Sunday, December 30, 2018

Armstrong's Life as He Saw It

Giovanni Russonello, "Armstrong's Life, as He Saw It: The Musician Kept an Archive of Materials to Document His Career.  Now the Collection has been Digitized," New York Times,  November18, 2018, p. AR1-.

     Behind his blistering trumpet solos, revolutionary vocal improvising and exuberant stage persona, how did Louis Armstrong see himself? What was it like to be the first pop virtuoso of the recorded era-- the man whose earliest releases set the tone for America's love affair with modern black music, and who went on to become one of history's most famous entertainers?
     Those questions aren't rhetorical.  There's actually a deep well of resources on hand to help answer them.  For his entire adult life, away from the spotlight, Armstrong amassed a huge trove of writings, recordings and artifacts. But until this month you would have had to travel far into central Queens to find them.  Now anyone can access them. Thanks to a $3 million grant from the Fund II Foundation-- run by Robert F. Smith, the wealthiest African-American-- the Louis Armstrong House Museum has digitized the entire collection he left behind and made it available to the public at collections.louisarmstronghouse.org

COMMENT

     Ricky Riccardo, the archivist at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, makes it sound like the famous musician Louis Armstrong had a bit of librarian in him: "Posterity drove him to write manuscripts and are tapes and catalog everything," he says adding that Armstrong wanted to be in control of his own story.

     Armstrong's single-focus collecting strategy is one that would be hard for librarians to follow yet it created an important archive well worth digitizing.  If a library had, say, a Louis Armstrong special collection it probably wouldn't get a $3 million budget. There is always a kind of guessing game about how to spend the budget, and librarians sometimes guess wrong. It's much easier to look backwards in time to know what turned out to be important.

    Still, the value of hyper-focused collections like this makes me wonder if libraries could create them deliberately.  If I were Queen,  I might give each librarian a "passion project" budget each year to spend on their own collection choices, whatever that happened to be. I think that the result would be worth the money.  A diversity of obsessions represented on the shelves would inevitably improve the "long tail" information resource for all library users everywhere [1].

     Digitization of this particular collection is a gift, but at the same time it's a little bit sad to think of the people who won't be making the pilgrimage into central Queens to stand in Armstrong's house and handle his  things.   Several library anecdotes [2] report a spooky sense of connection that comes from by handling objects from the past.  I have yet to find a story that relates a similarly powerful experience from viewing an online image.

[1] Brunvand, Amy. "Missing Information and the Long Tail: How Distributed Collection Development Assures the Continued Relevance of Libraries.Against the Grain 18, no. 4 (2013): 10.

[2] [[there.]] ;  Inside the List; etc...
 
 

   

Thursday, December 27, 2018

[[there.]]



Lance Olsen. [[there.]], Anti-Oedipus Press, 2014.
:::: My first excursion upon arriving in Iowa City to begin work on what would strike me in retrospect as nothing if not a fraught M.F.A. was into the corner of library stacks housing these by previous Workshop graduates.
     I touched the heavy spines protecting Flannery O'Connor's writing, John Irving's, T. Coraghessan Boyle's, hoping some of their prose would rub off on my hands.
     It's the same electric gratitude I feel walking the halls of the American Academy.
     Hello Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Jeff Eugenides. 
COMMENT

[[there.]] is a travel journal about displacement in time and space.  Olsen uses eccentric punctuation:

:::: for what cannot be articulated accurately.

[[ ]] for what must be removed from the chronic to be experienced.

The MFA theses in the library would have been signed by the now famous students who wrote them.  In this passage Olsen explicitly describes a physical experience, visiting books, powerful objects that might rub off some of their magic. He mentions touching the spines but not reading the text, though he might have and just didn't write about it.  In context it becomes clear that Olsen is conscious of visiting a  kind of book museum, a literary Wunderkammer.

Oslen writes:
     Travel removes us from clock time, from the capitalist insistence that minutes are money, our lives meant to be segmented, regulated, reified.  Travel serves as compelled dislocation and temporal smear. When that is no longer true, it is no longer travel: you have arrived somewhere.
      The same being the case with innovative writing practices.
By this definition, the library shelf of MFA theses is "somewhere," while the process of writing them involved a kind of dislocation.  Olsen is writing about an experience of library-as-place, not an interior facility of tables and chairs, but "somewhere" expressed in the collection of other writers who occupied the same place at different points in time.

