 Hello everyone, I'm Keith Webster, Dean of University Libraries. It's my great pleasure to welcome you to this virtual event to celebrate our special collections and showcase the work of our curator, Dr. Sam Lemley. We're all incredibly proud of Sam's accomplishments over the years since he joined us, and they are even more remarkable given that our libraries were in lockdown for the first six months of his time at CMU. It is commonly held that you can't have a great university without a great library, and during the 20th century that was understood to mean vast collections. Today, much contemporary scholarly content arrives on university campuses and in libraries in digital form, and gone are the days when we can measure current academic content based on the number of books on stacks. That has led to a couple of trends. The first is a sense of loss in that these current materials arriving at our computers are intangible, and secondly, every library acquires pretty much the same materials, so the measure of distinction brought about by the size of collections also has disappeared. These trends have led to a resurgence of interest in special collections, in fine and rare books, in scientific instruments, and other materials that support scholarly inquiry and academic research. We are so fortunate at Carnegie Mellon to have some wonderful special collections, and Sam will highlight some treasures from those in this presentation. I'm particularly grateful to those who support our work. The Posner Fine Arts Foundation and Executive Director Anne Malloy for their continued support. Pamela McCordock, a wonderful and generous donor who, with her late husband Joseph Traub, acquired a magnificent collection that now sits in our fine and rare bookroom. And of course the Hunt family who gave Hunt Library, the building in which our collections are housed, and where I am standing today. Sam and I are presenting to you from the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation on the top floor of Hunt Library, and we're grateful to Terry Jacobson, the director, for allowing us to make use of his facility for this production. Enjoy Sam's presentation. Hello everyone, welcome. I'm Sam Lemley, Curator of Special Collections, and thanks Keith for that introduction. The first thing that I want to share with you tonight is this book. It's a single volume of a scholarly journal that was published by the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1710. And for those of us that are familiar with the way that publishing works in academia, the idea of a scholarly journal will be somewhat familiar. But at the time, in 1710, this was an incredibly new and groundbreaking genre. And I think the real advantage of this form is that it passed the cost of publication from the author, from the printer, off to annual subscribers to the particular journal. And what that meant is that scientists, in particular mathematicians, but also archaeologists, linguists, really anyone working in sort of niche fields, were able to publish very short form discoveries. And quickly, right, these were sometimes issued monthly. So I think you really can't overestimate the impact that this genre had on the history of science and its advancement, its rapid advancement, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries. So in this particular volume, there's a very short article by the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. And this article is titled Brevis Descriptio Machini Arithmetikai, for a brief description of an arithmetic machine. And you can see that this is something that Leibniz is describing and announcing. In the first line, he says he invented it in his adolescence, or rather modestly, in 1673. But that's interesting in itself, right? So it's only published in 1710, decades later. That's an indication of the amount of refining that Leibniz had to do on this machine that he's describing. This is the first published account with an illustration of a mechanical computer. Leibniz was sort of, his design was groundbreaking in a number of ways, which I'll get to in a minute. So what is this machine? Well, if we turn to an accompanying illustration at the back of the book, there it is, right? So it's kind of an odd-looking thing. It's in a wooden box with a handle, some hinges. There are these small windows at the top, dials here, and then this sort of hand crank. So you probably can see that we have something right next to me on the table here resembling this illustration. And in fact, this is a replica of Leibniz's 17th century calculating machine. This particular model was built by an Italian model maker, Roberto Guatelli, in the middle of last century. And it came to CMU with the Trauma Cordic Collection just a couple years ago. So you can see a little bit, in a little bit more detail, what's going on with this machine. We can't take the casing off to show the sort of intricacies of its mechanics. But you can kind of get a sense of how it would be operated. So there again, on the upper edge, there are these 16 windows, and that's where the solution would appear. So you could calculate a solution up to 16 digits. And then there's another small line of small windows here where you enter the digits you're going to be calculating with, right? So Leibniz's machine wasn't entirely groundbreaking. There were actually earlier mechanical calculators much like this, probably most famously the one that Blaise Pascal invented and designed a couple of decades before Leibniz worked on his. But significantly, Pascal's only did addition and subtraction, right? Leibniz found a way to build a machine that was capable of all four arithmetic operations, right? Subtraction, addition, multiplication, and division. So you can imagine just the complexity of engineering and also the skill of the people actually tasked with building this thing. It's a monument of engineering and mechanics. So I think I'm starting with this pair of objects because it kind of encapsulates what I think we want to accomplish in special collections at CMU. You know, we're really interested in telling the history of computing over the long duray, right? Sort of from the 17th century when you sort of get these early experiments in mechanical calculation all the way through, you know, mid-century pioneers like Alan Turing, Grace Hopper, Von Neumann, et cetera. These are all names I'm sure this audience will recognize. So, but what is the genealogy, right, through and between those centuries and how can we represent that genealogy and that history in the form of a collection? So that's