Mea culpa - a change in course

Well, it has been EIGHT MONTHS since my last blog post. Clearly, I'm not too good at keeping up on this blog. Since that is the case, I'm going to try something different. I'm going to post about projects I've done instead of trying to give a monthly update.

For this post, I'll just give a rundown of some things I did over the past 8 months. It was a very busy year. Here's a quick list of some of the things I did:
Accessions

• Worked with HokiePRIDE on the donation of their records to Special Collections.
  HokiePRIDE is a student group that supports those with diverse sexualities and genders. As part of some changes in official university support for community and cultural groups, they lost their office and their records storage space. I worked with them to preserve their records by transferring them to the archives. In the next year, I'll work to process these records so they are available and usable.
• Erotica?
  I was asked to review 3 separate sets of erotica for possible purchase by Special Collections. It was an interesting task. The first included some truly rare items of lesbian pulp erotica along with some other rare volumes. The others also included some items that don't exist in many places. While the items were unique and potentially useful for certain educational programs, I ultimately didn't see how they aligned with our collecting priorities. We ended up buying them anyway - I suppose their rarity and the relationship with the vendor were more important in this case than direct alignment with our collecting priorities. Now, we just need to get researchers interested in using them!
• RFD Magazine and Unite Virginia Magazine.
  Thanks to a couple of fortuitous discoveries, I discovered RFD Magazine and Unite Virginia Magazine. These two publications are LGBTQ+ focused and have relevance to SouthWest Virginia, rural living, and/or other collecting focuses for our department. We added all back issues of Unite Virginia and are working on getting as many back issues of RFD as possible.
  

Presentations and Profiles

• Safe Zone: LGBTQ+ and the Media.
  I developed and co-taught a new session for the Safe Zone program at Virginia Tech. This session examined the historic depictions of LGBTQ+ people in US television and film from 1895 to 2017. This was partly something I did because of my personal interest in the topic and partly my project for the Diversity Ambassador certificate through the Diversity Development Institute at Virginia Tech.
• Diversity Alliance for Academic Librarianship Institute.
  I helped plan a two-day institute focused on job search and interview skills for the first cohort of residents in the Diversity Alliance for Academic Librarianship (yep - my own program). As part of this, I did a mock-interview presentation about implementing postcustodial participatory community archives at Virginia Tech.
  
• Conference presentations.
  I presented at a number of conferences including ACRL, MARAC, and VLACRL.
• Profiles.
  I was profiled by both the ALA GLBT Round Table and the ACRL Residency Interest Group. Being profiled was intimidating and a thrill. I don't personally think I'm all that interesting but I was asked, so I agreed.

Exhibits

• Timeless Words Fighting Injustice: Revisiting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham City Jail.
  For this exhibit, I mentored a student worker as she selected an item from the archives to highlight for Black History Month. She selected Dr. King's letter and chose quotes to highlight. I then did some layout work to create large museum-style panels showing scans of the document highlighting the quotes chosen by the student.​
• Communities of Caring: Community Expressions of Support in Response to the Events of April 16, 2017.
  I curated a digital exhibit for the 10th anniversary of the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech. Sadly, I didn't have the time or resources to take high-quality scans and photos of the archival materials. So, the exhibit uses existing digital images. Still, I feel honored to have been able to contribute to this important commemoration. The exhibit can be found here: http://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/exhibits/show/april16
• LGBTQ+ History at Virginia Tech exhibit.
  For PRIDE Week 2017, HokiePRIDE asked me to put together an exhibit of materials about LGBTQ+ history at Virginia Tech. I curated an exhibit about the history of LGBTQ+ student organizations at Virginia Tech for them.

Well, that's a quick rundown of what I've been up to. I'll be posting shortly about one other event that happened recently: Cogito Ergo Chuckles: "I Think, Therefore I Cackle".