I’m sitting at the library on campus.  Though I don’t have class today until 2, and no reason to be here prior to then, Katie was in rare form and I had to get away.  I drove down to Ann Arbor this morning and have been working on a paper (the same one I was supposed to be working on yesterday morning) that is due next Tuesday.

The paper is for my archives class; we are to review three archive websites and critique them.  I chose university special collections, and I have been spending some time be-bopping around the three sites, Auburn, Michigan State and Rutgers.  Why those three you ask?  Because I was curious what three land grant universities might have in common in their special collections.  Turns out nothing!

So I’m writing this paper, and for some reason I start thinking about the whole special collections theme as sort of your kitchen junk drawer.  You know, the drawer you dump stuff into when you don’t know where else to put it?  That’s the feeling I had about special collections.  And I expressed it that way in the paper….also described the collections as an “ecclectic (thanks Paul for that word) group of valuable and more dubious materials, sort of like a crazy aunt’s memory institutionalized by universities.” 

I have a few days to edit…the paper is far from done.  In fact after I got to the crazy aunt part I sort of stopped to ponder. 

Do you think professors have a sense of humor?