Field Trip

Today I got to go on a field trip--it felt just like elementary school! For our Digital Archives class, we took a drive up to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (about 60 miles from Charleston) to visit their digitization facility. U of I has the fifth largest library in the country, and they are currently working on a massive book digitization project. We got to go into the lab where they scan books, and they had these awesome high-tech book scanners that take pictures of each page in a book. The scanners are set up so that really delicate books can be placed under glass, and everything is automated so the book doesn't need to be handled very much. We felt kind of bad for the kids that have to sit in there all day in the dark and take pictures of book pages though. We also got to see their paper conservation lab where they have all of these chemical tubs, freezers, and vacuums to take care of old and/or damaged paper. I didn't know you could vacuum mold off of paper, but I guess you can! Then, the coolest part was when we got to see the vault where they store all of the books that are not on shelves at the library. We went into this room that was set at 50 degrees (we froze!), and there was row after row of book shelves--that were each 40 feet tall! It was awesome--kind of like I had died and gone to heaven. They had this fork lift that drives around and can be raised clear up to the top if they need to get books down from up there. The lady showing us around said that the facility can currently store 1.2 million books, but they're going to be expanding it so that in a few years they can store 10 million books--that's a lot of books! We learned a lot of cool things up there, and then everyone's favorite part was when we stopped at Jarling's Custard Cup--a world-famous frozen custard place in Champaign. I had a blueberry cobbler custard concoction. It was heavenly! I always wondered why the University of Illinois is called "Urbana-Champaign," but I guess it's because half of the university is in the city of Urbana, and half is in Champaign--makes sense. If BYU spread out a little more, maybe it could become the University of Utah Provo-Orem :-) Just kidding--that's too close to the University of Utah (and we don't want to get confused with them)! We got back from the field trip earlier this evening and then Alyson, Kristen, and I went out to take pictures of houses for our house survey that's due on Friday. I found a cool house over on Harrison Avenue to survey, but I don't know as much about house terms as I do furniture terms, so I need to go read up a little. I think people wondered why we were taking pictures of their houses.

Oh! Some good news is that I aced my next writing assignment in Dr. Reid's class--20/20! Yay! Also, I got a random e-mail yesterday from Lavina Fielding Anderson, the editor of the Journal of Mormon History--the king of all Latter-day Saint scholarly publications. She said that she wanted me to submit my LDS tourism paper from the Mormon History Association conference this summer to be considered for publication! I've submitted stuff to them before that got rejected, so I was kind of surprised that she came seeking me out. She said that the subject matter would be of great interest to Mormon scholars. So, I'll get that ready to go, and we'll see what happens. If you get published in the Journal of Mormon History, you've pretty much arrived as a LDS scholar!