the main reason why I wanted to start with these two artifacts from Leibniz. The other reason is, you know, insofar as a discipline can be said to originate in one individual, I think the history of computer science arguably could be said to originate in Leibniz and his immediate circle because he was not only working on the design and sort of operation of mechanical computers, calculators he also developed a system of symbolic logic and probably most famously he developed the system of binary code one and zero that influenced modern binary code that's still used today. So, you know, he's working on these sort of three strands of thought, right, symbolic logic, binary code and, you know, mechanically assisted computing that are still with us, are still with us in the history of computer science, you know, just across campus too. You know, and I'll just kind of, as a brief aside, something else, another treasure in the collection that we have of Leibniz's is a first edition of his Nova Methodus, which is his calculus, right. So Leibniz is probably most well known for his invention independently of Newton of the calculus. So this is the first appearance in print of the calculus 1684 and again this is in an annual volume of another scholarly journal called the Acta Aruta Torum. It was published in Leipzig. So very, very common for Leibniz to publish in this form. He published hundreds of articles like this over the course of his career and this just gives you a sense of the range of activity, right, that he was up to over the course of his life. With this next object, we jump forward in time three and a half centuries to another very familiar name in the history of computer science and that's Alan Turing. So this is a volume of the academic journal, another scholarly publication, called Mind, which specialized in human psychology, which might strike as his odd. Alan Turing is obviously dealing with computer and machine intelligence, not human intelligence, but he saw a close connection there. So this is volume 59. It was published in 1950 and I'll turn to Turing's article now. So the name, the title of the article is Computing Machinery and Intelligence. This was an incredibly groundbreaking event in sort of the history of the theory of artificial intelligence. It's where Alan Turing first described what became known as the Turing test, but what he called the imitation game and that's just a sort of thought experiment in which you test a computer for a human standard of intelligence. Of course, famously, we have still not built a machine that reaches that standard. So Turing in this article, of course, introduces that concept, that standard, and it was kind of groundbreaking because before this, the idea of a computer intelligence, machine intelligence, was a bit vague, right? No one knew how exactly to determine whether a machine, whether a computer was in fact intelligent. So he sort of wandered into this debate and came up with a fairly brilliant way of determining this kind of controversial question. But I think what makes this article really significant is actually the second idea that you find in its pages and I'll turn to a subsection of the article which Turing gives the title Learning Machines, right? So you can see there, Section 7, Learning Machines. So again, before this article, it was assumed that machines could only do what they were told to do, right? And that was it. Machines, Turing says, were often thought to never be able to surprise human beings. Of course, he responds by saying, actually machines surprise me all the time. And he has this really enduring view of the potential to actually program a machine, a computer, to behave in a way that was similar to the child's mind, right? So this was hugely groundbreaking. The assumption had long been, you know, let's program a computer to resemble an adult mind. But what Turing said was, no, let's consider a heuristic model for programming a machine that might attain artificial intelligence so that we could actually teach the machine through sort of question and response interactions rather than trying to sort of anticipate every possible scenario and program for every possible scenario. So I use the word endearing because I really like Turing's later papers, his later scholarship for this sort of boundless optimism that they show after his academic work first at Cambridge and then at Princeton, and then his wartime service, of course, at Bletchley Park in the cryptanalytic unit, which I'll actually be seeing at Enigma Machine in just a moment. So after that sort of official work and academic work, he joins the University of Manchester. And a lot of his work in this period in the early 50s, right before he dies, is much more speculative and imaginative. I think this article is a perfect example of that imaginative range that Turing was capable of. And literary style, he writes in a really engaging way. One thing that I really like about this article is the way that it ends. So I'm going to turn to that line and he writes, we can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done, right? So again, this sort of sense of boundless optimism and, you know, applying our imagination into these fairly technical problems, you know, if we do that, if we accomplish that sort of imaginative element in this work, really we can sort of find out amazing things. So, you know, there's also a tragic element to this story, because, of course, four years after the publication of this article, Alan Turing would die by suicide after being convicted by the British government for a gross indecency, basically being prosecuted for his homosexuality. And he was forced to undergo a regime of chemical castration, essentially. So just terrible end to a brilliant life and the loss is somewhat incalculable. What would he have contributed had he been given another 50 years of life? We just can't know. Another reason why I'm sharing this book is I often get the question, you know, what makes a rare book rare? And I think this is an example of a book that might not look the part, but is rare for a variety of reasons. You know, we tend to assume, you know, a rare book is not only valuable and significant in history, but it looks good. And as you can see with this one, it's not a very good looking copy of this book. You know, there are library stamps on the edge. This isn't sort of a basic library, what's called a buckram binding. And there are actually pieces of tape holding pages of Turing's article together. So, you know, and there are copies out there in the antiquarian book market that come up