Public Programs

This talk highlights a number of resourceful women in American book history, some celebrated and some whose names we’ll never know, who found ways to preserve and share aspects of the historical record outside the established institutions of their own day.

Women’s book collections appear in a wide range of forms: as catalogued libraries; as groups of surviving books linked by inscription and family use; or as volumes dispersed but still …

By the turn of the millennium, the word “text” had become a verb. Three-and-a-half years ago, ChatGPT was released into the wild, decisively severing the link between writing and human …

This talk returns to the decades in our previous century when the printed newspaper thrived as the center of the news cycle, and it highlights some of the hidden landscapes, labor, and infrastructures enabling that.

This talk will draw from the past thirteen years that Mike Kelly has spent building the Native American Literature Collection in the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College, as well as current work to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into library, archives, and museum practices. Kelly will demonstrate how a deep knowledge of traditional bibliography coupled with an understanding of Indigenous history results in a rich and complex understanding of this aspect of book history.