W&M Libraries Blog

How often have you stopped to think about the wonder that is the copy machine? If you were like me, not often at all—as students, interns, and young professionals most of us probably spent more time being warmed by the light of the copy machine than we would like to think about.

I'm a junior at the College of William and Mary, and I started cataloging blueprints in the Special Collections Research Center in the Fall of 2009.

I am not an archivist. Old and fragile documents have scared me for as long as I can remember. Not in a masked murderer kind of way, of course, but in the sense that at any moment while handling archival material, one can accidentally drop a priceless artifact or tear a centuries-old newspaper. That’s pressure I’d normally like to avoid when possible. On top of that unnerving, but not necessarily crippling fear, there are the allergies.