The first set of challenges is logistical: bringing students into the Library changed some of the Library’s usual operating procedures and has necessitated adjusting some of my own habits of teaching. The Undergraduate Program was the first time the Library allowed undergrads into the Library to conduct research in any sort of ongoing basis. (There has long been a fellowship for Amherst students that brings two or three students down to do research at the Library for a couple of weeks each year, but the intense use of rare materials and the duration of the fellowship are significantly different from the structure of the Undergraduate Seminars.) Even though the Library was supportive of my program and eager to help adjust policy, there was understandably some concern about how needy the students would be: Would they require a lot of supervision? Would they be asking for lots of assistance? Would they be disruptive to the other readers? (The answer, to all of these, is no: in part because of the intensive training they receive in the classroom about how to handle books and how to find the resources they need, the students are in many ways better prepared to work in the Reading Rooms than many others!) There were also procedural questions that needed to be resolved: before my program, rare materials were not routinely brought into the Library’s classrooms and were never handled by non-staff members in classrooms. Putting together a new policy on classroom use (how many items, how they could and could not be handled, the number of staff members necessary to supervise, etc.) was vital. It also wasn’t difficult, with the supportive curatorial staff. I did have to adjust my own teaching style. My preference is to decide what I’m going to do in any given class as I go along—I might decide to try a particular approach the day before class, if my sense of how the class is proceeding suggests it. But I cannot decide at the last minute to bring a set of rare books into this seminar room: rare materials need to be vetted by the curators in advance. That’s not a big obstacle, but just something I’ve needed to adjust to.

A bigger challenge has been getting used to not having all the answers. My students come from a wide range of majors—English and History, to be sure, but I’ve also taught majors in French, Theology, Art History, Music, Drama, Medieval Studies, and Economics. And because I let them choose any work that was printed before 1700 for their research project, students often choose works that I’ve never heard of. What this means is that I need to learn along with them. A student working on <em>Utopia</em> is fairly easy; a student working on a Czech herbal is a lot harder to offer guidance. But this is also a challenge that’s fun and that is beneficial to both me and my students; if I knew everything, it would be boring for me and wouldn’t allow students room for discovery.