ABSTRACT
There is a recent spate of publications theorizing Special Collections (SC) depart - ments in the twenty-first-century university library, particularly in how they “are inextricably linked with the very future of the higher education and how successfully it responds to the challenges of the 21st century.”2 Rather than being inaccessible spaces where rare material is guarded and kept away from the public, SC is being theorized as a space of community engagement that “articulates the goals of the library” as well as the university at large; a place for “enhancing undergraduate pedagogy”3 (Mitchell et al.); and as a place where researchers can explore how the text was “shaped by the ways in which it was initially embodied in its historical moment.”4 For the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, SC is a collaborative space of hands-on training and theoretical engagements with material objects for the foundational course, “Understanding the Pre-Digital Book.”
