What have you been finding in your collections lately? What is inspiring you? Cleaning out some map cases we came across rolls of posters that hand once been in buildings across campus. Treated by the wizards in Conservation, those rolls revealed these:
I was struck by their design. The sentiments of a war captured in three colors.
A new collection related to the telegraph brought in these:
I like to imagine the news that was once delivered by the local telegraph messenger – news of war, marriages, and births floating across telegraph wires (that you can still see along old railroad lines) and arriving in dots and dashes. There was one pamphlet from the 1950s that predicted where the telegraph would be in 100 years and I couldn’t help but think of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and other modern technology that will some day seem as quaint as these telegraph labels.
A day after Valentine’s, it seemed appropriate to say that one of things I love most about my job is that it makes me feel like a link on a very long chain, one that connects the cuneiform tablets snuggled safely in their boxes to the collection of punk zines that arrived last week. And it it my lucky job to preserve them.