21 & 28 February 2022

The San Francisco Center for the Book held two one-hour online classes titled “Introduction to Western Paleography”. During these two sessions the presenter, Kathryn Brunet, gave an introduction to palaeography, defining some of the key terms, describing different types of scripts used in manuscripts and documents in early modern England, and guiding the class in some hands-on transcription practice.

I chose to attend this course because of my professional interest in manuscript studies and related fields like palaeography and how they tie into my career goals. I felt that learning the basics of palaeography and manuscript transcription would be useful in helping me attain my professional goals of working with manuscripts and rare books, either through cataloguing or collection management.

The practical experience with transcribing manuscripts was useful as it put into practice what we were learning. This type of learning of by doing is called experiential learning and has been argued to be a more beneficial learning experience than passively learning from a book or watching a video (Ho, n.d.). I agree with this argument as I have found that I retain more information when I use experiential learning methods to learn new skills. Kathryn followed up each class with an email containing additional materials, resources and links which further extended the learning by doing experience and built upon what we had learned in the class.

It was a few weeks after the class that I noticed Kathryn’s emails contained a link to her website. Navigating to the site showed that it was her professional portfolio. Using the skills I had learned in INF305 I was able to critically evaluate her portfolio, enabling me to get a good sense of her as an information professional and discover what her passions were. Her passions and career goals are very similar to mine and it was beneficial for me to see through her portfolio the steps she had taken with education, professional development and workplace experience to progress her career. While some of my goals are different, I will be able to take some ideas from Kathryn’s portfolio and apply them in progressing my career and reaching my goals.

References

Ho, Leon. (n.d.). What is learning by doing and why is it effective? Lifehack. https://www.lifehack.org/898427/learning-by-doing