at auction that are in pristine condition that have the original binding. But, you know, I kind of like that this copy is a bit beat up because this is CMU's copy. As recently as two months ago, this copy was in circulation. CMU students could come in and check it out. So, and that's sort of an ongoing project in special collections in the libraries here. It's something that we've been able to do during quarantine, but we're sort of methodically going through the catalog and looking for important articles in the history of computer science, much like this one, Turing's here. You know, articles by people like John Van Neumann, Claude Shannon, Grace Hopper, right, these sort of pioneers that are contemporaries of Turing. And we're identifying those as culturally significant, particularly in this story that we're trying to tell about the history of computing and removing them to special collections, right, so that we have, you know, an original copy of, you know, the material artifact of the origination of that idea contained in them. But, you know, and there's also the aura of provenance in this particular copy, which I can wax poetic about. This was the copy of Turing's computing machinery and intelligence that was in circulation when Herb Simon was working right here. So, you know, it has the history of place, right, in it. And for that reason, you know, I don't particularly care that it's beat up. It's CMU's copy. So that's just an example of how, you know, books despite condition, despite appearance, can become rare, right, particularly as the ideas they contain kind of transcend to cultural relevance and importance. And that's certainly true of Turing's book here. So next, as promised, these are probably the most well-known objects in the collection, if not the most immediately recognizable, at least when their cases are closed. These are two enigma machines. They're cipher devices used most famously or infamously by the Nazi military in World War II. And we have a three-rotor model, and that'll make sense when I open them up, and a four-rotor model, and I want to start with them closed because you can see the original serial numbers at the back of the boxes here and here. So what I'll do is I'll turn them around carefully. You can see that they're encased in these sort of oak veneer boxes that have handles on them so that they would have been, you know, portable in field service. And then on the backs, there are these metal latches which open. And then very gently, there we are. So I'll move that one there. That's the three-rotor model. You can see the three rotors, and this one is the four-rotor. This one, I'll carefully set that down there. So these are, of course, famous objects. They have a very dark history naturally being used by the Nazis, but they're also relevant to the collections we're building, not least because Alan Turing, who we just met, worked on deciphering the enigma code at Bletchley Park during World War II. So the enigmas were, or the enigma machine was originally invented by a man named Arthur Scarbius, who was a German inventor. And the 1920s. And the original object of the enigma machine was actually to disguise commercial secrets, business secrets. So that's who they were sold to initially. But the German military, of course, very quickly recognized the security that they provided in secret communications and co-opted the technology, refined it, developed it further. And both of these are examples of the later sort of 1930s, 1940s era enigmas that have these sort of plug boards at the front. I'll gently fold this down. So I mentioned that this is the three-rotor model. It's the earlier of the two, primarily used by the German army and also the Air Force. So, again, this is kind of like Leibniz's calculator earlier in that you really can't see the mechanical complexity of the device without removing the case. But it's electromechanical. It was powered by a battery. And very, very basically, when you press one of its typewriter-like keys, you initiate an electrical current, which passes through a secret electrical route to one of these windows, each one showing a letter, and that window would light up, right? And also, every time you pressed one of its keys, the leftmost rotor would advance one step, right? And then once you got through all positions of the leftmost rotor, this one would then move forward once, kind of like an odometer on an old car, right? But what that meant is that once you set up, you know, the three rotors in the initial position, right, with every press of a key, the settings would change, right? So that if I were to, for example, press E three times, each of those three times, it would be assigned another cipher character to hide it, right? So that's what made it almost unbreakable, right? Because basically, the settings of the cipher would change with every single character of what the plaintext entered in to become the cipher text. But that wasn't enough, right, for the German navy. And so the four-rotor model was developed, which basically added, again, another rotor, another level of complexity to the cipher system. And the reason why the navy, the German navy, the Nazi navy, developed the four-rotor model was to protect communications regarding its very important U-boat fleet. And, you know, if you look at these, one thing I really like about the two enigmas we have, this one is in impeccable condition. You almost wonder if it ever saw a service in the field, whereas this one is a little bit beat up. It's the metal components are more rusty. The sort of finish on the casing is kind of worn away. It has this patina. And I like to think that that's because it was exposed to sort of the salt air of, you know, its naval commission. You know, I don't know, but I like to think. So these are naturally incredibly rare objects. You know, the Nazi people, soldiers in the Nazi military were required to destroy the enigma machine if they were ever captured or at risk of imminent capture. So the fact that these survive, you know, is kind of an accident of history. I think there are about 350 surviving examples of the three-rotor model and about half that number of the four-rotor model, which is far rarer. So these are in the Trauma Cordic Collection. Again, that's something that Keith referenced in his introduction. We're incredibly lucky to have them. And already they've kind of made possible really interesting educational programs. In fact, students, graduate students came into special collections about a year ago, a year and a half ago, and took these apart to actually look at how