Sunday, December 23, 2018

Preservation Acts

Nora Caplan-Bricker, "Preservation Acts: Towards an Ethical Archive of the Web," Harper's, vo. 337 no. 2023, Dec 2018, pp.59-63.

     After eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in  Ferguson, Missouri, Bergis Jules found himself worrying not only over the horrors of the present, but also over how little of the present was likely to be preserved for the future.  The best reporting on the aftermath in Ferguson was being produced by activists on Twitter, a notoriously ephemeral medium.  Jules, then an archivist at the University of California, Riverside, had the impulse to start saving tweets but wasn't sure how. "That whole weekend, watching things unfold, I thought, 'This is a really amazing historical moment; we should think about capturing it,' but I was just talking to myself," he says.  The following week, attending a Society of American Archivists conference in Washington D.C., he voiced his fears en route to drinks at the hotel bar.  He caught the ear of Ed Summers, a developer who just so happened to be the author of a Twitter archiving tool-- and who promptly programmed it to vacuum up #Ferguson tweets.  Within two weeks, he had amassed more than 13 million. 

COMMENT

  The Internet is a real-time performance, not an archival medium. The fact that history unfolds on social media these days is a big problem for historic preservation. If you don't collect Tweets right away they disappear. But it's not as easy as just scraping websites.  Not only are there serious privacy issues (the Department of Defense showed an unhealthy interest in the #Ferguson archive),  trying to gather everything doesn't even create a useful database (the Library of Congress has tried and failed).

      To some librarians and archivists, the Internet makes curation seem unnecessary.  They argue that any human selection is inherently biased and that any decision to exclude information will create an information gap.  This fear of missing something important can be so paralyzing that nothing at all is saved.

 I've noticed is that there is nearly always a library information gap with regards to citizen activism.  Libraries have collections of government publications but they don't necessarily have the citizen response to government policy because it's largely contained in born-digital gray literature and social media.   The  librarian perception is that the citizen response is biased, and so it is.  But government publications are also biased by the views of whatever party is currently in control.  Biased information is not necessarily  bad or even wrong if you know the bias.  When reference librarians ask the  question, "who cares about this issue and why?" and lead patrons to search for activist gray literature the research strategy often takes off in an entirely  different direction than the  usual method of searching for journalism in books and articles.

    What is an archivist to do?  I think that Jules is on to something with the idea of curating an event-based collections, striving for more sound and less noise.  One of the best such curated collections I've seen was published as a book, We Are Wisconsin. [1] Editor Erica Sagrans reacted to an unfolding protest against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by selecting essays, blog posts and tweets compiled  into a book that records a narrative the historic moment. Likewise, Jules contacted Ferguson activists for oral history interviews instead of trying to letting the collection of Tweets alone stand as the historical record.

   Rather than worrying about saving every Tweet, librarians might do better to focus on saving a record of local citizen action groups and their concerns.  Every library could have its own local version of the Interference Archive in Brooklyn, NY.


[1] Erica Sagrans, ed. "We Are Wisconsin: The Wisconsin Uprising in the Words of the Activists, Writers, and Everyday Wisconsinites Who Made it Happen, Tasora Books, 2011) 

   


Thursday, December 20, 2018

At Social Security, Service at Arm's Length

Mark Miller, "At Social Security, Service at Arm's Length: Fewer Field Offices and Longer Waiting Times as the Number of Beneficiaries Mount," New York Times, November 25, 2018, p. BU5.

Along with other community leaders, Ms. Holt mounted a campaign to save the office, proposing ways to the Social Security Administration to reduce expenses.  But the Quincy office closed anyway, in March 2014-- a casualty of the cuts required by eight years of Congressional budget tightening.
     For anyone without a car, public transportation to Tallahassee is severely limited: There is a once-daily commuter bus, s. Holt says, and it is often overflowing with riders.
      Social Security did install a video kiosk in the Quincy library. That kiosk connects benefit claimants with the Tallahasssee office; today it serves 75 to 100 people daily during library hours. But it's not a trouble-free solution, Ms. Holt said. " We have people who can barely read because of vision problems, or hiring problems. Video is not the answer for many of these people." 

