When my university's campus closed and moved classes online in March 2020, I was busy preparing for a presentation at the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) annual conference, to be held in Amsterdam. I was planning a trip to the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University to find the archival sources I needed to complete my research on the use of books in the Congress of Industrial Organizations' workers education program of the 1930s and 1940s. On March 23, 2020, however, the governor of Michigan's “Stay Home, Stay Safe” executive order shut down in-person operations at all businesses in the state as a response to the fast-spreading coronavirus. A few weeks later SHARP canceled its conference. By then, there were almost no flights from North America to Europe anyway. I started to explore digital collections to find inspiration for alternative research projects that could...

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