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Apr. 7th, 2011 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceebeegeeWeather is kicking my ass lately. So, so sick of all this disgusting cold and rain. All I wanted to do this morning was stay in bed with Tatia draping herself across the pillow.
We have a paper due in three weeks and the professor asks that we submit our sources in advance--citations were due today. He also wants us to have the BOOK in hand as we write the paper, just so we don't get taken by surprise and find out there's not enough material for our paper. So last night I'm putting together my sources and looking up the books on the Columbia online library catalogue. Of course my network at work has all sorts of firewalls, and just generally not all the software is up to date, so since I have to stop by the campus anyway to get the books, I'll look them up there. Leave work and it's freezing--so I decide to go home first to change, feed cats, etc. I look up the books there--and as it turns out, one of the books I need isn't at Butler, the main library--it's at the library at Union Theological Seminary, the campus of which is affiliated with and adjacent to Columbia. So not too far away but--eep!--it closes an hour earlier, at 10 pm. I get there by 9:30--but they've started to close the stacks. But since I had the call number in hand, they let me sneak in, grab my book, and be done. So nice! The source I need from that library was a translation of William of Poitiers's Gesta Guillelmi, about William the Conqueror--my paper will be about the role of the cavalry (and its implications for chivalry) in the Battles of Hastings (i.e., the 1066 Norman Invasion) and the Battle of the Golden Spurs. Oh, and I'm also using the Bayeux Tapestry as a source!
I really liked the UTS campus--it's built a bit like a combination of an English manor house, long hallways and such, and a high medieval castle, with vaulted ceiling and doorways. Very, very cozy walking down that long hallway to get to the library, which is preceded by a really beautiful Rotunda. I wonder if they offer undergrad courses at UTS? It would be so nice, so peaceful, going there for class--maybe a class in medieval theology?
After that I walked back up to the main campus to Butler Library, slipped into the stacks and grabbed my other source. To get to the stacks, you walk into Butler, walk up the main staircase, go around the circulation desk and through a door to a tiny internal staircase. The stacks...ahhhhhh. It's like entering another world. So peaceful and quiet, and the smell of all those old, old books. It makes me think of my childhood, reading my cousin's old copies of the Thornton W. Burgess Old Mother West Wind books. I got my source quickly (Annales Gendanses, a Flemish annal--I'm using it as my source for the Battle of the Golden Spurs, which was Flemish versus French). I would've loved to have just...stayed there. Stayed there draped over a table, bent over a book, occasionally rising to get some other fragile book about some old, old battle. Old unhappy far-off things/and battles long ago... Libraries are like church to me.
We have a paper due in three weeks and the professor asks that we submit our sources in advance--citations were due today. He also wants us to have the BOOK in hand as we write the paper, just so we don't get taken by surprise and find out there's not enough material for our paper. So last night I'm putting together my sources and looking up the books on the Columbia online library catalogue. Of course my network at work has all sorts of firewalls, and just generally not all the software is up to date, so since I have to stop by the campus anyway to get the books, I'll look them up there. Leave work and it's freezing--so I decide to go home first to change, feed cats, etc. I look up the books there--and as it turns out, one of the books I need isn't at Butler, the main library--it's at the library at Union Theological Seminary, the campus of which is affiliated with and adjacent to Columbia. So not too far away but--eep!--it closes an hour earlier, at 10 pm. I get there by 9:30--but they've started to close the stacks. But since I had the call number in hand, they let me sneak in, grab my book, and be done. So nice! The source I need from that library was a translation of William of Poitiers's Gesta Guillelmi, about William the Conqueror--my paper will be about the role of the cavalry (and its implications for chivalry) in the Battles of Hastings (i.e., the 1066 Norman Invasion) and the Battle of the Golden Spurs. Oh, and I'm also using the Bayeux Tapestry as a source!
I really liked the UTS campus--it's built a bit like a combination of an English manor house, long hallways and such, and a high medieval castle, with vaulted ceiling and doorways. Very, very cozy walking down that long hallway to get to the library, which is preceded by a really beautiful Rotunda. I wonder if they offer undergrad courses at UTS? It would be so nice, so peaceful, going there for class--maybe a class in medieval theology?
After that I walked back up to the main campus to Butler Library, slipped into the stacks and grabbed my other source. To get to the stacks, you walk into Butler, walk up the main staircase, go around the circulation desk and through a door to a tiny internal staircase. The stacks...ahhhhhh. It's like entering another world. So peaceful and quiet, and the smell of all those old, old books. It makes me think of my childhood, reading my cousin's old copies of the Thornton W. Burgess Old Mother West Wind books. I got my source quickly (Annales Gendanses, a Flemish annal--I'm using it as my source for the Battle of the Golden Spurs, which was Flemish versus French). I would've loved to have just...stayed there. Stayed there draped over a table, bent over a book, occasionally rising to get some other fragile book about some old, old battle. Old unhappy far-off things/and battles long ago... Libraries are like church to me.
