Friday, April 1, 2011

New & Ongoing: Research as Performance piece.


For my 10 credit self directed senior project I am exploring the relationship between consumption and security, or consumption and satiety. One portion of this project is in the form of gorging myself on the Econ section of my school library. I decided to start by counting the books. The first thing I found out was that I am not going to read them in order because the first thousand are Business Planning By County from 1968 on. I liked getting familiar with the scope of the collection but at 2,100 volumes I got tired and went to ask the research librarian:

Librarian: Can I help you with something?

Me: Yes, I was wondering how many books are in the HC section? I tried counting them but it was too hard.

Librarian: Sure, I can find that out for you.

Me: I think there are about 11,000.

Librarian: That's not far off. 10,092 separate titles, although it doesn't show the number of volumes.

And he said I was the most interesting question of the day.

1 comment:

Robert van de Walle said...

I've often thought you were the most interesting question.

What a wonderful ambitious project. How are you documenting it?