She Blinded Me with Library Science!

After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions

I found this exhibit entirely by accident. It all started because there is no air conditioning in the Natural History Museum, and I was there on a particularly stuffy day. I was a sweaty mess, and I at least wanted to go to my interview not looking like I'd just run a marathon. I happened across a hallway beyond the dinosaur exhibit that wasn't as crowded as the rest of the museum. It turned out there was a special exhibit tucked away back there, and very few people were in it because you had to pay £5 to get in. I noticed it was something related to Darwin AND it was air conditioned, and they couldn't keep me out!

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In 1872, Darwin published his last major work, a book called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In it, he identified several different ways in which both humans and non-human animals express emotions. He thought that emotions were universal, that "...the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements."  It was also the first study to use photographs as scientific evidence.

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The exhibit itself was actually a gallery of art inspired by Darwin's work on emotions. One of my favorite rooms in the exhibit was a circular room with pictures from the book that represent Darwin's original list of 24 different emotions. Below each picture, Mark Haddon (author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and A Spot of Bother) wrote a paragraph-long short story about that emotion. I love Mark Haddon, and the stories were just short enough to read all of them. 

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There was also a silent movie projecting on the walls outside the circular room. Well, I call it a movie, but it was really just raw footage of a team of scientists working and bonding with gorillas. 

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A fun addition to the exhibit was hidden away in a small dark room off to one side. As you pass the entrance to the exhibit in the main part of the museum, there is a large mirror with a picture of a chimpanzee next to it. The sign with the picture encourages people to try and make a face into the mirror to resemble the chimp. You can see where this is going, right? Once you're inside the exhibit, you realize this is a two-way mirror and you can watch people make ridiculous faces from inside! Fun.

Even though I'm not really a super artsy person, I really enjoyed this exhibit. Sometimes I feel like people get so bogged down in the controversy surrounding Darwin and his theory of natural selection, they forget he did other things. It's really nice to see other people's takes on his descriptions of the human emotions.

All photos from the Contemporary Expression website.

Natural History Museum and Library

Finally, after a month of visiting other libraries and thinking about my Darwin project, I had a free day to visit London's Natural History Museum and Library! I made it there around 11:00 because I wanted to look around for a few hours before my appointment with the zoology librarian, Paul Cooper. (Hi Paul!)

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As you can see, the line was... substantial. The main line for the front door was at least 1.5 hours long. Luckily, I found a super-secret (not really) side entrance with a much shorter wait, about 20 minutes! 

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I can't even describe how great this place was! I could've easily spent a whole day there. I didn't even get to see the dinosaur exhibit, since that exhibit had its own line and I was running short on time. I was mostly in search of their Darwin stuff, and there was plenty to see. There is a life-size statue of Darwin on the landing of the big main staircase, and there is even a whole Darwin store! I bought a plush Darwin.

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Have I mentioned that Darwin is on the £10 note? Observe:

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I of course made my way to investigate the exhibit on salamanders. It wasn't that extensive, but they had the important stuff!

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The building (designed by Alfred Waterhouse) that houses the museum is well known for its stunning architecture. It opened in 1881, and many of its features were built with nature and natural history in mind. For example, most of the ceiling tiles have elaborate pictures of plants or animals on them. 

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In one area, there are stone monkeys on the walls, and I found one that looks like Darwin! I doubt this was intentional, but since Origin of Species would've been hot stuff when it was designed and built, it's tough to say for sure. You can see it, right? Unfocus your eyes a little. See? It's like it has a little beard and everything!

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For comparison:

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At 2:00, I made my way to the library for my interview with Paul Cooper. First, I had to sign up for a reader's card, which made a nifty souvenir (wee plush Darwin is holding it in the picture above). Then I was taken through a maze of hallways hidden from the public and delivered to Paul's desk in the corner of a reading room. We talked for well over an hour (Paul's generosity knows no bounds!), and covered many of the same topics that other librarians have talked to use about. The library is run by the Department of Culture, Sports, and Media, so it is subject to the same budgetary pressures as the V&A National Art Library. Paul's daily duties consist of a mix of staffing the inquiry desk, answering email queries, and special projects such as digitizing some older items. He has also occasionally traveled for the library, escorting rare or special materials. We joked about his metal briefcase handcuffed to his wrist with rare scientific documents inside!