COMMENT

     Since 2010, Social Security has closed 67 field offices causing long wait times, a jammed phone line and long delays in solving appeals and errors. Meanwhile, each year  about one million more people begin to receive benefits.  When this particular Social Security office closed, the public library became a substitute for a staffed office.  However, it's not a very good substitute. The video kiosk,  is not accessible to people with certain kinds of disabilities and is staffed only by librarians who lack institutional knowledge about  Social Security and can't trouble-shoot problems. 

     Social Security has tried to address budget shortfalls by increasing the use of technology, but has run into a problem that would be familiar to any librarian -- the digital divide.  Older people, people without internet access, people who lack of computer literacy, people who are not fluent in English, homeless people, people with disabilities -- all sorts of people have trouble using computers un-aided.  What's more, technology is hardly ever really do-it-yourself.  Customer support and human intervention are needed to help people fill out complicated forms correctly. For instance, the complexity of IRS forms has created an entire industry of tax-filing software and accountants. 

     When libraries used to hand out paper tax forms it was always problematic that people wanted advice about which forms they needed, but they were asking the wrong people for help.  The reported 75 to 100 people per day is a lot of people in need of help.  It seems like one solution might be for Social Security staff to periodically visit the library kiosk in order to offer personal help, similar to the way some large urban  libraries staff social service desks to help homeless people.  While it's a great idea to  put a Social Security  kiosk at the library, but it's still not free. The library clearly needs more support in order to make it work. 


Wednesday, December 19, 2018

The Gap in Broadband Access

Steve Lohr, "The Gap in Broadband Access," New York Times, Dec. 5, 2018, p. B1.
The country seat, Republic, has basic broadband service, supplied by a community cable TV company owned by residents. But go beyond the cluster of blocks in the small town, and the high-speed service drops off quickly. People routinely drive into town to use Wi-Fi in the public library and other spots for software updates, online shopping or schoolwork, said Elbert Koontz, Republic's mayor. 
COMMENT

     The gist of this article is that the U.S. government has about $4 billion available for grants and subsidies in order to bring broadband to rural areas. Microsoft wants some of that money, especially because, " it enlarges the market for their products and services."  Does anyone see a problem here?

   Note how the article frames the public service offered by libraries and coffee shops as a nuisance. Maybe using the library and coffee shops for occasional fast Internet is not actually as onerous as Microsoft claims it is. Maybe people like to go into town now and again to buy groceries or have coffee or borrow a library book.

     While Microsoft says 162.8 Americans lack fast Internet, FCC numbers suggest that a lot more people in rural areas already have Internet. It's just slow. The device Microsoft is proposing to use to provide access costs "just" $300 (!) which might sound cheap to Bill Gates.  Microsoft plans to reach 3 million rural residents.  To me it sounds like Microsoft plans to suck $900 million directly out of  the pockets of disadvantaged rural people under the guise of helping them.

     It irks me that the government has $4 billion to help Microsoft market products and services, but no money for libraries that have already found a way to immediately fill the community need for fast Internet. I admit, it might not be quite as convenient of having your own, but it's up and running right now and it doesn't have $300 in upfront costs to use it.  With a little ingenuity, local people are making it work for them.  Maybe if the library got a piece of the pie for rural Internet access they could make things work even better.

    But what about the digital divide?  Sadly, it's real, but fast Internet access is no magic bullet.  I've had some experience with it since I use slow internet myself.  At school my kids are forced to use clunky software that has very little educational value but which has once in a while caused them to actually fail classes because of the way it limits  teachers' ability to adjust grades and assign extra credit work.  One year the school failed to hire a competent math teacher.  The administrators told the kids to just use videos from Khan Academy.  If you ask me, a mitigating factor for the digital divide is a gap between overblown expectations for what computers will do and what computers actually do.


   

 

   

Saturday, December 15, 2018

The Cry Closet

Marina Gomberg, "The Cry Closet: Behind Nemo Millers Viral Sensation," Continuum: The Magazine of the University of Utah, Fall, 2018, pp. 14-15.

