Unpacking the Personal Library: Defining the Academic Library and its Purpose

Sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Recorded on 10/24/2022
Posted in The Authority File

Episode 286

Unpacking the Personal Library book cover. Wooden sculpture of open book with paper lines, some missing. White background and black text.

In the third episode of this four-part series on personal libraries, Jason Camlot and Jeffrey Weingarten, coeditors of Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books, examine what’s lost when libraries discard volume duplicates or rely solely on digital copies. Highlighting the traces left from marginalia, publisher blurbs, and differing publication years, our guests discuss what these intricacies can reveal about the cultural moment. In addition, Jason and Jeffrey define the many forms academic libraries can take and the malleability of collections by adapting to a space—an academic library, museum, archival storage—and its intrinsic values and demands.

About the guests:

Jason Camlot
Professor of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies
Concordia University

Jason Camlot is Professor of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University. Recent books include Phonopoetics (Stanford, 2019), CanLit Across Media (MQUP, 2019) and Vlarf (MQUP 2021). He is director of the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb research partnership that focuses on literary audio collections.

J.A. Weingarten headshot

J.A. Weingarten
Professor in the School of Language and Liberal Studies
Fanshawe College

J.A. Weingarten is a Professor in the School of Language and Liberal Studies at Fanshawe College. He is also the author of Sharing the Past (UTP, 2019), as well as more than three dozen articles, book reviews, and papers on Canadian arts and culture.

Enjoy the conversation? Listen to the rest of the series:

Check out our previous series with Wilfrid Laurier University Press:
– Cultivating Indigenous Studies
– Michelle Porter and the Métis Way
– Looking at Community Music
– The Making of DisPlace
– Prison Life Writing

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