Archives and Special Collections Visit

 From my visit to archives and special collections, I learned about how books all over the world were made. We took a tour through books that were formed around the different cultures around the world, starting from Europe to Asia to Africa to North America. I saw the difference and similarities in how the books were made and written. For instance, in the second Asia table, I saw a story on contemporary life in Japan during the 1800s. Each page was attached by pieces of string and the paper felt rough like wood. There was another book in the Asia section, however, from China, that felt and looked extremely similar. It was interesting to compare and contrast how these cultures created their books. In the North America section, I saw a newspaper that was made in the 1900s in Mexico. There was an English translation copy of the newspaper as well. The paper felt the same, but one easy way to tell whether one was the original, and the other was not outside of the English translation, was the rough cut edges on the newspaper. The English translation’s sides looked perfect while the one in Spanish looked very worn and used. After looking through other books in the archives and special collections, I saw most other books that were not copied looked very worn while the books that were copied looked clean and well-kept. One interesting thing there was that I was able to see an old Ethiopian prayer that was for a person to get better mental health. I am Ethiopian, so it was cool to see representation and interesting to see some old text within my own culture.