Adaptation!

Greetings to my readers. Last year at this time, Rudy Bond and I traveled to Emory University's Pitts Theology Library to make a presentation about the EJLPP. Public History MA students at Georgia Southern University are required to present their research projects--the internships they've been working on during the prior two semesters--at a public forum. These projects, of course, have public applications, but our program believes that the presentation is important because it quite literally brings the process as well as the product to the people. This year's MA student, Lauren Della Piazza Hartke, and I were going to go back to Pitts on Monday for the same reason. We're very grateful to Emory for providing us with this platform and with and audience that has a specialized interest in rare books and librarianship.

As a result of the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, however, both Emory and Georgia Southern are temporarily suspending classes and restricting travel. We are therefore going to give the presentation via Facebook live, at 2:00 Eastern time on Monday, March 16. I've never used that before; Lauren has never used it before; we have only vague ideas of how it might work. The idea actually came from our PH Coordinator, Dr. Michael Van Wagenen, who had asked Lauren if we could use it to stream from Emory so that he could see the presentation. As the situation developed and we saw nationwide implementations of the new social distancing recommendations, it occurred to me that we could use the technology from here in Statesboro, and invite a broad audience. Yesterday, I posted the event on the Project's Facebook page: see https://www.facebook.com/events/638118823630510/. I hope that you'll tune in, and that you'll ask questions: while Lauren is talking, I'll be monitoring the feed via my laptop.

This year, we were in a position to do some data analysis, which is really enormously exciting. We are of course disappointed that we won't get the tour of the Special Collections at Pitt, which was a highlight of our visit last year both for Rudy and me. We still have information specific to the Emory books in the talk, in part to express our continued gratitude for their support.

Stay safe, stay healthy, and wash your hands often, everyone.