Comments on: From the Archives: W.S. Hull’s Report on the Governor’s Mansion

By: Builder Pics: M.T. Lewman & Co. | Preservation in Mississippi

Builder Pics: M.T. Lewman & Co. | Preservation in Mississippi — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 12:02:29 +0000

[...] the state’s first member of the American Institute of Architects and who wrote that wonderful Report on the Governor’s Mansion we all read a while back. Natchez Hotel, from the MDAH Digital [...]

By: Round the Blogosphere 11-15-2010 | Preservation in Mississippi

Round the Blogosphere 11-15-2010 | Preservation in Mississippi — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 12:03:20 +0000

[...] in the Governor’s Mansion, don’t forget our very own re-print of W.S. Hull’s 1909 Report on the Governor’s Mansion earlier this [...]

By: Carunzel

Carunzel — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:18:54 +0000

Hear, hear to all the unsustainable systems!

I’m definitely not advocating continuing with a card catalog; it was to the point that in certain large libraries they were getting unsustainable. I like Nicholson Baker’s argument that it would have been better to keep them frozen at the point they were converted to electronic. That way we would retain the work that was done, the annotations, the physical clues to library usage, etc. Instead, we are using for scrap paper potentially valuable documentation in the history of libraries and institutions. As an archivist/cataloger I find this an egregious error.

By: ELMalvaney

ELMalvaney — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 18:36:02 +0000

It’s interesting that for all our talk of sustainability, we seem to be focusing only on environmental sustainability, while ignoring that we are creating systems of economics, culture, etc. that only work when everything is going just fine–there’s no backup plan for if the electricity goes out or if there’s a catastrophe. Katrina should have exposed the fallacy of that thinking, but I think it’s human nature to assume that that was just a fluke.

On the other hand, I also see that large collections of paper have their own sustainability problems: take up too much space, break down physically, hard to index, etc.

By: Carunzel

Carunzel — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:21:04 +0000

I have read the article; just read it again last month, in fact! I’ve long wondered, as a fellow traveler with James Howard Kunstler, what will happen re accessability to our library collections when we no longer have the fossil fuels to power anything, much less our on-line public access catalogs (OPACs in library parlance). I know that finding stuff in a library isn’t necessarily first on everyone’s minds in case of power grid meltdown, but a copy of a Foxfire book, for instance, might be very useful for self-sufficient living.

Then again, everything’s probably going to be just fine!