they're put together. And that was an initiative, a program sponsored by the host program, the History of Science and Technology Group at CMU. So there's huge potential here, right, that you can learn people studying, you know, block ciphers or advanced encryption methods. It kind of starts here, right, the history of cryptology. And these join a number of books in the history of cryptography and cryptology. And so this is sort of a side branch of this history of computing collection that we're starting to develop. We have several things in the history of cryptography in addition to things in the history of computing. And of course, those two fields are kind of inextricably linked. But I'll just end by saying that there's, again, Laura, having these shelved nearby works by Alan Turing, you kind of have that history, that relationship that he had with these very dark machines kind of at the height of his career encapsulated in the form of a collection on shelves. With this next object, we turn to something a bit more literary. So this is a first edition copy, first printing of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And this copy in particular is, I think, incredible because it's in immaculate condition. You can see that it's in its original blue paper binding with this sort of gray spine. The title is, you know, PEN'd on the spine volume number there. It's typically in this period, it was published in 1818 when someone bought a book like this from the bookshop. They would then take it to have it bound in a style and level of opulence sort of of their choosing sort of to fit their budget and style and taste. But this one, for whatever reason, comes down to us in its original binding, and that's very unusual. I think personally this is one of the best copies of Frankenstein in existence. So it's really marvelous that we have it. Another wonderful thing about this particular copy is that Laid Inside is a letter, a manuscript letter from Mary Shelley. It has nothing to do with this book. I thought that it might have been a previous owner who just bought this letter and then laid it in as sort of an addition to the value of this book. But there's her signature there, Mary Shelley. So Frankenstein, you know, why did I choose to share this book in particular? Well, you know, it's often viewed as a sort of story of horror, you know, sort of the original monster story. Of course, it's been subject to a host of cinematic adaptations. But besides that, I would actually make the case that it's the first sort of recognizable work of science fiction. And that's because of something really quite simple that Mary Shelley actually refers to in her preface. She said, I'll just read the first line. She says, the event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed as not of an impossible occurrence, right? So she's saying, you know, the sort of revivification, the resuscitation of a human body with an electrical current is not impossible, right? There's a level of possibility there. And we know that when this was first published, again, in 1818, the response from early readers was, did this happen, right? There was some, at least, belief that what the events that described were possible. The reason for that is something that was going on at the time, about the same time, and that's demonstrated by these two other books that I have here. The first is from 1792. I'll turn to the title page here. This is Luigi Galvani's work on animal electricity in the motion of musculature, right? So Galvani and his nephew, Giovanni Aldini, discovered that when muscles were exposed to an electrical current, they would contract, right? And they conducted fairly morbid experiments on animals, and then eventually Aldini experimented on human corpse, which we'll get to in a moment, showing that if you expose tissue to an electrical current, something happens, right? It almost seems to leave its state of rictus and come back to life. So this copy, you can see it's on blue paper, which is unusual. That was sort of deluxe sort of presentation copies of works were printed on blue paper. This copy is from the Posner Memorial Collection. It was given by the family of Henry Posner Sr. to the university, and we now hold it for them. It's particularly strong in the history of science. As a brief aside, you know, I don't have time to show everything here, but there's also a first edition copy of Isaac Newton's Precipia in that collection, as well as first editions by Darwin, Galileo, Kepler, et cetera. So it's really, really strong in the history of science and technology, and we're very fortunate to have it here. So I'll turn to illustrations in these two books. At the back here in Galvani, you have depictions of frog legs being exposed to an electrical current there. So the frog's legs would sort of jump when electrified. But more to the purpose, getting back to Mary, Shelley, and Frankenstein, is a later book. So I said that was published in 1792. This is 1804. This is Giovanni Aldini. So the nephew of Galvani continued these experiments and eventually published his theoretical and experimental essay on Galvanism, because at that time the name of his uncle sort of was lent to this new phenomenon. And the reason why this is, I think, more important in relationship to Shelley and Frankenstein is that in 1803, a year before this was published, Aldini conducted these electrical experiments on the recently deceased body of the murderer George Forster in London. And there are illustrations showing these experiments undertaken in London just there. And I don't think that there's a direct line from Aldini and Forster and Shelley. I mean, at the time Shelley was only five years old. But this was sort of an event in London society. It was written about repeatedly. And of course these depictions, these illustrations, circulated fairly widely. So you can see it's kind of morbid, but sort of witness accounts say that when George Forster's body was exposed to an electrical current, even one of his eyes opened. So there's this sort of visual immediacy of a body being resurrected that I think Shelley had in mind when she wrote her account of Frankenstein's monster. But I go back to my original point, which is this is less a horror story than it is a work of science fiction. And that's because Mary Shelley, way ahead of her time in sort of writing about current science and imagining its potential applications or its potential outcomes. And of course there's also a tenuous connection to the history of computing because the first performance of Frankenstein when Shelley read to