visit to claremont

yesterday, i drove to claremont college to do some research for a project i’m working on. i’ve been trying to locate a manuscript or facsimile of a work by Marenzio, a 16th century composer. i managed to contact Roland Jackson, an expert on Marenzio who has published many editions of his works, and he told me the original sources were on microfilm at a claremont library.

i enjoyed wandering around the campus because it had the aura of an east coast university. once i got to the library, i got even more excited because it was pretty big, at least compared to the uci lib. sadly, i spent the next hour just trying to find the microfilm section in the library. it wasn’t where the map said it would be, and there weren’t any librarians in yet to help. i was on my own, in an unfamiliar place, searching for rare documents. it kinda felt like an adventure, in a weird scholarly way.

after finally finding the microforms, i spent another hour fumbling with the scanning machine. eventually, i got the hang of it, there was a moment when i was scrolling through the manuscripts and it finally hit me that i was a graduate student (as if the teaching and sleepless nights didn’t do it). there’s something special about getting off the computer to search through a collection in person.