On Wednesday, October 28th, SJSU ALASC hosted a tour of the prestigious Huntington Library located in Los Angeles County. Nineteen iSchool students attended the tour and got an amazing look inside how one of the largest research libraries in the United States operates. As the Program Outreach Coordinator, I feel very fortunate to have gotten the opportunity to host this event. Follow me as I recap some of the amazing behind-the-scenes things we were privileged to see!
Here are some of us standing in front of the Munger Research Center where the tour began. The center is the newest addition to the Library structure -adding 90,000 square feet of additional space for scholars and staff, preservation, conservation, and storage!
Once inside we got to peek inside the reading room, wander the stacks, and examine the Huntington’s card catalog – which they still use!
We also got to view some of the rare items in the Huntington Library’s special collections. The library has some of the finest rare books and manuscripts of Anglo-American civilization. Altogether, there are about 6 million items!
Perhaps the best part of the tour was looking at American Civil War correspondence, coded telegraphs, and the code books used to decode the secret messages.
Even more exciting is the Huntington Library needs your help! In May 2016 they are teaming up with Zooniverse, a crowd-sourcing website, to utilize citizen archivists to decode and decipher the 15,922 Civil War telegrams in their collection of the Thomas T. Eckert Papers. By crowd-sourcing this effort, the collection will be transcribed and processed with greater efficiency and accuracy than could be done by the limited staff at participating institutions. Learn more and discover how you can take part here.
That concludes our tour! Thanks to all our wonderful tour guides. I really enjoyed learning more about the Huntington Library and meeting fellow iSchool students. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more great events with SJSU ALASC.
-Stefa Witt
Program Outreach Coordinator
