Oberlin College Libraries Department of Special Collections is hosting a 1.5 day symposium on March 13th and March 14th 2020.  This is the second call for interest.

For registration and a full schedule see here:

The theme of the symposium will focus on building and teaching with material  collections of objects, and will rely primarily on the holdings and spaces of our own Special Collections and College Archives. Our intended audience is targeted at those who support small liberal arts and special mission colleges with limited financial and collections resources. We seek to convene librarians, curators, and archivists from around the region and the country with an interest in exploring and enhancing objects-based pedagogy on their campuses.

In the last decade Oberlin College Libraries have invested heavily in building collections of textual and visual media that allow students to interact kinetically with crafts such as papermaking, calligraphy and manuscript decoration, printing, binding, and pre-cinematic visual media. We supplement the Class interactions take the form of demonstrations, labs, creative work, and January intensives.

The underlying question many of us have been more quietly asking concerns the changing nature of Special Collections Departments and staff in the liberal arts setting. Our feedback from faculty and students at Oberlin has been very encouraging, so we're offering to reach out to others to network, and help us share ideas and stories.

Feel free to use your own personal networks to share this message with colleagues who you think might be interested in joining us. 

For more information about the symposium, or just to share thoughts, please contact me personally at: [log in to unmask]