What are academics looking forward to about returning to campus?

As vaccination programmes offer the prospect of a return to physical teaching, what aspects of their pre-pandemic life will academics most heartily re-embrace (or at least touch elbows with)? And are there aspects of locked-down life that they will miss? Our six contributors offer a range of perspectives

Kristen Ghodsee

Getting back to the stacks

When it’s finally safe to return to campus, I will dive headlong into the east wing of the fourth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.

According to the Library of Congress classification system, the H section contains most of the social science books relevant to my research, and it is between the rolling stacks that I will lose myself in something I like to call shelf research.

In those halcyon days before the advent of digital databases, I remember digging through the musty drawers of ancient card catalogues to find a text related to my subject matter. With the call number scratched out in pencil on a scrap of paper, I would hunt down the book. Then I would sit on the floor and take down about 10 books to the left and 10 books to the right of the one I’d searched for. Because librarians have arranged the books by subject matter, I usually find amazing sources that I would not have found by searching remotely through an electronic catalogue. Continue reading