     University of Utah art student Nemo Miller's life changed on April 24, 2018 when her final project for her woodshed class became international news.
     It took one tweet from a fellow U student and about 24 hours for word about Miller's work, The Cry Closet, to reach nearly every corner of the globe. The response was uniformly emphatic, but ranged drastically in sentiment.
     Some thought the three-foot-by three-foot wide "safe place" installed in the J. Willard Marriott Library during finals week was the perfect antidote for stressed students who needed to take a breath, regain composure, and get back in  the action. Others, many of whom didn't realize the installation was an art piece and not an intervention devised by the university, deemed it an unnecessary measure to comfort an already overcoddled generation.
COMMENT

     The author of this article doesn't quite capture the nature of the uproar over The Cry Closet, though she does mention that the work was installed in the library during the stress of finals week when emotions always run high. It's not that uncommon for distraught students to break down in tears. The librarians try to cope by hosting soothing activities like therapy dogs and yoga breaks.

     The course instructor, Professor Kelsey Harrison, said that the assignment was, "to design and fabricate an object that would solve a problem." The artist said, "I thought it would be funny to make a closet since I identify as a lesbian."  But whatever the artist intended,  The Cry Closet didn't seem like a very safe space to cry.  On one level, it seemed to endorse a kind of relational violence that first bullies people to the point of tears and then demands that they limit and conceal their distress.  Once it hit the Internet it really brought out the bullies.

     In the context of the library where surrounding tearful emotions were authentic The Cry Closet became a piece of site-specific performance art. In synergy with the location and the earnest efforts of librarians to offer stress relief for students it seemed like it could be real and it told us something about the way we treat each other that we didn't especially want to confront.  Learning is not always a safe space.  It can be extremely emotionally intense.  Despite claims that college provides a safe place to fail, actually failing often gets you attacked in various ways. Thanks to the display space in the library  The Cry Closet brought some of the unacknowledged cruelty of education out into the open and the artwork became deeply meaningful and actually shocking.

   

Thursday, December 13, 2018

Inside the List

Tina Jordan, "Inside the List," New York Times Book Review, Oct. 7, 2018, p. 24.
     In the summer of 1994, not long after finishing her dissertation, [1] Deborah Harkness stumbled on a long-lost manuscript in the stacks of Oxford's centuries-old Bodleian Library. "It once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I's astrologer, the mathematician and alchemist John Dee [2]. It was called 'The Book of Soyga,' and he prized it above all of his other texts. I found it, hiding in plain sight, among the Bodley manuscripts," [3] she says. Harkness -- now a historian of science and medicine at the University of California -- wove the experience into her best-selling All Souls trilogy, a rich, sprawling historical fantasy about a vampire scientist, a history professor who discovers she's a witch and an enchanted manuscript a the Bodleian. 
 COMMENT

     On Oct. 7, 2018 Harkness' novel Time's Convert was #3 on the New York Times Print/Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List. Her inspiration was a manuscript that people knew about, but up until 1994 nobody knew of any extant copy.  I can only imagine the thrill!  Finding and and holding that piece of history inspired the invention of an  entire fictional world populated by supernatural characters. 


    The most exciting thing I ever found in the stacks was a set of uncatalogued Alta Avalanche Studies recording early experiments that led to modern avalanche control techniques.  It's not nearly as exciting as finding The Book of Soyga, but I still remember the astonishment and the prickle of recognition when I realized that I was holding piece of history. I have never felt anything like that spooky sense of touching history looking at a digital reproduction. I believe that a digitized copy of The Book of Soyga might have had equal utility for writing a PhD thesis, but I doubt it would have ever inspired a series of bestselling novels. 


[1] Deborah E. Harkness, “The Scientific Reformation: John Dee and the Restitution of Nature” (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of California Davis, 1994).
[2] Deborah E. Harkness. John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
[3] The Bodley Manuscripts are a miscellaneous collection of manuscripts formed at Oxford University in 1761.

