Course Information
Instructor: Joshua Teplitsky
Location: UCLA / Los Angeles
Mode: In-person
Dates: August 3–7, 2026
Tuition: $1200.00
Course Description
Jews are often held up as a “people of the book,” in a fashion that approaches cliché. In this course we will examine the people and their actual books, taking the example of the media of Jews as a diaspora population to explore the making and re-making of books in their historical context. Jews’ adoption and adaptation of media forms at times paralleled and at other times diverged from that of their dominant ambient cultures, and offers a valuable lens to confront transmissions of Jewish culture on its own terms as well as a prism to encounter wider media shifts in politics, culture, gender, and religion. The course will focus primary on the medieval and early modern periods, with framings from antiquity through the digital era, exploring case studies from the ancient Near East, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. The course will be conducted through readings of primary and secondary sources, but will, most importantly, revolve around the examination of material objects and their design and dimensions at the literal center of the table and the core of class discussion.
Course Information
Instructor: Sarah Werner
Location: Online
Dates: August 3–7, 2026
Tuition: $1200.00
Course Description
This online course considers what might constitute a feminist approach to studying books, what the benefits of such approaches are, and how to incorporate them into our own work.
We will center the textual object in exploring these issues, letting artifacts drive our questions rather than the actions of book makers, sellers, or collectors. Another way of putting this is that the course won’t ask who women printing books were, but rather, who determined the terms on which we engage with books. This doesn’t mean ignoring the many agents involved in book work, including the people involved in the long history of book trades, the academic field of print culture and textual editing, and the intersection of these with library practices. But it means that our work this week will be focused on generating questions about methodology rather than recovering names and histories.
We will also wrestle with the theory and practice of feminism, which has a history of different meanings for different communities, and how to develop it as an inclusive practice for our book work. If living a feminist life is, as Sara Ahmed argues, something we must return to over and over, something that we put into practice daily rather than something that stays in the classroom, how do we bring that into our spaces of book work?
Through a combination of short advance readings about bibliography and feminism, course discussions, and your own work with textual artifacts, we will explore what questions are brought to the forefront when we approach our work through a feminist framework. Participants should anticipate two concurrent and two asynchronous sessions each course day, with those sessions being scheduled to accommodate the range of US time zones; asychronous sessions could involve exercises, readings, and off-camera discussions. Discussions and exercises will also try explore different models of pedagogy in order to give participants a feel for what methodologies might suit them best.
The course is intended to be of use to anyone researching, teaching, or acting as a custodian for rare books; although we will pay careful attention to the first centuries of western printing, since the study of those books have shaped the field of bibliography as a whole, the issues the course will consider cover all periods of book study. Participants should not expect to come out of the course having mastered a feminist history of books, but to leave with a set of tools to ask feminist questions of books.
Course Information
Instructor: Trevor Owens
Location: Online
Mode: Online
Dates: August 3–7, 2026
Tuition: $1200.00
Course Description
This course will take a holistic approach to digital content, technologies, standards and policies in special collections. Digital materials are an increasingly routine area of work in special collections, including, but not limited to: collection development considerations and appraisal of born digital and digitized materials; acquisition and processing of born-digital materials; planning for management and access to digital surrogates for objects; online finding aids and reference activities; and ensuring long term access to content through digital preservation work. The first and last of these—born-digital materials and digital preservation—are areas of great activity and developing standards and best practices, and the course will include an emphasis on building basic core knowledge in these areas, together with the means to track developing standards and best practices. We will also consider the role of information technology services—either within the home institution or through external partnerships or consortia—in the management of born-digital materials and preservation of both born-digital and digitized content.
During the course we will also consider the role of digitization projects and services in building special collections of the future. Starting from the obvious premise that building collections of digital surrogates has value in their own right, we will consider the variety of options available for building services upon those digitized collections, including strategies for providing access and reference services, contextualizing digital content and enriching the collection through the participation of our users, and the increasingly important role of research in the digital humanities.
Course Information
Instructor: Ann K. D. Myers
Location: Los Angeles, California | William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
Mode: In-person
Dates: August 10–14, 2026
Tuition: $1200.00
Course Description
Aimed at catalogers who find that their present duties include (or shortly will include) the cataloging of books in their rare materials or special collections and want to be trained in applying Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books). Emphasis will be placed primarily on books of the hand-press era, with some consideration of 19th and 20th century books in special collections. Topics include:
- application of codes and standards, especially DCRM(B)
- transcription, collation, and physical description
- concepts of edition, impression, issue, state
- genre/form terms, relationship designators, other special files
- copy-specific information
- cataloging policy in institutional contexts, including provisions for reparative descriptive practices
This course is intended for working catalogers experienced in AACR2 and/or RDA and MARC 21, and general cataloging principles and practices. No prior knowledge of early books is necessary. The goal of the course is to provide instruction and practice in each of the primary elements of the rare book catalog record, so that students will be equipped to catalog their institution’s rare books and special collections materials to national standards. Please note that this course covers printed monographs only.
