This entry comes straight from the Schomburg (delayed a few hours for lack of an internet collection) while I await a new box to sift through. There are a lot of things that make the Schomburg an infinitely cooler library than, oh, the Beinecke or even SML Manuscripts and Archives. The only thing Sterling has going for it is that you bump into federation and UOC people everywhere. That’s it. Manuscripts and archives also has some great stuff on strikes of yesteryear, icluding a pretty awesome button collection from 1984, and the entirety of the Donahue transcript, which I’ll probably blog someday, but it, like the Beinecke, is private and restricted to most people on the planet – although both are paradoxically more public than almost any other space on the Yale campus, vaults and all. What I really hate about the Beinecke though is how obnoxious this one guy who works there was to me last year, right before they fucked up my photocopy order and helpd me condemn myself to a very dismal winter break fretting over my ability to get a term paper done that should have been presented to a class a month earlier. Though most of that was my fault. And I never should have taken five seminars in one semester.

The Schomburg’s cool because it’s much more responsive to and integrated into the city and the neighborhood: there’s an exhibit on Malcom X right now and all these court sketches from the assassination trial are hanging from the exhibition space in the Manuscript room and as I’m sifting through the St. Clair Drake papers, people of all ages – senior citizens, school groups, families -- are just wandering around and looking at the exhibit, and it makes sitting in the same place for hours on end sooo much more tolerable than in the dank basement microfilm room or the Beinecke panopticon. Yesterday, there was an adorable baby who was making a lot of baby noise, and it kicked ass. All archives should have babies in them. Thus spake Zachathustra.