Being inside a classroom all day is the last thing most students want their summer schedule to entail. And for students enrolled in DU Professor and Archivist Steve Fisher’s library and archival preservation and conservation class, spending hours in a classroom isn’t part of the plan.
Each week, the class, which normally meets in Penrose Library, goes on a field trip or hears from a guest speaker. Some of this summer’s guest speakers are Camila Alire (MA librarianship ’74), president of American Library Association; Karen Jones, a book conservator; and Diane Lunde, preservation librarian at Colorado State University.
“I think it’s a real-world class, very practical,” Fisher says. “Students get to meet people doing the work and hear from people in the field.”
“We are hearing from art curators, film restorers, archivists and more people in the field with direct experience,” says Kyle Henke, a first-year master’s student. “We are getting great information based on real life and personal experiences rather that just a text.”
The field trips range from going to a motion picture restoration lab to the DU anthropology lab. Another on-campus trip was to the Margery Reed Hall, where a mural is being restored.
“Being able to see a restoration project in action was fascinating,” Henke says. “Seeing the mural up close and in detail brought the work to life even if it was still partially covered up in numerous layers of black paint.”
This summer marks the second year that the library and information science program has offered the class. It is a three-credit class for graduate students. The class meets once a week from mid-June to the beginning of August.