Special note on RDA: instruction in this course will be on DCRM(B)—both classic (based on AACR2, as published) and RDA-compliant (as amended by the PCC Bibliographic Standard Record). Please also note that, although Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (RDA Edition) has been published, for the time being this course will continue to use DCRM(B) as the standard, until the Library of Congress and the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) have fully implemented the Official RDA toolkit.
Course Information
Instructor: Filippo Mardente
Location: Los Angeles | UCLA
Mode: In-person
Dates: August 10–14, 2026
Tuition: $1200.00
Course Description
This course explores the material and literary evolution of the Greek book and its spread in Europe following the fall of Constantinople and the invention of movable type printing. Through a historical and codicological analysis, it will consider how the paramount transition from manuscript to print influenced the preservation, the transmission and the diffusion of Greek literature and science. This course aims to provide the tools to conduct historical investigations on manuscripts and early printed books in Ancient Greek, as well as to explore and appreciate the changes that took place in the fields of literature, scholarship and typography in Italy during the Renaissance.
The first part of the course will cover the methods of productions of the objects (the manuscript and the printed book) and the study of those material elements that assist historical analysis (paper, writing, binding). The second part will be devoted to the printing in Ancient Greek in Italy during the 15th and the early 16th centuries. After considering the pioneering works carried out in Milan and in Florence, the classes will focus on Aldus Manutius’ revolutionary editions and on the reasons of their success to the present day. Through an in-person observation of these early Greek editions, it will be analysed the textual and graphic evolution of the printed book as an object. As a conclusion, it will be proposed an overview of the most important collections of Greek books during the Renaissance.e will continue to use DCRM(B) as the standard, with reference to differences coming in the future.
Course Information
Instructor: Eira Tansey
Location: Online
Mode: Online
Dates: August 10 – August 14, 2026
Tuition: $1200.00
Course Description
Climate change is one of the greatest contemporary threats to archives. Increasingly severe disasters like hurricanes, floods, storms, and wildfires pose immediate dangers. Longer-term trends such as migration and rising sea levels may necessitate decisions concerning the geographic relocation of archives. Archivists and cultural heritage professionals, regardless of where they are located, should understand the threats related to climate change and how it impacts our work and cultural heritage institutions. Participants in this course will:
- Learn about the basic science behind climate change
- Explore political governance challenges related to mitigation and adaptation
- Develop personalized strategies for addressing climate grief and anxiety
- Assess how climate change impacts their local region and institutions
- Explore how climate change impacts archives and cultural heritage institutions, both in the short and long-term
- Develop skills in using simple climate change data visualization and mapping tools
This week-long course will take place online between 10 AM and 3:30 PM Eastern. Participants will be expected to participate in an online class environment for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon each day of the course. The course will involve a mix of asynchronous readings, live lectures, class discussions, and workshops using web-based climate change data visualization and mapping tools. Although the course focus is on archives, all information and cultural heritage workers are welcome.
Are you an established expert in rare books, special collections, and print culture? Or perhaps an expert in library and information studies, critical librarianship, or data studies? CalRBS encourages course proposals on innovative topics that build on its vast array of courses focusing on rare books, special collections, and manuscripts.
CalRBS is especially interested in the following areas as they relate to rare books, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums:
- Grant Writing
- Advanced Pedagogy and Teaching
- Remote Course Programming and Design
- Space Planning and Innovative Alternatives
- Social Media
- Programming for ESL and Bilingual Constituencies
- Data Preservation
- Digital Knowledge Repatriation
- Crisis Recordkeeping
- Public Libraries and At-Risk Populations
- Sustainability Studies
- Climate Change Impacts on the Profession
- Grassroots Communities
- Archives Organization
- Reappraisal and De-Accessioning
- Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship
- Data Activism
- Collection Development for Specific Communities
- Ink and Papermaking (Maker studio and/or history of)
- Children and Young Adults and Public Libraries
- Primary sources in K-12 Education
- History, production, and publishing of children’s books
- Material, Collections, and Institutions through Indigenous and First Nation lenses
- International Librarianship, Bibliography, and Rare Books
- Disability Studies
- Feminist and Gender Studies
- Postcolonial, Decolonial and Critical Development studies
- History of small presses and independent publishing in Los Angeles/California/U.S. and beyond
- Gastronomy, cook books, and food culture
- Topic and survey courses that focus on undergraduate and high school students
Courses that focus on critical analysis, diversity, ethics, and promote justice-oriented approaches are especially welcome. In addition to these areas, we are looking for courses that fill identified gaps in the current CalRBS curriculum. While new courses can extend beyond the domain of rare books and special collections, they should contextualize rare books within a larger library and information economy, emphasizing the importance of book and print culture throughout the discipline of Information Studies.