There are several cataloging issues the library is facing. Some parts of the collection are catalogued using different systems. There are also some journals that are not fully catalogued, but the 200 million items have been in an automated catalog system since 1989. 

In addition to our little chat, Paul was also kind enough to pull some Darwin-related materials for me to peruse. These were great, and I intend to use the materials he showed me in my Darwin paper, but they were overshadowed by some other things that happened. When Paul gave me the materials (a first edition of Origin of Species! Darwin's correspondence!), I sate down at a table with an older gentleman. He greeted me, I said hello, that was that. After a few minutes, he got up and told Paul he had a brief meeting to attend with the library director, and he would return in a few minutes. Once he got up, I saw what he'd been looking at: a box with the words "ORIGIN OF SPECIES, ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT, 5 SHEETS" on it. Do you know what that means? That means that there were 5 sheets of Darwin's original handwritten draft in that box! This is like the holy grail for an evolutionary biologist/librarian such as myself! Paul allowed me to touch it, and I think he laughed a little at me for being so excited.

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Even more exciting: it turns out that the man who'd been using the manuscript was Randal Keynes, one of Darwin's great-great-grandchildren!

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Overall? Not a bad afternoon.  :)

(Picture of Mr. Keynes from this website.)

Oh, the cleverness of me!

Brittany and I got back to London on Monday, and on Tuesday, several of us went to see a performance of Peter Pan!

Peter Pan is my absolute favorite children's story. I love that every time I read it, I get a completely different message from it; it always seems to have been written just for me and whatever I have going on in my life. A statue to the original tale is found in Kensington Gardens.

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The play itself was inside a play in the middle of the gardens,  not far from the statue. It was a big white tent, and didn't look that impressive from the outside. However, once we got inside, it was a whole different story. They used the white canvas ceiling of the tent to project scenery on so that the flying scenes were the coolest special effect I've ever seen! I only got one picture of the stage before the show started, but Google found some nice ones; first one is from here, second is from here, third one is mine!

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A couple of days later, we went to see Wicked. We booked the tickets several weeks in advance, so I bought and read the book to prepare. Wicked was quite the experience, but very different from the book. The book obviously contains a lot more detail and back story, but they also added a love triangle from nowhere. They made it so that several plot elements tied neatly together in the end, but I thought it was all just a bit too... neat. The book was definitely the witch's story, but the musical was more of Glinda's story. Not bad, just very different from the book! 

(First picture is from here, second is from here.)

Ireland!

After Scotland, Brittany and I flew to Dublin for our mini-break. We had to get up at about 4:30 in the morning to make it to our flight, but the flight only cost £1, so it was worth it. We arrived in Dublin pretty early, which was actually not that great since we couldn't check into our hotel yet and we were sleep deprived. We walked around for an hour or two until the lunch places opened, ate some fish and chips, and then finally got into our hotel room and took a serious nap. This hotel room was, shall we say, hilariously tiny. You actually had to put your toiletries in the sink because there was no room to have them in the shower with you! I think I preferred my bitsy London dorm room. That afternoon, we finally got up and walked around Dublin a little. It's a very walkable city so we managed to see a lot even though it was kind of late and things were closing. Of course, our first stop was the Trinity College Library to see the famous Book of Kells. They didn't allow pictures inside, but I've found some through the magic of the internet. (First picture is from here, second is from here.)

The book was gorgeous, and I could've spent the rest of the weekend just hanging out in that library, but we had to see other stuff! We also saw the Dublin Castle, River Liffey, St. Stephen's Green, and St. Patrick's Cathedral.

We got up early the next morning and walked the two blocks to get on our three day bus tour. We went with Paddywagon Tours, which I highly recommend. Dublin is on the east coast of Ireland, about halfway down, and our first leg of the trip took us due west to the opposite coast. We stopped in the almost-exact center of Ireland at the ancient monastery Clonmacnoise. It's home to loads of those giant Celtic crosses. 

