Oblivion:Roleplaying/Librarian or Archivist

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Librarians and archivists are slightly different, but most players will be familiar with librarians. In general, collect books, pamphlets, and other printed material such as notes, and organize them in some manner in your library (house). The people involved in creating Oblivion put a lot of effort into fleshing out the world, and there are a lot of books and other printed material. Have you, the player, actually read much of the text they created? The Skingrad house works well as a library or archive due to its display cases, study areas, and many bookcases (how many shelf-feet of material do you have?). You can also hire a full time librarian for it. Lastly, there are some collections-related quests, such as The Collector and its two related quests and Lifting the Vale. Maybe you start these quests but keep the items.

[edit] Librarian

• Focus on book collection. Do you have all the volumes of multi-volume series?
• How thorough is your rare book collection? It's not? Go get those rare books!
• You might also have a section of newspapers. Is it complete? Finish quests that cause a special edition of the BHC to be printed and add it to your collection.
• Encourage reading. Take books to places where the public hangs out (inns, pubs), and try to start a reading group. Leave books there for people to read (although they might disappear, so leave easy to find ones).
• Encourage people to borrow books (reverse pickpocketing). If they don't return them, charge them a late fee.
• Travel the land looking for rare editions, make the bookstore traders your friends, swap editions with them.
• Do you have the best library in the land? Is it better than the library at the Mages guild?
• Visit your underfunded branch libraries out away from the cities (the pubs and inns in the countryside). Bring them books.
• The library of Kvatch has been destroyed! The poor citizens are bereft of reading material and the joys and benefits associated with it. Mount a relief effort, start a book drive for the survivors (convince merchants to sell you books at discount), and deliver books to the survivors.
• If using your house with its tiny few bookcases is not what you consider a library, then clear out a guild's bookshelves and replace them with your own. (Note that some people may take your books in guilds.)
• You can start a book club in Seridur's basement as the occupants are almost always reading books there.

[edit] Archivist

• You'll have books like a librarian, but archives tends to focus on a person, group, company, city, or some other historical instance.
• Make sure to keep to writing materials away from the books and other records. A vandal, pretending to be a researcher, might try to destroy controversial material!
• Have a desk available with a pen, inkwell, and paper so people can take notes on the material in your archive, and soft gloves for them to wear so they don't damage the material.
• You could play a paranoid, thieving archivist and be convinced that the public doesn't know how to treat books and other material, they'll ruin it with the natural oils on their hands (you wear gloves when you handle material, right?), their page-turning, and exposing it to sunlight! Save (steal) those rare books and material from the ignorant masses! You have to save the cultural heritage of Cyrodiil!

About archivists: Archival role-playing might be more fun, as archivists oversee collections of any material that has cultural and historical weight to it, not just books and pamphlets. Maybe you have a few collections with different focuses. Maybe you have archival material on the Mythic Dawn: their robes, all four Mythic Dawn Commentaries, maybe even the Mythic Dawn shopping list from the Dagon Temple. You don't have their shopping list? What kind of archivist are you!

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