School Update

Summer semester is halfway done. Halfway? Really? Yes, really. The semester is only three months long, and finals are the first week of August (not that I have finals). I have maintained my regular schedule of ignoring school for the first week or so of the semester, and the stress came shortly thereafter.
The class I've done the most with is my face-to-face class. It's my Preservation Strategies class, and it's awesome! My teacher is the administrator of the conservation lab at the University of Utah, and he believes in doing it old school. He uses a projector, VHS movies, and hasn't opened up the class on Blackboard. It is so much fun! When was the last time you got to see a slide show through a projector? When was the last time you watched a VHS? Because there is so much information to be shared, we have three classes instead of two, two of which were the last two weekends.
The information that he shares is amazing! He has a reading a lot of stuff, one of which is a book titled "Double Fold" by Nicholson Baker, which is all about the destruction of print material in the move to digitize from the 1940s on. It's definitely a skewed book, but a lot of interesting information is put forth. We get to handle original documents, some of which is so old it's in Latin. We got to look at different binding methods, different printing methods, the construction of paper (both Western and Japanese), and the list goes on and on.
Did I mention the class was hands on? The first weekend we got to mend paper using two different methods/tools, which was a lot of fun. It's nice seeing how things change. We got to look at how ink chips, see how dirty paper can get, different ways to clean paper. We even got to do some of this stuff in the lab at the U. Last weekend we made Ethiopian style books. We got to use thread and needle to sew a book together, and it's small (a couple inches by a couple inches) but it looks so cool to see such handiwork. My professor said we'll never look at books the same, and he's right. Now when I look at books I see how they are bound (most use adhesive), and see how badly they are falling apart. For my big project in the class I'm co-writing a grant with a classmate for a mental hospital in Washington, which also sounds exciting and daunting!
The other classes are a work in progress. It's a lot of reading that I need to catch up on. I've managed to stay caught up in assignments for one class, but I'm two discussion posts behind in the other one. Can you tell that I'm not as excited about these classes as I am about preservation? These two classes I took because I figured it would be good to know. Preservation strategies I took because I'm in love with the class and the topic fascinates me.
I did find out though, that I probably won't go into conservation because it's really hard to get into as a profession, and it requires more schooling. At this point I'm planning on being done with school for awhile (hopefully forever, but I'm not holding my breath) once I finish my last class in the spring. I have to double check some things to make sure I can get an emphasis in Archiving by taking one more class in the spring, otherwise Fall semester will be my last one.