her group of friends, Byron, Lord Byron was present, and of course Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, was an incredibly important pioneer in the history of computing, worked with Charles Babbage on developing the difference engine. So there's that genealogy again that even reaches to Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. So you sort of see these conversations happening between these artifacts and books in a really fascinating way. So this next item is a true treasure in special collections. Many of you will recognize it. I'll open to the front page. This is a copy of Shakespeare's first folio published in 1623 in London. So it's significant because it's the first collected edition of all of Shakespeare's plays to appear in one book. It was published seven years after Shakespeare died in 1616. And it's always been a sort of collector's item. It's famously valuable and valued by collectors, though not particularly rare. There are something like 235 copies in existence. The other reason why this book is significant, it's not just its rarity, it's not just its value, but it's the question of survival. So there are 36 of Shakespeare's plays in this book, and a full half, 18, appear nowhere else. So absent Shakespeare's original manuscripts, none of which survive, this is the only attestation of those 18 plays. So if this book hadn't been printed, if this book didn't exist, plays like Macbeth and Julius Caesar would not exist either. So it's a demonstration of the kind of remarkable survival that the printing press could sort of affect in this period when so many texts were lost. So that would be significant in and of itself, the fact that we have a first folio. It's very unusual to have one of these, and we're very lucky to have it. That's not all, though. We actually have two copies each of the second folio, the second folio, the third folio, and the fourth folio, which are all the folio editions of Shakespeare's plays that were published in the 17th century. And this matters that these are all in one place because you can sort of study how Shakespeare was received through the 17th century, how readers and performers of his plays sort of changed their understanding of his language over most of a century. This last thing that I'll share is actually a new acquisition. It's something that we purchased for the collection just last month, and it arrived just last week. So this is actually the first printed book on the subject of robotics. It was published in Venice in 1589. It's quite an old thing. So this is an Italian translation of a classical work by a hero of Alexandria on mechanics and automata, which are sort of early robots. But the Italian translation, I think, of the title is really wonderful. It's on automatons or machines that move themselves, so you can make a brilliant definition, if you will, of robots. So there was a 17th century and late 16th century fascination with robots and automata. There's sort of advanced puppets in a way. But again, as I was talking earlier about the sort of genealogy of the history of computing, there's a comparable genealogy in the history of robotics. And this gives me an opportunity to call out my really brilliant colleagues at the archives who are currently working on putting together a robot archive, a sort of archive of CMU's work and innovations in robotics and the story of robotics from a more contemporary lens. So I view it as a special collections role to tell the prehistory of that story. And I think I would argue that that prehistory really starts here with this book and the sort of reception of classical mechanics and the sort of effort by Renaissance scientists to build machines that do things like robots might do today. So I'll give you one example with an illustration here, which I just really like. It's an image of a machine that cuts wood automatically. So you have this sort of awkward apparatus, the gear with these sort of sharp teeth and these two weights which actually power the machine, the idea being, you know, I'm not sure this actually worked, but the idea being can we construct an automotor that would be capable of doing something that might be viewed as difficult by humans, right, cutting wood? So thank you for joining me for this special behind-the-scenes look into some of the treasures in special collections. I hope that we've given you a sense of the kinds of things that we're collecting, our ambitions for the collection and the kinds of research and projects that we support in special collections. I would encourage you to reach out to me with any questions. And I look forward to the Q&A following. Thank you very much. Sam, that was wonderful. Thank you so much for giving us that first glimpse into the world of special collections at CMU. Some remarkable treasures there, which I'm sure we will talk more about as we work through the questions that the audience are sending in. And please do send your questions in. I can tell already we have more than 20. We're not going to get through them in the next 20 minutes, but we will follow up with each of you individually or publish our responses with the video. We'll figure something out. But Sam, I'm really intrigued to begin our conversation by asking you to say a bit about how you got to where you are today. What sort of training prepares you for this role? You've got a very eclectic knowledge. I'd love just to tease that out a little bit further. Yeah, it's a question that I get pretty frequently. And it's a question that I can really only answer, like having in retrospect, like looking back on where I've been, the people I've met along the way. But I think my journey into rare books started in undergrad. I worked in the rare book collection at the university I was at. First in the cataloging department, but then eventually the curator, she sort of took me under her wing and invited me to participate on some really fascinating projects. And then I eventually convinced the university's conservator to let me work in the conservation lab, basically building enclosures for books, archival enclosures for books, and repairing tears in manuscripts. I don't think I was aware then how lucky I was. I was an English major, but I think that the fairly comprehensive view that I got into how a special collections library operates day to day, I think it planted a seed that from that point started to grow. And after that experience, it really sort of led me to pursue a graduate degree in librarianship first. So I actually did that in New York City. And I did that in New York City because there was a