A Dial-Up Librarian Enters the Blogosphere
When I was first approached about doing a blog for the library, my first thought was "YIKES." Being new to the blogging world, this was unchartered terrain for me. After all, we still have dial-up at home and I rely on my 2 year old to help program our DVD player. However, the more I thought about it, I realized – what a great forum to talk about the wonderful items in our collection. After 10 years of working in the library at the Indiana Historical Society, I am still uncovering gems in the collection.
With more than 1.5 million images, thousands of books, manuscripts and maps there is a lot to uncover. We recently estimated that if you stacked our collections flat page-by-page, it would be a single stack almost 6 miles high. (OK, so we didn’t actually try this but you get the idea that there are a lot of great materials that we can talk about in our blog.) Here are a few of my favorites.
- This 1833 map uniquely and beautifully depicts our developing nation.
- A woman gives an orange to a departing WWI soldier. (Bretzman Collection, Indiana Historical Society)
- This one caught your eye – didn’t it?! The American Red Cross sponsored this circa 1918 broadside to help keep WWI servicemen healthy.
Let me know your favorite Indiana history topic or if you have a question about something we might have in the collection – you can leave a comment here or e-mail us at reference@indianahistory.org.
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Suzanne Hahn is director of reference services for the IHS Collections and Library. She loves helping people find the information they seek and is perhaps the only librarian ever to get shushed for laughing too loud in a library. |
