Incorporate the rare books experience into your classroom
Rare Books provide enormous potential for impacting student awareness of print culture, literary contexts, and textual variance. They are important for the content they contain, but also for the physical aspects they exhibit, offering historically informed understandings of our cultural heritage, across disciplines. West Virginia University's Rare Book Room offers a respectable list of holdings that underscore these characteristics -- ranging from Diderot's Encyclopédie, to Shakespeare's first four folios, to extensive Asimov editions, and wide-ranging Folklife material. Using the customizable exercises and materials on this website, faculty can teach undergraduates how to analyze and discern meaning from rare texts, and students can learn the conventions of rare book rooms and the ways to handle rare materials properly.
Faculty may use any or all of these exercises, depending on their specific course goals. These exercises are designed to be modular, so they are independent of one another, and each assignment can be adapted to the course's needs. We ask only that you take the time to provide feedback, via the attached form.
All texts presented in the exercises on this website are available in the WVU Rare Book Room (6th Floor, Wise Library) and have been approved by the library staff for class use. Faculty members may additionally request scans of up to five individual items for classroom use, i.e. five pages of a book, five single scans of book illustrations, etc.
*At the current time we ask that all visitors to the Rare Book Room follow these guidelines:
