{"id":34605,"date":"2018-01-23T16:26:57","date_gmt":"2018-01-23T20:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/?p=34605"},"modified":"2018-10-03T13:10:40","modified_gmt":"2018-10-03T17:10:40","slug":"ucba-bookish-travels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/2018\/01\/ucba-bookish-travels\/","title":{"rendered":"Bookish Travels"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Christian Boyles, Michelle McKinney and Kellie Tilton<\/em><\/p>\n

UCBA Library staff and faculty, Christian Boyles (Collections Services Manager), Michelle McKinney (Reference and Web Services Librarian) and Kellie Tilton (Instructional Technologies Librarian) hit the road and visited a few bookish places over the holiday season. Click on the images to get a better view of the photos.<\/p>\n

Christian Boyles \/ Washington DC \/ Library of Congress<\/strong>: In December, the missus and I went to DC for her birthday.\u00a0 Along with visiting\u00a0many great Smithsonian museums, walking a gazillion miles, seeing grand architecture,\u00a0priceless works of art and ephemera and the new Star Wars film, we went to the Library of Congress.\u00a0 For someone who has worked in libraries for a gazillion years, going there felt like what going to the Vatican must feel like to a Catholic.<\/p>\n

The building itself is an amazing and imposing\u00a0structure designed in the Beaux-Arts style with a bonkers fountain out front\u00a0featuring the Roman god Neptune, some sea monsters and a bunch of naked people riding what I guess are horse snakes.\u00a0 What that has to do with literature and the centralized housing of knowledge was lost on me.\u00a0 Inside is no less impressive.\u00a0 Walking in, I was legitimately awestruck by the LOC’s grandeur.\u00a0 Imagine if St. Peter’s Cathedral\u00a0and some enlightenment era French king’s\u00a0home\u00a0had a baby and you’re still nowhere close to how awesome it is.\u00a0 Probably the crown jewel of the place is the reading room. Housed under a dome, it is a masterpiece of archetecture featuring arched stained glass windows, semetrical study carrells, Corinthian columns, and statues of some of the great minds in religion, poetry, commerce, philosophy, etc.\u00a0 Just looking in on that, I’m pretty sure I felt my IQ nudge up a couple points.\u00a0 Throughout the building, there were displays of ancient manuscripts\u00a0going back hundreds and\u00a0thousands of years.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, we were running short on time, so we couldn’t take the tour.\u00a0 But, we did manage to check out a very cool exhibit on the American experience of World War 1.\u00a0 In a perfect world, I would have spent a day, if not more, discovering all the cool features and offerings.\u00a0 Insider tip:\u00a0if you’re in DC and are having a sugar crash, the LOC’s vending machines are very comprehensive and cheap.<\/p>\n\n\t\t