Terminator: The Cyborg in the Archives

Detail from Self Made Man Episode Still Photo

I've been watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and in the second season (disc 3 via Netflix) is an episode entitled Self Made Man (2008) in which an upscale academic library's research archives are a key element.

Cameron, a reprogrammed Terminator cyborg protects John Connor (Sarah's son) and those around him. By the second season she's developing her own network of resources that includes a wheelchair bound grad student who lets her into the library at night when it's closed.

Cameron embarks on a research mission to decipher an image from the 1920's and her search in the library's archives becomes a key storyline for this episode.

Her search entails visiting a number of different collections each of which is stored in a different format. It's a pretty believable romp through the archives with only a couple of unlikely moments that don't mar the pleasant surprise of a library playing a key role in a great television series.

Definitely some potential here to use excerpts from the episode in an introduction to library archives for high school and undergraduate students.

Side note:

The juxtaposition above of the time travelling cyborg on the right, the human in a wheelchair (in a looser sense, also a cyborg) on the left and a traditional card catalog in the background is an interesting one to consider.

Once everything's digitized this story line would have been squashed into a single digital download scene with images from different time periods flickering past.  Who knew old school methods held so much opportunity for drama?