Day 3: In Transit

My two first days of the iCHSTM 2013 were spent completely with the sessions, which were related to the questions I tend to face in my work within my field of expertise as a librarian. How nurturing and pleasant it was, I must admit that I needed an extra day to digest what I heard during these past two days. That was one of the reasons, why I took a break from this discussion, which had galloped wildly in twitter, in blogs, in discussions, in comments and in papers. My “day off” at iCHSTM 2013 was spent with transportation.

What I enjoyed the most today was that I managed to change the clothes of a librarian and digital humanist with a historian and a cyclist. I these attributes are not really making me neither Jekyll nor Hyde, but it was refreshing to listen the papers as a historian in deed.

The morning session, P123 B/C was titled as The invisible bicycle: new insights into bicycle history, which suited a bike enthusiast more than perfectly. In the afternoon, I went to a heritage bus trip and tour of the Museum of Transport. (Thanks for the valuable chats, Nicholas Oddy and Peter Cox). Also, it was nice to have an opportunity to meet my old student-and-postgrad-fellow Tiina Männistö-Funk again.

What I enjoyed the most in these two occasions, with the professional librarians and the volunteers at the museums was the sense of commitment. It is not always allowed for a historian to present personal and often emotionally loaded options and views in front of the academia, but this generation knows how to do it. It gave me a bit more of courage to start thinking of arguements in my research – would I be brave enough what I really think what I reckon? At least, based on today’s presentations, one can at least practice how to set in the views in a well-arguemented but in a polite way.

Despite the fact that I feel like running out of gas at the moment, I am eager to wake up tomorrow and focus a bit on the libraries (and GLAM issues in general) too. There will be a tour at the Chetham Library, but I will try to do my best to visit the John Rylands Library too. Maybe I will find some new ideas more.

See you tomorrow again.

Yours &c.,

Jussi-Pekka

Writer works as a project manager in the Digitization Project of Kindred (Finno-Ugric) Languages at the National Library of Finland and will give a paper at ICHSTM 2013 on Friday. Follow @Hakkarainen on Twitter for iCHSTM comments.

13 thoughts on “Day 3: In Transit

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *