I am sure I am not the only one who complains that summer is going by too fast! It indeed seems that way… For me, it all began with a trip to Southern Spain in May, that we thoroughly enjoyed, then a trip to Southern California for a wedding in June and then to Canada for a few days in July. When you travel time tends to go by faster than if you are just hanging out at home. On top of all of this, until mid June or so, the temperatures were not the usual warm ones, instead they were pretty cold.

I have been learning a lot more now by engaging with ChatGPT and Bard than simply asking my phone questions by saying “Hey Google” and asking random questions. For example, the hard work of planting some vegetables by my wife in our garden hasn’t yielded much this year. When I probed the AI tools, I learned that when the temperature is colder than normal this happens. They cite many reasons including the fact that the bees don’t come out when it is colder to pollinate the flowers. Got it. Could I have found this out through Google search, yes, but through multiple steps for which I don’t have time 🙂

I also learned that squash is monoecious, meaning they have male and female flowers on the same plant and don’t need a pollinator. If so, I have no idea why we are not seeing a lot of squash. Whatever, the bottom line is, it has been a disappointing summer for vegetables. But we had a great outing this past weekend to pick a lot of blueberries and we plan to go next week for picking other fruits.

At work, we are moving forward with all the detailed planning for the Clapp renovation project. One of the biggest challenges that the archives and special collections staff are planning for is how much materials will be required to support the instruction during the time Clapp ibrary is closed. This is a classic chicken and egg problem because we first need to finalize the available space before we can answer this question. We are working on it actively.

Archivists are busy labeling some of the boxes that contain unprocessed materials that we plan to send to offsite storage in the first wave, so as to avoid a lot of work in December. Special Collections librarians are going through an exercise to see what are some of the collections that are unlikely to be used for instruction and see if they can be sent to storage earlier. Research and Instruction librarians are working on the reference collections and making some decisions related to how best to serve the community when we are closed for renovation as well as for the long haul.

We want the library to look and function the way it is until the end of the Fall semester, which means that the time we have for packing and moving to offsite storage cannot begin until the last day of exams. With the week between Christmas and and New Year is one where not just Wellesley College is closed, but our vendors are also short staffed and prefer not to work. That makes it a bit tight to get everything done before the construction begins in January.

We had two excellent “pull sessions” where all parties involved in the renovation met in the same room and the interdependencies of every single thing came to the fore and at the end of it we made adjustments and developed a sound plan.

One of the most important aspect of the move is the valuation of our special collections, archives and general collections. This is important for our insurers. We have not done a formal valuation exercise, so this is hard. We have some assistance and have a very good estimate to work with. One of the challenging thing here is that we have so many manuscripts and papers in our distinctive collections that are unique and not replaceable, so how do you value them? Of course, this has all been thought through by many and we are going through the exercise by consulting with appropriate parties. Obviously, if we have digital surrogates for some of these, it is helpful, but we all know that they don’t cut it and we need the primary sources for instruction and research in the end.

As always, playing a lot of golf – mostly good days, but some really terrible days. Good thing that we are members, so if things are not working, I cut the loss and leave no matter how many holes I have completed! I wish I can get the same mindset in trading stocks 🙂

In short, I am just beginning to feel like it is summer, though there is not enough light at 5:30 AM to make it feel that way. But there are more flowers in the vegetable plants, bees pollinating them, a ton of birds eating away the bird food (which I am happy to see), but they also eat the ripe blueberries despite nets (this I am not happy about) and no travels until September, so I will be home…

Another summer, passing by way too fast.