program that offered a concentration in rare books and special collections librarianship. And that was really formative, not just because it was well taught. You know, at the time it was led by Fernando Pena, who's just an exceptional teacher. He's now at the book department at Christie's Auction House. But also because the program was in New York City, which you have in a very small geographic area, some of the most important and phenomenal special collections libraries in the world. Places like the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library, Columbia University, the Grollier Club. And a lot of my coursework and librarianship sort of took me into these collections to work and research. But just sort of pursuing that through line, I think the most formative experience that I had was actually working in the antiquarian book trade. You know, through a friend of a friend, I was sort of put in touch with the antiquarian book selling firm WP Watson, who specializes in the history of science. And so I ended up working for Rick, who's the owner at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, basically selling books and learning the trade. And I think that that might surprise some people. I think there tends to be a pretty stark divide between librarianship at the antiquarian book trade. And I think for a large part that's for a good reason. But my time in the trade showed me that booksellers are themselves really phenomenal scholars. And there was this entire sort of intellectual world in the history of books. And there was always going to be more to learn. So I think that experience really led me to pursue a PhD. After that, I went to the University of Virginia, which its English department is sort of known for having this concentration in the history of books and bibliography, which is sort of the, the science of the physical book, the artifact, the book as artifact, you know, famously, you know, the University of Virginia hosts rare book school, which has been called summer camp for book nerds. Right. So there's sort of this, there's this culture there that really spoke to me that centered on the book as an artifact. And so I viewed my time there as a kind of a necessary period for kind of honing my research chops right in this field. So yeah, I finished the PhD late last year and was very fortunate to be considered for this job and to get it. So that's sort of, that's sort of my backstory. Wonderful. Well, we're of course thrilled that you chose to come to see and we're delighted to have you on our faculty. A couple of questions about conditions and that sort of thing. Let me preface the first question by acknowledging that I see on the attendee list this afternoon, Mary Kay Johnson, your predecessor, and she deserves a lot of credit for the first part of the question, which is the books are in remarkable condition. How do you maintain them in such good shape? And secondly, I have a question that we knew would come, which is absolutely in line with what I was taught, which is surely you should be writing white gloves whenever you handle their books or artifacts. And did you leave yours at home or was it deliberate not to wear them? Yeah, it is a very common question, but I'm always happy to get it because I think it shows that there's a sense of reverence around these materials. So people want to see them being handled with gloves, you know, cotton gloves. But it's actually better to not use gloves for books, at least, because when you have a glove on your hand, you sort of lose that tactile, you know, accuracy and you're more likely to tear a page or something. I will say that, you know, if I had handled the enigma machines or liveness calculator more closely, like actually now you could probably tell that I was careful not to touch a lot of the metal components. I probably would have worn metal gloves because, you know, the acids, the oils, and skin would damage those materials. But in the case of books, you know, mainly made out of leather, wood, paper, you know, and the paper is incredibly high quality, you know, linen rag. It survived for centuries and they were designed to be handled without gloves. So yeah, that's a common question, a good question. And the other, the first part, and I'm glad Mary Kay is here. Hi, Mary Kay. So, you know, I think that is really about sort of the environmental conditions that we keep these books in. So we're lucky at CMU to have a dedicated space that's environmentally controlled, that has, you know, the security, you know, that you'd expect for this kind of collection. But you know, we keep everything at a fairly regular temperature and also relative humidity level, sort of an ideal range, right? To ensure that these things last for, yeah, so that's a great question. Questions are also coming in about access to these items and there are two threads to this. The first is, do you have these things digitized? Can we view them on screen? And if you don't, do you plan to? And the second is some variant on the theme of can I come and look at these things? What are the opportunities for current faculty and students, alumni, members of the public to visit and look at the items you've shown us today and other things in the special collections? Yeah. So we're lucky at CMU to have a digitization lab. So we do have a program of scanning some of the things we have in the collection and then providing access to those scans on our digital collections repository. We're actually working on sort of a new interface for that resource right now. And then access is as open as possible, really. I mean, if you have an interest in seeing something as a CMU student, as a CMU affiliate, whether an alumni or otherwise, reach out to me and we can set something up. Right now it's a little strange, obviously, with access being a bit curtailed, but it's part of my job, really, to provide access to these things to make sure that they're there to be seen and enjoyed and researched. So yeah, that's always an option. How do you build things for the collection in terms of how do you decide what to select and purchase or bring into the collection and how do you make decisions about gifts and donations? Yeah. So the question is kind of how do we acquire things? It's either one of two ways, really, either by donations when it gives us something, right? Usually alumni who have assembled a collection over the course of their lives and want to see that collection kept intact and put to use in some way, giving to a place like CMU ensures that that's possible, that that's the case. So that's pretty conventional. But