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I will admit that up until about this point in the trip, I was a total wet blanket. Our day in Dublin had been good but strange due to the traveling, and we hadn't been able to actually go in any places. I know this will sound really dumb, but our cabbie from the airport took us through the slums of Dublin on the way to our hotel, which kind of kills any excitement you have for a new city. It was rainy and cold, and I was just. Not. Feeling. It.  

However, once we got to Galway, it was all better! Galway is a little coastal town. If my tour guide is correct, then there isn't really a lot in the way of history here; it's more of a local party town. It's where college students go for fun weekends. When we were there, there was some sort of huge horse racing festival going on. This was also our first night in a real Irish pub! Irish pubs are different from everywhere else. If the pub is any good at all, it will be uncomfortably full. You will talk at length to total strangers. You will drink Guinness or Bulmer's cider. They will always be inexplicably playing "Brown Eyed Girl" or Johnny Cash music. Our B&B in Galway was so fantastic we squealed a bit at the room, plus we had a huge window with a oceanfront view of the Atlantic!

Day 2 of our bus tour was definitely off the charts as far as picturesque-ness goes. From Galway, we drove south around the coast. First we saw the Burren, which is an area of huge limestone hills. We also saw an old potato famine graveyard. After the Burren, we saw the Cliffs of Moher, which I cannot do justice to with a paragraph and a picture. The wind was so intense I was blown out of my shoes, and even though we were at least a couple of hundred feet above the water, I could feel the ocean spray on my face. There was a castle too - there's always a castle. 

I got a little more familiar with the Cliffs of Moher than I really wanted when one woman from our bus who spoke no English didn't come back on time. We waited an hour for her and then ended up sending someone to find her! That was pretty much all the excitement of day 2. That night, we stayed in Tralee, which is the biggest city in County Kerry. It's an adorable little town, and I made a very important discovery in their Tesco. Apparently my very favorite discontinued Herbal Essences shampoo is still made and sold over there! I may have bought way too many bottles and shipped them home. 

On day 3, we went to Blarney Castle and I kissed the Blarney Stone! What people don't tell you about the Blarney Stone is that it is actually on the outside wall of a very tall castle, and you have to be shoved through a hole in the wall to kiss it while your lower half is held onto by a large Irish fellow and the rest of you just kind of dangles. Fun! There is a picture of me kissing the Blarney Stone, but I will have to scan it it. For now, have some pictures of the castle!

When we got back to Dublin that evening, we went out to the pub with our new friends from the bus. For some reason, our bus was made up of about 90% Australians, and they were all fantastically fun. We learned a new bar magic trick from one of the Israeli guys! There was also some random Dubliner fellow named Mike that really wanted to hang out with us. He also wanted to do some magic trick that involved a €10 bill and my bra, but I'm still not sure what was going on there. He insisted on giving a kiss to every girl at our table, but I think the only one he actually cornered was Brittany!

Scotland, Part 4: Fun Stuff!

I did a couple of things in Scotland besides visit libraries. For starters, I went on 2 ghost walks around the downtown Edinburgh area. They were both pretty awesome! The first was through a graveyard, where we were supposed to come into contact with a poltergeist that had over 800 documented attacks on people. Sadly, nothing happened on our trip, but I did get this awesome photo with ghostly orbs floating in it! It just happens to have been taken right outside the tomb of Mackenzie's poltergergeist.

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This particular graveyard is one of (perhaps THE) oldest cemetery in Edinburgh. It is where Greyfriars' Bobby is buried. It's also right next to Heriot School, which is the school that is rumored to be the inspiration for Hogwarts. There happens to be a grave for Thomas Riddel, which is pretty awesome (it's in the photos above, which my blog refuses to delete/move/allow me to edit in any way).

The second tour was through the tunnels and caves underneath the city where the, ahem, criminal element in Edinburgh used to hang out. This tour in particular was really fun because they mostly just told us ghost stories and served us a free pint at the end in an underground bar. 

