When I was in 8th grade, I was doing a project on a local University and spent a decent amount of time in that institution's library doing research. It was here when I first discovered the Microform. Though off limits to me at the time, I knew that one day in my future as a grown up (barely) , intellectual (sorta), responsible (snicker), college student I might embark on a project so intellectually profound that I would have to resort to using whatever kinds of special data was stored in such a way. Yesterday was that day. As you might have guessed, aside from feeling as if I too had now completed some sort of bizarre right of passage of college students everywhere since our parents graduated, the experience really wasn't too glamorous.
In case you were wondering, a Microform reader looks something like this:
As you can see, the Microform reader is one of those fantastically awkward pieces of technology that came into a shortlived prime right after we perfected the analog computer, but just before fully digital technology was mainstream. No matter how you try to spin it in your head, there really isn't anything too dignifying about sitting in front of a burly, beige piece of equiptment like that and staring at it's oversized, blaring screen. It was a truly ghetto experience. And speaking of the ghetto, they're friggen scary too. Just one little flip of the power switch and the large, blank screen lights up right away as you hear whizzing fans and ancient circuit boards awaken, hungry for tasty young college students.
Indeed, for most of yesterday, I was the microform scanner's bitch. Comically, I had to often resort to manually adjusting the tape, and even putting an entire roll back on the reel when the machine disfuctioned and I ended up surrounded by about five yards of loose film strip, no joke. Thank you 1970s technology, really. Let's not even begin to talk about printing.
But today I mastered the Microfilm reader. Today not only did I demand that its spinning feed wheel do my exact bidding, but I even mastered the art of printing out beautifully contrasted and focused copies (Albeit at the OBNOXIOUS price of $ .15 per page) and assembling them into quality source materials. Hey, you know those hand outs they've been passing out to us for years since grade school? Except for the ones from text books, I think this might be where the rest come from. Who knew?
While I was in the process of scrolling through a reel of materials (FYI: You know you've spent too long studying when you see a really ripped up document and think "Hey, that's really badass!") I couldn't help but think about something else that always occurs to me when I'm in the large, main library at my college. In this specific case it was: where did all these random documents come from and who decided which ones were special enough to go here? More generally: Half of this stuff seems like random junk. Who would have thought that a pamphlet advertising opportunites for women with PhDs at Radcliffe in the 50s would make its way to the shelves of a respectable library alongside encyclopedias, thesises, and novels? 50 years at least before cultural studies and SWAG had probabaly gained any recognition, who bothered to keep it? And 50 years from now, what about our life will, essentially by pure happenstance, find its way to the shelves of our grandkids' schools?
Oh, and here's a fun, Nexusy fact: the microfilm collection I was using was assembled in my old hometown where I lived in middleschool, same zip code and everything. This is significant seeing as, as the blog buddies can vouch for, I used to live in the middle of nowhere with literally nothing but a cornfield and a church. Wonder how that happenned.
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