Prof. Joshua Calhoun of the Department of English showing a Special Collections book to his students. Photo by Kevin Boettcher.
We welcome undergraduate and graduate classes. We can put together a sampler of relevant books and other materials for a class session, or work with instructors to select items for more detailed examination. We can also offer suggestions about assignments involving use of Special Collections holdings.
We will schedule a class session using Special Collections materials in our own seminar room (984 Memorial Library), equipped with wireless access, laptop, projector, screen, and object camera. Because the room is often in use, please give us as much notice as possible.
The seminar room is designed best to accommodate groups of fewer than 25. For practical reasons, we need in general to break a class larger than that into smaller groups to look at Special Collections materials; in some cases, it may be possible to arrange for multiple sections to visit Special Collections, each at its appointed time slot. Please confer with us about options.
Those who use the Special Collections seminar room will need to put coats in the cloakroom and book bags, purses, backpacks, etc. in the free lockers available for this purpose. Only laptops, tablets, smartphones, pencils, notes and notebooks, and textbooks may be brought into the seminar room. No food or drink, please.
With the aid of an overhead color scanner appropriate for Special Collections materials — and sufficient advance notice — we can also create small online exhibits for your classes. Examples are
- our editions of Sacrobosco’s On the Sphere and his commentators
- sample images from the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert.