It is almost time to sign up for this year’s A. Dean Larsen Book Collecting Conference. The web site and registration page should be live in a few days. You can learn more about past conferences at http://lib.byu.edu/sites/sc/events-news/book-conference/

Imagine if you could choose anything from the vaults under the library. That is just what the curators of the L. Tom Perry Special Collections have done to fill the cases in their new exhibition “Discovering Special Collections.”

A first edition book of Mormon, a program from the premier of the movie “King Kong,” and a declaration of war from Japan are just a few of the items you can now see on level 3 of the library.

The exhibition is located just inside the library doors (near the eastern security desk) and it is open during all library hours. The public is welcome and admission is free.

Now, when you enter the library and you see someone wearing purple you can ask them for help.

Thanks to our model, Athens, the library’s service dog in training.

The library wants to hear your input on our new search tool Scholarsearch. Tell us what you think about it. What do you like? Are you having any trouble? Could something be better? Has it helped you find something new?

Send your feedback to libfeedback@byu.edu. In a few weeks, at the end of the semester, we’ll collect all the submissions and hold a drawing for an iPod Shuffle!

If you could choose anything in a library to share with others what would you pick? Would it be an ancient scroll with a map of a curious mine in Asia? Would it be a rare illuminated manuscript created in the middle ages? Or would you look for a handwritten document by Oliver Cowdrey? Or perhaps you would choose something more modern like a Hollywood film script or combat photographs from the Korean War.

This December the curators of the L. Tom Perry Special Collections are going to pick their favorite items from the vaults under the Harold B. Lee Library. They will display those items in the library’s exhibit space on level 3 as the final exhibition marking the library building’s 50^th anniversary. The exhibition will be titled “Exploring Special Collections.” It will replace the “Mormon Migration” exhibition that is currently in the exhibition space.

The level 3 exhibition space is open during all regular library hours. The public is invited and admission is free.

Have you found something unique or interesting in the Perry Special Collections – records, photographs, sound recordings, books, or other materials – that has influenced your research (both personal and professional)?

We encourage you to submit either:

• A 400-word essay describing your quest for information and explaining why finding the information has made a difference for you, along with a color photograph of yourself, or
• A video of no more than 2 minutes in which you describe your quest for information and explain why finding the information has made a difference for you.

A maximum of 5 finalists in each category of the contest will have their videos and essays posted online for a public vote.  The finalists with the most votes will each receive a behind-the-scenes tour of the Perry Special Collections and a $100 BYU Campus gift card.  Runners-up will also receive prizes.

Entries will be accepted between October 31 and November 28, 2011.  To learn more about the I Found It In the Archives Contest and how to submit entries, please visit the contest website at http://lib.byu.edu/sites/sc/events-news/i-found-it-in-the-archives-contest/.

Life online is a jumble. E-mail, tweets, instant messages, news, sound bites, video clips, blogs, status updates, rush before our eyes.

Printed books offer an escape. You know what a book is when you pick it up. You know that the words you start reading will be the words you finish reading. They will be the same words you can go back to when you need a quote or to refresh an idea. A book doesn’t update. It doesn’t rotate out of the cycle on your screen. It doesn’t disappear when it is twenty-four hours old. New books don’t force it down the queue.

Almost a century ago, H. A. Calahan wrote about learning to sail*. He argued that you can never “find the world of waters” in a motor boat because a motor boat “carries part of the shore with it.” The engine, the fuel, the vibration, the noise of a machine tie you to shore and interrupt your connection to the water. His argument resonates with the change from print to digital reading. You can never really bond with a book when you read electronically. You are always reliant on the machine. You can’t see ahead. You have the worries of battery power and signal strength. You know in the back of your head that a system manager may reach out and delete your content. Or an alert will interrupt your screen just when you are integrating some new idea into your way of thinking.

We know that books are bulky and slow. You can’t search a book in a few clicks. At best you can refer to an index. But when you do learn what a book contains you know you can rely on it.

When you read a book you are alone. You are not connected to a server or a network. It is just you and the author’s words. You have to rely on your own knowledge and experiences to evaluate the worth of the ideas on the pages you turn. You have to imagine the images the author worked to share with you with no help from stock Images. You have to work a little harder to understand everything, but you gain the satisfaction of knowing that you do understand everything. You didn’t just follow a link to a definition that you will forget by the time you device loads a new screen.

Books are expensive. Trees must be cut down and pulped. Paper must be made in vast dedicated factories. Editors and publishers must invest their time to select books they value. Printers use steel and electricity and ink to transform nature into ideas. All of that work helps to ensure that a good book was worthy of the effort for it to find its way to a reader.

Modern technology has, we admit, reduced the value of the book. It is easier to print a book today than ever before. You enter some content into your computer along with your credit card number and 10 days later a printed bound book arrives at your door. But the great books of the past still hold sway and new books continue to bring us new ideas.

Our library, like many modern libraries, provides electronic access to databases, journals, and e-books. So much content that no one person could ever read it all. We are happy to do so because it supports our scholarly community. But we also want to invite you to take some time and experience a real book from time to time.

Emily Dickinson said “There is no frigate like a book, To take us lands away…” And with that we see the difference between print and digital. Print can take us away while digital brings everything to us. If we want to find new things we must take the time to look beyond where we already are.

Photo: BYU-Hawaii Collection, Call Number PH 2.003, Photographer Bryant, Edward K., Title “Native people on a canoe in the ocean,” ca 1940.

*Learning to sail
Calahan, H. A. (Harold Augustin), b. 1889.
Personal Author:     Calahan, H. A. (Harold Augustin), b. 1889.
Title:     Learning to sail.
Edition statement:     New ed., with supplementary chapter.
Publication info:     New York, The Macmillan company, 1937 [c1933].
Physical description:     xxii p., 1 l., 345 p. incl. front., illus., diagrs. ; 20 cm.
Subject term:     Sailing.
LCCN:     33035388

Holdings
HBLL
Copy     Material     Location
GV 811 .C3 1937     1     Book     Harold B. Lee Library Bookshelves

BYU’s Bethanne Andersen was chosen to create the illustrations for a new children’s book  titled Louisa: The Life of Louisa May Alcott. The book was written by Yona Zeldis McDonough and published by Henry Holt & Co (ISBN 9780805081923). This week many of the original illustrations from the book go on display in the Springville Museum of Art. And thanks to the efforts of our own Maggie Kopp, Curator of Rare Books in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections, the exhibition will include examples of Alcott’s lesser known works as well as facsimiles of handwritten documents held in the library’s vaults.

Of course the library has a copy of the book available in our juvenile collections as well as a copy in Special Collections. By the way, the L. Tom Perry Special Collections have the second largest collection of Alcott materials after the Orchard House in Concord, Mass.