Location: International Room, Sterling Memorial Library

Date: Friday, November 16

Time: Lunch at 11:30am. Talk begins at 12:00pm

Presenters: Kathryn James, Curator, Early Modern Books and Manuscripts and the Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Christine McCarthy, Chief Conservator, University Library

Description: In spring 2012, with the support of a Yale University Library SCOPA (Standing Committee on Professional Awareness) grant, staff members from Special Collections Conservation and from the Beinecke Library created the Traveling Scriptorium, a teaching kit of inks, pigments, binding samples, and paleography resources. The participants — Kathryn James, Karen Jutzi, Marie-France Lemay, Christine McCarthy, and Paula Zyats — were responding to a sense of the Yale community’s increasing interest in the book as artifact, and the need to work directly with these materials in order to understand how medieval and early modern books were written, built, and read. The idea for the Scriptorium grew out of a collaborative teaching session, in which each presenter spoke about the same objects from their related but different professional perspectives. The Scriptorium brings these perspectives together in a tangible way. The Scriptorium is available for students, faculty, and library staff to use in Yale classrooms; the creators also envisioned drawing on the kit for instructional sessions for the Yale community.

For full coverage of this session, please click the video below
(note a slight delay upon initial playback):