After a summer where I hardly spoke to any students, in the last two days I have done four tours, three instruction sessions, and sat in on a class. (I also had to tell some non-student dude to quit chatting up our female students.) By the time the week is up, I’ll have done three more tour/classroom sessions, attended a workshop on setting type at the Press at Colorado College, and had a class discussion of James O’Donnell’s Avatars of the Word over breakfast.

The beginning of the school year is always an exciting time. I’m especially excited this year because I have a few more opportunities than usual to work with students and understand their work a bit better.

At my library, we make a special effort to get all the First Year Experience (FYE) classes into the library. Given our intensive block plan academic calendar, this means as a group, we are doing dozens of instruction sessions in the first two weeks of the school year, with a few more classes scattered over the next six or seven weeks.

In addition to those classes–usually one- or two-off sessions for sixty or ninety minutes–I’m going to be working with another FYE on something more like a daily basis. One of our history professors has recast her usual “Civilization in the West” course to focus on “Cultures of the Book.” In addition to reading great works by Plato, Augustine, Voltaire, Goethe, and others, they’ll be reading some secondary literature on the history and future of the book (such as the O’Donnell I already mentioned) and–even better–hand-setting type at the Press under the instruction of the College printer. My friend, Jessy, the Special Collections librarian, will also be heavily involved, as students work with materials in her library, and choose a text to print from among the manuscripts in Special Collections. You can see the class syllabus online.

I’m not sure where this is all going to go, but in my experience it is always enlightening when I get a chance to see how students actually work as readers, thinkers, speakers, researchers and writers. I’ll be very interested to hear how they think the historical changes that came with the shift from orality to written language, from scroll to codex, and from manuscript to print can help us think about what is happening now as digital communication is changing how we write and work and think.