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Between the World and Me

Image result for between the world and me random house

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, Penguin Random House, 2015.
     I needed more books. At Howard University, one of the greatest collections of books could be found in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, where your grandfather once worked.  Moorland held archives, papers, collections and virtually any book ever written by or about black people. For the most significant portion of my time at The Mecca, I followed a simple ritual. I would walk into the Moorland reading room and fill out three call slips for three different works.  I would take a seat at one of these long tables. I would draw out my pen and one of my black-and-white composition books. I would open the books and read, while filling my composition books with notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences of my own invention.  I would arrive in the morning and request, three call slips at a time, the works of every writer I had heard spoken of in classrooms or out on the Yard: Larry Neal, Eric Williams, George Padmore, Sonia Sanchez, Stanley Crouch, Harold Cruse, Manning Marable, Addison Gayle, Carolyn Rodgers, Etheridge Knight, Sterling Brown. [p.46]
...
     The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, their right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.  I was made for the library, not the classroom.  The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.  Slowly, I was discovering myself. [p.48]


COMMENT

     "The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. " It's a statement so beautiful I'd like to engrave it on the marble facade of a library, if libraries still had marble facades.

     Ta-Nehisi Coates was destined to grow up to be a bookish, well-read person. His father, W. Paul Coates, worked as African American Studies reference and acquisition librarian at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center; He also owned a bookstore and founded Black Classic Press.

     The "jail of other people's interests" is Coates fils' rationale for his idiosyncratic research method but it also gets to the core what libraries are all about. Education has done its job when students are able break free from lectures, classroom assignments and the pursuit of grades. All that schoolwork is a foundation, but the library is the place where students truly become independent thinkers and complete their transformation into scholars.


Monday, December 10, 2018

End the Innovation Obsession

David Sax, "End the Innovation Obsession," New York Times, December 9, 2018, p.SR9.

     A year ago I stepped into the Samcheog Park Library in Seoul, South Korea and saw the future.  The simple building in a forested park had a nice selection of books, a cafe at its center and a small patio. Classical music played while patrons read, reclining on extra-deep window benches that had cushions and tables that slid over their laps so that they could sip coffee and eat cheesecake while gazing at the leaves changing colors outside.  Seoul is one of the most modern cities in the world a place suffused with the latest inescapable technology.  This library was designed as an antidote to that.
     "What's so innovative about that?" a friend asked who works  for the library here in Toronto asked when I showed her pictures.  Innovation to her meant digital technology from drones and movie-streaming services and 3D printers, which the library was constantly showing off.
     "Why couldn't they both be innovative?" I asked.
     We are told that innovation is the most important force in our economy  the one thing we must get right or be left behind. But that fear of missing our has led us to foolishly embrace the false trappings of innovation over truly innovative ideas that may be simpler and ultimately more effective. This mind-set equates innovation exclusively with invention and implies that if you just buy the new thing, voilà! You have innovated!
 Comment

     This commentary by the Author of The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter (2016) uses libraries as a frame to exemplify the foolishness of mistaking technology for "innovation."  As an academic librarian I have crashed into the brick wall of technology worship again and again.  The librarians who want to purchase some "innovative" technology are lauded as "visionaries" no matter how much money they waste on ineffective techie toys; Any librarian who wants to preserve literacy and contemplative space is labeled old-and-in-the-way no matter how many patrons ask for a quiet place to study.
   
      As the article points out,  the false promise of technology is hardly benign.  Schools have sacrificed art and music and sports programs in order to by computers that turn out to be ineffective for learning and quickly obsolete. Cities that destroyed their human-scaled centers to accommodate parking now have to innovate to get rid of too much traffic.

      In the library stories I have collected,  technology (with the exception of digitized archives) hardly ever figures as "innovative, much less transformational. Rather, libraries are given as an example of the digital divide -- only the poor and underserved need to travel to a library for clunky, outdated tech offered during limited hours.  The stories of transformation tend to center on collections and on the intellectual space of the library faculty -- study space, a place to meet, discovery of a life-changing book, finding hidden treasure in dusty boxes, self-discovery and coming of age through reading.

    Sax defines innovation as "a continuing process of gradual improvement and assessment."  When technology becomes the problem, the true innovation may be what Sax calls "rearward innovation" to  adapt or revive older systems that worked in more social and human-focused ways.  As an example of rearward innovation,  Sax cites the publication of "Penguin Minis," pocket-sized print books that combine convenience and physicality.  This re-designed codex format was launched in the U.S. with a set of John Green books, an author especially popular with "iGen" readers.  That fuddy-duddy librarian from Toronto hasn't yet realized that computer technology is old-hat.  In order to be innovative it has to do something that is useful and beneficial.



