As it is now mid-week, I think I can now say with a reasonable degree of certainty that yes, there is indeed a pattern of crowding and dwindling in the Manuscript reading room at the British Library. Once again on Monday, the room was almost full within an hour of opening. Tuesday, by the same time, it was maybe half full. We'll see if it ends up being around a quarter full by Friday. On a related note, I met an older scholar while waiting outside the library on Monday (this being the day the reading rooms open half an hour later), and he (being a member of the Friends of the British Library) was wondering what I thought about the hours of operation. Apparently, there is a movement going on that would like to see the hours of the library change to what the hours of the reading rooms were in the British Museum when it had most of the cool book stuff (this being 9am, as opposed to 9:30 T-Sat). Interesting....
Today I took off from the library in order to do some writing and organizing. Progress was made, although not as much as I would have liked. Part of this was to the the fact that I am currently forced to use digital versions of most of the texts I am working with, and I gotta say this really makes the case for why we must all pray that printing of books on paper never stops. Yes, digital texts are handy for portability, but it is really irritating (and much slower, or at least it feels slower) to have to switch back and forth between the text onscreen and the word processor. I also realized that for some reason I have a problem spelling the word 'label' accurately the first time around (it always seems to end up coming out as 'lable') which is a problem since I use the word with some frequency (at least in this part of the chapter-draft). I must however profess my new-found appreciation for the DIMEV (if you don't know what this is, it's my new best friend The Digital Index of Middle English Verse) which until a few days ago, I did not know existed. this is one digital thing that I will allow to exist without ranting.
New thing about primary research learned: Having some extra time to go back and A) review and B) look for specific details and answers to particular questions is crucial to working with things like medieval manuscripts. I can only imagine (and pray I never find out for real) how horribly annoying it would be to realize after it's too late, that there is a really cool point to be made, only to realize that you aren't certain of the textual-codicological details that are necessary to make said point.
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