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I also went to the Edinburgh Castle, which is right in the center of the city and dominates the landscape. We thought it was going to be a really steep awful walk, but it kind of sneaks up on you - you don't even realize you're going uphill, and then all of a sudden you're at the gates! We got to see the crown jewels, called the Honours of Scotland, but I honestly don't remember anything at all about them because I just remember the HORRIBLE 45-minute line we had to wait in to see them. It was indoors and really crowded and hot, and there was a French woman that kept trying to sneak past me but settled for just leaning on me. She also made a big deal about covering her mouth with her shirt when she got near me, as if I was trying to spread all my American swine flu germs to her. MAYBE I WOULDN'T GIVE YOU GERMS IF YOU WEREN'T LEANING ON ME. JUST A THOUGHT. Anyway. Moving on.

One thing I really wanted to see in Edinburgh was the Surgical Museum. I love medical oddities in jars! I walked there with Nikki and realized upon our arrival that it had been closed for an hour. We went to take pictures with the weird sculpture in front, and tried the door on a whim. It wasn't locked, so we went in and played dumb about the closing time. The security guy was so nice, he let us take a 5 minute run through the museum as he locked up! We even got to see a room or two that wasn't on the regular tour, including the medical library for the surgery school in Edinburgh. I got to sit in the President's Chair, which originally belonged to the real-life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. We also ate dinner at the Elephant House that night, so it was a pretty good day overall.

While in Edinburgh, several of us decided to take a day trip on a bus tour through the Highlands and Loch Ness. This might have been the best decision of the entire trip. I discovered that bus tours are the way to go - very low stress, very comfortable. The Highlands were AMAZING, and I met Hamish, who is the cutest Highland cow (they pronounce it "Heilan' coo") ever, and I felt like I was in the scenery from Lord of the Rings for an entire day! I didn't realize this before (of course, I also knew pretty much nothing about Scotland before this trip), but Loch Ness is freakin' HUGE. For some reason, whenever I have seen pictures or TV segments about it, I always got the impression it was a medium sized lake, lots of touristy stuff going on around it, rather like Crystal Lake from the Friday the 13th movies. This is completely inaccurate. It is HUGE and calm and there are castles just sitting around like they own the place, and there are a couple of restaurants and B&Bs, but that's about it. We took a boat around Loch Ness, and I searched as hard as I could for Nessie, but she didn't come out to play. 

Overall, I really liked Scotland more than I thought I would, and of all the places we visited, it's the one I want to re-visit the most.

Scotland, Part 3: National Archives of Scotland

The day after we visited the Central Library and the National Library of Scotland, we were scheduled to visit the National Archives of Scotland. Brittany and I did some other things in the morning (more on that in the next entry), and then had to find our way to the Archives after lunch. Trouble is, none of the locals know where it is! We even asked two people working at the tourist information centre, and the best they could do was to direct us to the National Library we'd visited the day before. This is even more distressing when you realize it's in a really, really huge building (called the Register House) in the center of town near the intersection of two main roads and has a big ol' monument in front of it. How can they not know about this place?

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I have never seen or heard of anything quite as organized and impressive as the National Archives of Scotland. They have three buildings in Edinburgh and 160 staff to run 8 (eight!) websites. Most of their holdings are various records of people and property in Scotland. If you had Scottish ancestors, this is THE place you would come to look them up. They have pretty extensive records dating back all the way to the 12th century.  They're in charge of the official Register of Tartans! This place is so well-organized and has such a wealth of records, I am sorry I'm not Scottish because looking up my family would've been a breeze at this place. 

So, you might be thinking to yourself, "Eight websites! What on Earth could they need that many separate websites for? That seems a bit superfluous." I will list them all for you here!

1. National Archives of Scotland website. This seems pretty necessary, right? 

2. National Register of Archives. The NAS can catalog records, but sometimes others own the items being catalogued. This website will help you search those items and get in contact with the owners, if need be. 

3. Scottish Archive Network. This is a repository for the scanned handwritten documents owned by the NAS.

4. ScotlandsPeople. This is where you would start family research.

5. Scottish Handwriting. Remember how some of those records are from the 12th century? Sometimes the handwriting is hard to read. This website helps researchers decipher the handwriting.

6. Scotlands Images. Stock historical images for use by businesses.

7. Tartan Register. This is the official list for all the recognized clans. The keeper of the Tartan Register was awarded his own tartan as part of his job post, and he chose the colors from the interior colors of the NAS itself!

