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Finding my second home in the Reeder Media Center

April 17, 2019

By Alicia Draper, Reeder Media Center student assistant

It only took one tour of William & Mary for me to know that the College was for me. I remember that day fondly. The weather was absolutely perfect, the sun was out, and the temperature was about 72 degrees. During the tour, we took two steps in to Swem, only to be quickly escorted out, and shown other parts of campus. My tour guide briefly described the “Reeder Media Center” as a place for renting photography & film equipment. At the time, I was taking TV production and film study electives at my high school....

Previous Posts

May 2017

  • The ties that bind: How the decay of a binding shows its construction

    May 3, 2017
    Swem Library has a great many books in very bad bindings. Most modern books, for instance, are held together only by glue at the spine. Even modern hardcovers have the same binding. Other than the hard shell surrounding them, they are in all other respects exactly the same as a cheap paperback. In the past, however, bindings were much stronger.  

Apr 2017

  • Remembering World War I

    April 12, 2017
    On April 6, 1917 the United States entered World War I, then known as the Great War. A century later, objects in Special Collections reveal memories of Americans’ lives at wartime. Among the variety of materials available for research are a collection of Red Cross posters, a veteran’s scrapbook, and a nurse’s correspondence with loved ones.  

  • The World Before QWERTY

    April 5, 2017
    Can you type without looking at the keyboard? This used to be a skill taught to people who wanted secretarial or clerical jobs. Now of course many of us type quickly because we use computers on a daily basis.  But what about the predecessor to the keyboard we know? This is it – a typecase, filled with individual letters which had to be assembled by hand to create anything which needed to be printed.  

Mar 2017

  • Believable Lies

    March 29, 2017
    The island of Taiwan, once commonly known in the West by the Portuguese name of Formosa, has recently resurfaced in the news in connection with the One China policy. In the past it was also a subject of interest, although information coming from Taiwan itself was often scarce.

  • Propaganda and the Beginnings and End of Spanish America

    March 22, 2017
    The arrival of Europeans in the Americas was an event of global importance, and its effect on the people already living here was devastating. That is why in 1552 the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas wrote a book that he called Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, or A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.

  • Jennie's Search for "More to Life" in Maurice Sendak's "Higglety Pigglety Pop!"

    March 16, 2017
    Most of us, if we recognize the name Maurice Sendak, probably think of him as the man who wrote and illustrated the beloved children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are,” published in 1963. Yet what some may not know is that Sendak wrote (and illustrated) much more than that one popular book.

Feb 2017

Jan 2017

  • Henry Lee, “Sea Fables Explained”

    "Sea Fables Explained"

    January 25, 2017
    Imagine, if you will, a creature with a lower body made of the skin and scales of a carp, a human-like upper body with prominent ribs, “thin and scraggy” arms, “skeleton-like” fingers, the head of a small monkey, and the teeth of a catfish. Sound familiar?

  • Building a Library in the Seventeenth (and the Twenty-first) Century

    January 12, 2017
    Many of the books in Swem Library’s Special Collections have been gifted by individual donors who have themselves built up their own private collections. This practice of endowing educational institutions with the tools of study has long antecedents, but in the seventeenth century a librarian actually laid out a plan for building a library and advocated wider access for scholars.

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