The intimacy of original manuscripts

By Pearce J. Carefoote and Deborah Whiteman. Why special collections can be transformative to the student.
Most of us are well aware that the current generation of incoming undergraduates is the most technologically savvy of any that has gone before it. Never has a group of students had so much information available to them, instantaneously and literally at their fingertips. And yet, over the past dozen years we librarians at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto have been asked by professors to go “old school” and provide sessions for them on the role of primary sources and how to use them in academic research. More...