the other way is that we acquire things by purchase. That's either through the antiquarian book trade or at auction. And what guides those decisions, what we accept as donation, what we end up buying, we end up writing a pretty comprehensive collection development strategy, right? Which kind of articulates our focus for the collection. And as I mentioned in the pre-recorded section of this event, we're really starting to focus increasingly on the history of computing, cryptography, robotics, right? Things that CMU is known for, right? And that's the goal, right? You want the collection, you want special collections to reflect the culture of the institution it's part of, right? You want it to be relevant and interesting to the community that it serves. But to circle back to the question of donation, it's certainly true at CMU and I think it's true at most special collections libraries, but we really only exist because of, you know, the well-timed generosity of donors over the years. You know, the story of the founding of the rare book collection really goes back to the Hunt family. Rachel Hunt was, I would argue probably the most important collector of botanical books in her generation, maybe of all time. And she had this really phenomenal collection in the history of botany, and she wanted to find a home for it. So on the condition that CMU would accept this collection, and this would eventually become the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, on that condition, the Hunt's agreed to fund the construction of Hunt Library. And, you know, Rachel Hunt being a typical book collector, she had, you know, a variety of tastes, so she didn't only collect botanical books, she was actually a book binder herself, and she just collected fairly widely in other fields. So her non-botanical books, everything else in her collection came to CMU libraries and sort of formed the core of special collections. So that was the foundation, and then another really important donation in the late 70s came from Charles Rosenblum, who is a sort of Pittsburgh entrepreneur. For example, he gave all the folios, Shakespeare's first folio, and then copies of the second, third, and fourth. There are also copies of the second, third, and fourth in the Posner Memorial Collection. So, you know, but that really kind of added a lot of really amazing things, Rosenblum's gift, including Frankenstein, the copy we just saw. And then a little bit later, the Posner Memorial Collection was founded by the Posner Farnats Foundation, the Posner Family, and Henry Posner Sr., kind of like Rachel Hunt, was really a leading collector in the history of science and technology in particular for most of the second half of the 20th century. So, you know, his collection, which is sort of, was founded in his memory, is really strong in those fields. Yeah, donation, purchase were really, those are the two ways that we get things, yeah. So, we have a couple of questions, and I will see now we're at 45 questions. We're certainly not going to get through these, but questions about the, and you've touched on this already, but the themes that you are interested in pursuing as you further develop the collection, you've touched on things like robotics and the history of science, but do you have a crisp list of themes or is it a very open and speculative process? And also a question about what is the landscape in the current collections around the history of science? Are there other treasures? If we were doing a second episode of this, what would be the next set of treasures? Yeah, it's a frustration, right? We're sort of limited for time, but there are so many treasures I wish I could have shared. So, yeah, I'm happy to talk about that. But the question of the focus of the collection, I said earlier that my goal is certainly to make the collection relevant to the teaching and research focus of CMU. The challenge is to make that collection speak to the community it's meant to serve. That's what I said earlier. And it's kind of a personal challenge for me personally because I'm kind of a died in the wool humanist. So I've had to rethink a lot of the assumptions that I bring to Special Collections Librarianship and kind of rethink what that category, right? Special Collections might mean or could mean at a place like CMU. But having said that I'm a died in the wool humanist, I would also describe myself as a technologist, right? I'm not an engineer. I don't have that expertise, but some of my favorite books are in the history of science, history of technology. And frankly, I think these books in these fields are the most beautiful and the most fascinating. So there again, I think I found the prospect of working at CMU and taking on the role of leading this collection as something really exciting. But there's a host of challenges in that. I think particularly as the cost to collect things, you know, not only the cost to purchase things, to acquire things, but to safely house them as that cost continues to increase, every university can't collect everything, right? So we kind of have this imperative out of place like CMU to sort of rigorously select our focus, pare it down to the essentials so that we can become a leader in a particular field or fields. And at CMU, I think that's going to mean building, frankly, a fairly weird collection, but also a wonderful collection in that it's not just books, right? And that's why we have things like the enigma or Leibniz's calculating machine, which I think is very unusual, right? These are things that you might find in a museum dedicated to the history of science, but very rarely in a special collections library. And that presents, you know, kind of day-to-day challenges, like the infrastructure of a library is kind of designed to handle book-shaped things. So to toss in, you know, an electromechanical cipher device kind of into the works, it's forced us to kind of think quickly and think differently about what we're doing. Yeah, I think in an academic community that's made up of, you know, certainly really brilliant humanists and students and humanities, but also engineers and computer scientists, you know, these kinds of objects, enigmas, calculating machines, et cetera, they're just as legible and interesting as a 400-year-old book. So, you know, my task is to find out how to care for, describe, and provide access to some of these things, you know, both Shakespeare's first folio and things like early transistors, right? Which is, it's a lot of fun. So I'll finish by just speaking briefly about other things that we have in the collection. You