Wednesday

We were in lectures at Charles University Library Science Faculty today. The actual school is in the suburbs of Prague so we took the subway there.
Very steep elevators and they move very very quickly.

We had an overview of the library school and how many students there are (616) overall. They issue 3 degrees here at Charles University in Library Science. A Bachelor's, a Master's and a Ph.D.
We then moved to Czech history. Our guide from yesterday was our history teacher. We got about 1000 years of history in an hour.
It's really interesting. Well the way Vaclav told us it was. Political backroom deals by the church, fraticide, arranged marriages, religious wars, Nazi and Communist occupations, uprisings and censorship, violent crackdowns(Prague spring anyone?) and then finally freedom.

We learned about digital librarianship here and a new project that just got approved by the EU to convert 19th century Bohemica into digital format. And we learned about the marginalia in some of the older manuscripts.

We then headed to the Libri Prohibit to see the banned writer books. After 1968 many authors were banned outright. Didn't matter what they wrote, they couldn't be published. So they wrote their own stuff in secret and typed them in multiple copies to distribute. Which was highly illegal. It's one reason Vaclav Havel was in jail in the 1980's.
Some stuff was banned not because of the author but the translator. Like Shakespeare translated into Czech.
Fascinating. Yes I am a geek.(or intellectual badass...)
No photos, sorry...was on a mission to find a European battery charger. Blew a fuse in the hotel trying to plug in my American charger. Found one!