Month: November 2022

Never-Never Bland: Another Fun, Fully-Immersive Georgia Archives Month Program Wraps up at Georgia Southern

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Submitted by Autumn Johnson, Special Collections Librarian, Georgia Southern University

Georgia Southern University’s Special Collections recently wrapped up their Georgia Archives Month program, Bland’s Botanical Bequest: An Escape Game for Georgia Archives. This was the third and most successful game-based instructional program the unit has organized over the past few years that highlights the unique resources offered on their campus. The program builds upon the success of their 2019 Secrets, Sources, and Swamp face-to-face escape room and 2021 semi-virtual Case of the College Sweetheart mystery experience. This year, Special Collections took the escape game concept outside of the library and partnered with Georgia Southern’s Botanic Gardens. The program was held in the Botanic Gardens’ historic Bland Cottage, the 1920s homestead of Daniel and Catherine Bland, who donated the cottage and land to the University in the 1980s.

The game, similar to commercially available escape games, placed players together in a situational enviroment where they must solve a series puzzles and clues in order to solve the task at hand. Specifically, players in this game were given 45-minutes to find the Last Will & Testament of Daniel “Dan” Bland, who upon his passing in 1985, bequeathed his estate to the University.

The Bland cottage was transformed back into the 1980s and reflected the wide interests and hobbies of the Bland family. Many of the clues and puzzles encountered throughout the game were based on actual materials belonging to Dan and Catherine Bland including photographs, a hand-drawn map, herbarium press book, historic newspaper articles, and even an oral history recording. Many of these were rediscovered in Special Collections when Gardens staff began to conduct research for an upcoming exhibition!

By encountering these first-hand accounts and original materials from Special Collections, our players were able to piece together the lives of Dan and Catherine Bland, two citizen scientists who contributed greatly to Georgia Southern and the local community. They discovered the Bland family and their vision to inspire generations of lifelong learner through community gardens while learning more about the breadth and depth of resources available to them from Special Collections.

This program was the most successful to date with over 230 participants during the short-run. The program was made available through generous funding from the 2022 Georgia Archives Month Spotlight on Archives Grant. There will be an encore run of the program in Spring 2023 based on unprecedented demand from both University and greater communities!

More information about the program can be found at www.georgiasouthern.libguides.com/archivesmonth or by contacting Special Collections Librarian, Autumn Johnson at autumnjohnson@georgiasouthern.edu.

To learn more about Georgia Archives Month see SGA’s website.

SGA’s President Reflects on our Annual Meeting Theme

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Submitted by 2022 SGA President Cathy Miller

This year’s annual meeting theme, Sustaining Archives: Practical Solutions for the Future, in my mind, speaks to not only what we have done to sustain the work of our archives, but the work we have done over the last three years to sustain ourselves. During the meeting, specifically in our keynote and in one of the planned sessions, the importance of self-care was emphasized. And boy howdy, can I say what an advocate I have become for self-care in these times. 2022, which is really just 2020 dressed as two kids in a trenchcoat, has been a year, to say the least. There’s been good, sure, but also, to put it plainly, there’s been a lot of suckitude. I hope that everyone who attended the meeting took away many learning moments regarding the work they do, but I also hope that attendees may have taken away new leases on life – I know, that’s a tall order, but bear with me a moment. Maybe you met a colleague at the meeting who plays Animal Crossing as religiously as you do, and before you know it, you are Switch friends and visiting each other’s islands and conspiring about how to take Tom Nook’s empire down. Or you found someone who shares the same hobby as you and you are able to trade ideas. Or you made a colleague who lives near you and now you have a new friend to go grab coffee or food with. In leaving the annual meeting, I hope you were able to take away something that sustains you as the person you are, not the archivist/librarian/information professional that you are.

SGA Keynote Address at the 2022 Annual Meeting

We have a lot of vocational awe in our profession. We are either told by someone or we tell ourselves that we are so lucky to be working in this field and getting to do the things we do, thus we’ll let slide the often poor pay, lax benefits, and multitude of other black marks that our profession is guilty of. I am here to say that while the work we do is awesome and important, the work will never love you back. So please, sustain yourself, however that is, be it treating yourself to a yummy food or drink treat on the drive home from work or going to the dollar spot in Target to see what new and exciting things await you. I’ve been reading T.J. Klune’s Under the Whispering Door – the premise of the novel is that Wallace, a workaholic lawyer, has died and he is given one week to get his afterlife in order and cross over to the great beyond. Wallace decides to embrace living a lifetime in those seven days. Let’s not be like Wallace. Live your life in the present. Leave work promptly at your 7 or 8 hour mark. Go enjoy being you with the people and pets that matter most to you in life.