know, the history, we're really lucky. I said this in the pre-recorded section, but we're very fortunate to have the Pozner Memorial Collection because, you know, it's full, chock full of these high points in the history of science that are almost unobtainable now, certainly in the antiquarian book market at auction. You know, usually private collectors are buying these things, but libraries are sort of on the sidelines for obvious reasons. But, you know, I mentioned, we have a first edition of the Principia Mathematica, you know, Isaac Newton, foundational in the history of modern physics and mechanics. We also have a first edition of Darwin's Origin of Species. It's actually inscribed to his friend. I'm forgetting the name of the friend, which I should know, but, you know, so it's a really fascinating artifact about, you know, Darwin's like intellectual circle. We have a first edition of Copernicus's Dave Revolutionibus, which is a mouthful, but that's the first description of the heliocentric solar system, right? So before then, it was always assumed that the Earth is at the center of the solar system or terrestrial system, I guess. But 1542, right? Copernicus publishes this and sort of throws that out the window. Yeah, so there are so many treasures. And I do regret that we don't have more time to share them. But again, access is open. If you have questions about things we have, if you want to see some of these things, do feel free to reach out. And I've noted that we will have a second edition of this. In a smaller world, a bit of un-staged propping, the ink illustration over my left shoulder is of the cathedral in Poland where Copernicus was baptized. But that's a story for another day. Somebody asked the interesting question, you know, I think the question was, have you read all of the books? But you've only been here a few months. But do you read the books that are in special collections? And supplementary from another questioner, do you enjoy normal books? And what sort of thing do you read in your free time? I know you've got a four-month-old child, so time might be tight. But love to hear your reading habits. Yeah, I think it's essential that, you know, someone in my role, a curator of special collections, is actually reading the things that are in his or her care. And that's something that I've really enjoyed doing is actually reading things by Alan Turing, for example. I had never read Alan Turing. My background is in English literature, 17th century English literature under theography of book history. And I commented on that in the prerecorded section that it really amazed me to find that Alan Turing's articles are not only approachable, but really engaging. He writes, he has his own literary style. And I think it's, you know, there's this false distinction that's often made with like the humanists are creative and the scientists are more like empirical. But I think what, you know, special collections in the history of science and technology can show is that, you know, there's this amazing imaginative world that's going on in the history of science that, you know, all you have to do is sort of crack some of these books open and then you find it pretty quickly. And the question, do I, do I read? Yes. I mean, you can see behind me, this is only probably an eighth of my book collection, you know, but so it's obviously comes with the territory of doing a PhD in English literature. You know, as I said, my background is mainly in 17th century poetry, you know, antiquarian literature. But yeah, I collect books myself. I've always been a book person and always shall be a book person. So, yeah. There was a lovely book. It's probably more than 20 years old that was published in the UK called The Cambridge Quintet, which featured a fictitious dinner party hosted by C.P. Snow. And you prompted me to think of that because C.P. Snow wrote about the two cultures. He was a great British polymath of the mid 20th century. And I had wondered whether Snow and Turing might have been in some way contemporaries. And of course that book featured as his four dinner party guests, Alan Turing as one of the guests alongside Wittgenstein, Schrödinger and G.B.S. Haldane. So, you know, there are lots of potentials there to try and stitch that together. I'm conscious that we're coming to the end of time. We will follow up with a release of the recording and I suspect a transcript and that sort of thing. I would love to hear your thoughts, Sam, as a final question on those who want to support your work. How can they support special collections? Can they help with acquisitions or your work in any other way? Yeah, that's a great question. One that I'm very happy to get. There's really a host of ways that you can support what we're doing in special collections. You know, we're very fortunate in the libraries to have some brilliant people actually working on, you know, making giving easier and more accessible. You know, one example recently, the Posner Fire Enhance Foundation just established a research fellowship that will bring one graduate student or early career scholar into the collection to actually work on the dissertation project or article or research in general. And the Posner Fire Enhance Foundation has also long supported a internship program for graduate students. But more recently, we just established an acquisitions fund that accepts donations on any scale. And you have to remember that, you know, while we use the acquisitions fund to like buy things, purchasing things, acquiring things for the collection, you know, directly supports things like research or seeing these students' exhibitions that we put on the libraries and other programs, right? So it's acquisitions, but it makes what I do and what we do possible on every level. So if you have ideas on that vein, you know, get in touch. Morgan Walbert is our Associate Director for Advancement in the Libraries and she's been really helpful on working on this. Well, thank you, Sam. Once again, it's been a wonderful opportunity to get to know you better, to begin to see the fruits of your work. Thank you again to those who have supported Special Collections at CMU for many years. Thank you in anticipation to those who might join us on that journey. We'll be in touch with some follow-up materials. I'll link to the recording answers to some of the questions we couldn't get to. But please do get in touch with Sam, with myself, with Morgan. If there's anything we can help you with, we'd appreciate it to see such a large audience. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you, everyone.