to teach students about archival research […]
News from RBML’s Archivists | July 2020
Kevin Schlottmann, RBML’s head archivist, shares these updates about finding aids that our archivist and collections management specialists converted from scanned PDF documents to more accessible digital use. The materials described offer a glimpse into the broad and deep collections that the RBML stewards. Also highlighted are examples of the other archival processing work, such […]
The Malleable Academic Calendar: Then and Now
The 2020-2021 academic calendar includes some changes adopted to address the COVID-19 outbreak. This is not the first time that Columbia’s class schedules have yielded to health and national emergencies. […]