University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries Magazine | Page 12

Special Collections and Undergraduate Teaching
By Robin Rider
Curator of Special Collections

“Many of these
visits to Special
Collections
involve a wow
factor—‘I had
no idea the
library had
such books’
—and infectious
curiosity.”

12 | LIBRARIES Fall 2015

The idea of Special Collections as the
exclusive preserve of established scholars
has long been out of date: we have for many
years done much teaching from our holdings
to undergraduate as well as graduate classes.
In the past dozen years or so, however, the
focus has shifted decisively to undergraduate
class sessions and assignments that promote
student engagement with primary sources
and the wide range of questions they raise.
Students in Professor Lee Wandel’s
European history survey course, for example,
regularly come in during their discussion
sections to use Diderot and d’Alembert’s
massive Encyclopédie, in which they
see firsthand the scale of this collective
enterprise. Professor Wandel wrote about
the experience in the 2008 issue of this
magazine. As with many other classes, these
sessions give students the opportunity to
examine the results of printing with movable
type and person-powered presses and to
reflect on the market for printed books prior
to industrialization. In class sessions led by
Monica Ledesma in fall semester 2014,
the large engravings of crafts and trades,
a noteworthy feature of the Encyclopédie,
helped open up lively discussions of the
organization of labor and technological
innovation in the decades before the
French Revolution.
Professor Joshua Calhoun of
the English Department is an
enthusiastic partner in encouraging
undergraduates to use the resources
of Special Collections. Kaydian
Campbell and Emily Loney, teaching
assistants for Calhoun’s large
Shakespeare course, have just
recently brought their sections to

the Department,
asking students
to look for—and
talk about—
something
interesting (or
puzzling) in early
printed books,
from monstrous
creatures in
the Nuremberg
Chronicle to
alternate
renderings of
Shakespeare’s
texts in our
copy of the
Second Folio and later editions. The long “s”
of the period (which strongly resembles a
lowercase “f”) always gets students’ attention,
but with practice they get beyond it and find
themselves able to navigate 17th-century
books with relative ease.
In a recent class session in Special
Collections on dictionaries (for English 100,
taught by Richard Ness), students were asked
to compare definitions of the same word in a
variety of dictionaries, ranging from a “Table
alphabeticall” to aid in the “understanding of
hard usuall English wordes” (1604) to Samuel
Johnson’s magisterial dictionary of the mid18th century. Despite centuries of readers,
their sturdy bindings and handmade rag
paper allow us to talk about the durability of
early printed books as a critical technology
for information management. Early editions
of Webster’s American dictionary of the English
language, alongside rather bawdy lexicons of
“university wit and pickpocket eloquence,”
speak to related questions of audience and
publishing models.

For her undergraduate course on the
Scientific Revolution of the 16th–18th
centuries, Professor Florence Hsia of the
History of Science Department has prepared
worksheets tailored to our editions of and
commentaries on a late medieval astronomy
textbook, Sacrobosco’s On the Sphere, and
carefully guided her st Ց