Filed under: Not so ancient History, Old Technology, Professional, Technology, Thoughts, librarian, library
As the archival assistant here, I tend to get old video tapes chucked at me a lot. This is both interesting and frustrating. Interesting, because it turns shelving into a puzzle that involves moving vast numbers of VHS tapes around and frustrating because I don’t know if the tapes are important or if we have any paper description of them anywhere.
Today, I transcribed a tape at the 2002 Student Service Awards. It was a speech given by Late Senator Paul Wellstone. Seeing that he was kind of a big deal here, I decided to search for the text of the speech. Alas, Sen. Wellstone gave two speeches that day. One was two the DFL convention, and the other was at this awards ceremony. The speech did not appear anywhere online.
So, I called up the state archives. I talked to a lovely Reference Librarian who informed me that while the text of his speech probably exists in their archives, it has possibly not been accessioned yet, and, 6 years on (and this is just my understanding), they have not come to an agreement with the Wellstone family on how much should be released to the public. Being a member of the public, it’s tough luck for me.
So, this morning was spent infront of a TV that has no remote control running back in forth, pausing it, rewinding it, playing it, and trying to type it out at the same time. But we now have a paper copy of the text.
