“My curiosity leads me to wonder what the words underneath the slip say. This slip creates a traceable history of the book, showing when it was checked out and returned from the University of California Medical School Library. I also appreciate the shift from hand-written dates to stamps back to hand-written again for the last recorded return date. What happened before the first recorded date? What happened after the last recorded date? This slip also lacks any names…what were the names of the people that checked out the book on those dates? Why did they choose this book, and what did they learn from it?”

Submitted by Catherine Hanson, of Dr. Terry Harpold’s University of Florida course Hypermedia: Futures of Reading.

From the back matter of A Compend of Equine Anatomy and Physiology by William Rice Ballou (1907). Original from the University of California. Digitized November 13, 2008.