OK, I had to go see if any of my family names had a tartan associated with it, and I thought I would strike out, but my mom's maiden name  - Norris - had two tartans! The first is for anyone with the name Norris (I think), and the second was actually designed by someone in South Carolina, my home state! That's pretty cool, right?

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8. Scottish documents. This website is the newest, and isn't live yet. It will be a site for the church records in Scotland.

That's a lot of information, right? I can't believe no one in Edinburgh seems to know about this place.

Scotland, Part 2

On the same day we visited the National Library of Scotland, we also visited the Central Library of Edinburgh. This might sound like a really busy day, but it wasn't too bad since the libraries were right across the street from each other! 

Normally I'm not really into public libraries, but this one was pretty cool. For one thing, they gave us tea and cookies and free tote bags! They also gave us really extensive tours, since their library is actually divided up into several areas for the music library, art library, Edinburgh room (local history, maps, newspapers, etc.), and lending library.  I think there was also a separate children's library. 

The Central Library is a Carnegie library, meaning it was built with money donated by Andrew Carnegie himself. There are only 2500 Carnegie libraries around the world. 

As fantastic and fascinating (really!) the tour and history of the library was, I think the best part of the afternoon was the talk we had over our tea and cookies with Colm Linnane. He works in reader development and outreach. He does some works with book groups, trying to get different groups in touch with each other to foster a community that goes beyond the library. His most impressive stories were about the time he spent encouraging children in group care to read for pleasure. He took a mobile library around to group homes and juvenile detention facilities and had the unenviable task of convincing these children to read for fun.

Scotland, Part 1!

So, I haven't published anything in a few days. In fact, I'm already back home in the States! I got a little behind when we went to Scotland and Ireland, since we didn't really have internet out there, and now I need to finish up this travel blog before certain entries are due this weekend! Expect many posts over the next couple of days...

On Sunday the 27th, our whole class went to King's Cross Station and boarded a train for Scotland. Since we are all great big librarian dorks, we took a TON of candy and pretended we were on the Hogwarts Express. We are clearly the embodiment of maturity!

The plan was to spend until Thursday morning in Edinburgh. During that time, we were going to see three libraries as a class, but otherwise all our time was our own. The place we were staying is actually run by a team from the University of Wisconsin, and is used for their extensive study abroad program. During the summer, they rent it out to classes like ours! Dalkeith House is a 300-year-old palace and is supposedly haunted, but it was really just more like an old dormitory. We were grouped into rooms with 3, 4, or 5 beds, but I got lucky and all my roommates decided to stay at a hotel in Edinburgh instead, so I got the room to myself. It wasn't a bad place to stay, really, other than the tiny annoyance of having to use communal bathrooms. The grounds were gorgeous! We spent a couple of hours the first day walking around and taking pictures. Dalkeith House is in the suburb of Dalkeith, which was about a 30 minute bus ride from downtown Edinburgh. Some people complained that the smaller town was boring, but I just enjoyed the break from outrageous London prices.

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On Monday (the 28th, for those keeping track), we rode the bus into downtown Edinburgh and went to the National Library of Scotland. First impression of Scotland's capital city: WHOA, THEY LIKE TARTAN. There was so much plaid! The library itself seemed great, but we didn't actually get to see very much of it. We got a short introductory lecture from one of the librarians, but it turned out that this was yet another library that operated on a system with reading rooms wherein readers requested specific books that were brought to them. None of us had cards at that library, so we couldn't even get past the reception desk. They did allow us to see an exhibit about what the library does and what it contains. This continued on to an exhibit about Scottish emmigrants and what their lives were like in their new countries. Apparently there is also usually a fantastic exhibit on John Murray, a famous publisher, but it wasn't open that day! I did sneak one picture before we were told not to, and it's a good one: One sentence of Winnie the Pooh in Scots!

