From the Director

Welcome to the third issue of Mirabile Dictu. I trust you will continue to be as impressed and astonished by the riches of our various Special Collections as I have been in the two years since coming back to Bryn Mawr. In September we will mount an exhibition that will illustrate, through our African collections, the books, manuscripts, objects, and art that make up our unique and special holdings. We hope it will be as successful as "It's the Ticket," the bookbinding exhibition that has graced the Class of 1912 Rare Book Room in the 1998-1999 academic year. In March, we heard from the wonderful book designer Sue Allen as she spoke to a packed crowd on the decorated cloth bindings of the nineteenth century. Her talk, and the panel discussion that preceded it, which featured a valuable contribution from Todd Pattison of the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts, drew favorable reactions from both old and new Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Libraries. The final event of this year's Friends' program features a talk by the noted expert in book preservation Mirjam Foote of the British Library, and coincides with the publication of the catalog for "It's the Ticket."

Andrew Patterson, Florence Goff, and Mark Colvson of Canaday's Reference Department display the new Bryn Mawr College Libraries' travel mugs, "spill-proof" containers approved for use in the Libraries.

This year at the Libraries has been spent successfully blending the traditional and new, combining a year-long celebration of nineteenth-century bookbinding with new steps forward in the realm of technology. Nothing exemplified that blend as well as the Information Fair held for students during the first week of this semester. Visiting all the major sites for libraries, collections, and computing, as well as the Language Learning Center and the Digital Media and Visual Resource Center, many students got a fresh sense of the richness of the world of information that Bryn Mawr College offers. Many visited the Ella Riegel archaeological collection on the third floor of the Thomas Library&emdash;some did not even know there was a third floor of Thomas!&emdash;for the first time and marveled at what they saw; everyone ended up in the newly reconfigured space of the old reserve book room and witnessed its transformation into a student lounge and night study space. The neighboring Canaday Computer and Data Lab and Campus Gallery also demonstrate the Libraries' ongoing commitment to both traditional and new types of information and learning.

We look forward to another year of making the connections between the rare and the everyday, the electronic and the print. And, on behalf of Susan Klaus, Chair of the Friends of the Library, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the Libraries' friends for their continuing support.

Elliott Shore
The Constance A. Jones Director of Libraries