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I did learn some interesting things about the history of libraries in Scotland. The National Library itself started as the advocates' library in 1689. In 1710, it became a copyright depository library. Although the library could collect a copy of any book published in the UK, they generally focus on books published in Scotland or about Scottish culture. It was not known officially the National Library of Scotland until the "National Library of Scotland Act 1925." Snazzy name, right? Since then, the library has been adding new buildings and wings, most recently the new Visitors' Centre in 2009. I would love to write more about this library, but the fact is we really didn't see or hear much about the inner workings of the library - even our tour guide stuck mostly to facts and figures we could've found on their website. Dr. Welsh did buy a book that she gave to me for my project on Darwin. It's about the library's extensive John Murray collection. Murray was a London-based publisher born in Edinburgh; he published many famous books, including the first edition of On the Origin of Species. Hopefully there'll be some good information in there for my paper!

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Have you heard? I am in London.

Last Saturday, Brittany and I got up early to try and see some iconic London sights. We made it to Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, and Big Ben. The only one of those things that is a real activity is Westminster Abbey; the rest are just things to see from the street. Here's a picture looking straight up at Big Ben:

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Westminster Abbey is totally crowded every day all the time. We were lucky enough to go pretty early in the day! My first impression was that it was really... full. Not just with people, but with memorials. It kind of resembles the basement storage of some fantastical place that has just too many monuments. There are statues on statues! They're all smushed in so close together it's tough to appreciate any of them fully. Anyway, we made sure to see the big sights and take illegal pictures just like good tourists!

I was particularly interested in Darwin's grave, which is marked with a very simple floor marker. They also had a relief of him on the wall, right next to Alfred Wallace. Wallace was a young scientist, and wrote to Darwin (pre-Origin of Species) about a theory of natural selection. Darwin quickly published his own book that he had been working on for several decades. To be fair, he'd been working on his for a long time and it was much more thorough than Wallace's theory was at that point, but still, this was kind of a asinine thing to do on Darwin's part.

On the way back, I got a good shot of Westminster Abbey with a red bus in front, as well as a great shot of the South Bank Lion!

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Daleks! The Doctor! Torchwood!

So, if the terms in the title of this entry don't make any sense, then I gather that you are not a Doctor Who fan, and this entry will most likely be of little interest to you. :)

The day after the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I travelled to Cardiff, Wales, with Lauren and Cassie. My main motivation was the Doctor Who museum in Cardiff, which also happens to be where they shoot many scenes for DW as well as its spin off, Torchwood. Lauren came along because her boyfriend likes Doctor Who, and Cassie just wanted to see Wales.

Let's get right into the Doctor Who exhibit, shall we?

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First, some outfits from the ninth doctor and the tenth doctor's pajamas, along with a classic Martha outfit.

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Then, a clockwork robot! Very creepy.

We also saw a few of Donna's outfits. This was pretty awesome for me, since she's my favorite companion! Here are her outfits as seen on the show:

And here are my photos:

There were about a million things on exhibit, but of course I can't go without mentioning some of the villians. There were the one-off villains like the previously mentioned clockwork robot, stone angels, robot angels, a santa mask from the Christmas invasion episode, one of the skeletons from the library episode, and Dalek Sec himself!

And I may have done a little dance when I walked into the room and saw Daleks! They were pretty awesome. There were Cybermen (smaller than you expect) and Sontarans (verdict: a little deflated looking in person), too. I tried to get a video when the daleks were spinning around shouting "EXTERMINATE!" but it was a bit more difficult than anticipated, so I'll leave you with this instead!

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After the Doctor Who Museum, we took a boat tour around Cardiff Bay. The bay was beautiful, and when the tour guide saw my bag from the Doctor Who shop, he immediately started pointing out different locations around the bay where they have filmed Doctor Who and Torchwood. Pretty cool, right?  We also saw the back entrance to Torchwood, which is fenced off for the summer and has fan lettters and flowers sticking in the fence.

After the boat tour, we wanted to see Cardiff Castle, but it was too late and the gates were closed. Instead, we just walked around and found a very nice garden park beside the castle grounds! Not bad. The walls of the castle grounds had these funny decorations that looked like animals about to jump over the wall.

After this, we ate dinner at a local pub and then had to catch our train home. Not a bad day! I really liked Cardiff and would love to go back and see it properly some day.

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