Saturday, December 8, 2018

Dance With Us

 Ann Dils & Rosalind Pierson. "Dance With Us: Virginia Tanner, Mormonism, and Humphrey's Utah Legacy." Dance Research Journal 32, no. 2 (2000): 7-13. 
Pierson and I both seek to explain the magic of and produced by Tanner's teaching, but our texts--a memoir and a research paper--are distinct. Pierson writes from the warmth and certainty of her own experience, her memories perhaps stimulated or affirmed by research (see pp 14-16). Her account makes it clear that a memory is not just a mental picture but a remembering (derived from the Latin membrum, rather than memor) of experience, a calling up and inner restatement of sensory, somatic, and emotional experience. I write from the more distanced perspective of a researcher struggling with several kinds of documentation. I include more voices in my text, especially those of the Tanner students I interviewed or whose words are preserved in letters to her, now housed in the Virginia Tanner Papers, 1945-1979, in the Special Collections of the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
COMMENT

     Scholarly articles seldom  mention library interactions even though scholars are heavy library users judging from the typical extensive, well-researched reference lists. The erasure of personal experience is intended  to keep scholarly research objective.  I've noticed, though,  that when scholarly authors write for popular news media they love to relate their library adventures and the thrilling discovery of hidden treasure in the archives. 

     This is a rare scholarly article that does  mention the library. It's because the co-authors used an uncommon research strategy that combines personal memory with historical library research. This proved to be so confusing to whomever constructed the JSTOR online database where I found the article that they misinterpreted it as two separate articles. The digital copy of the article cut me off in the middle.  I had to locate a link to the entire scanned issue in order to read the whole article.

 

   

   
     


Friday, December 7, 2018

Robert Rainwater, 74, New York Public Library Curator

Roberta Smith, "Robert Rainwater, 74, New York Public Library Curator," New York Times, Obituaries, Dec. 6, 2018, p. A29. 


     He went to work at the New York Public Library in 1968 as a technical assistant in the art and architecture division, where his chief responsibility was answering questions from the public, either by telephone or mail.  The print division was next door, and in 1972 Elizabeth E. Roth, its keeper (as curators were then called) and on of the library's great repositories of institutional memory, invited Mr. Rainwater to join her department.  Upon her retirement nine years later, he became the keeper of the division.
     Mr. Rainwater became the librarian of the newly formed Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division in 1985. At the same time, he was named curator of William Augustus Spencer Collection of Illustrated Books, Manuscripts and Fine Bindings. 


COMMENT

     Mr. Rainwater was 25 years old and ABD in art history at New York University when he got the technical assistant job.  This suggests that at some point he had wanted to become a professor of art history.  Instead he got a job at the library and found a librarian mentor.  He ended up getting what sounds like the best art history job ever, curating art, prints and photographs and creating museum-quality displays in one of the best libraries in the world.   

    Back before everything was automated, libraries used to hire zillions of assistants-- pages and shelvers and  people to order books and file catalog cards and check out books and so on.  All of these people got to hang out at the library and interact with librarians and maybe even  consider librarianship as a profession.  Now that there are computers there are a lot fewer assistants.  It seems too bad that with the loss of these jobs to technology, young people are no longer finding their way into librarianship through mentorship.  

     NowI think librarians should try to deliberately re-create opportunities for mentorship to replace these lost library jobs.  Positions for interns and assistants could be designed to help mentor young people into the profession.  This might even be a strategy to help invite more diversity into the library profession. 

     

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Baby Center

Jennifer Case, “Baby Center: An Essay on Place,” Orion, 35 (4&5), 2016.

BabyCenter was easy to participate in: all I had to do was log in. In-person gatherings were harder to devise. And yet I craved those, too, which is why I attended the local La Leche League meeting.  Some nights I hardly said anything at all. I just sat there in the basement of the library, nodding, nursing my daughter, comforted by the presence of others, other women with children, who talked about what they struggled with, what they loved, what they feared about having more children— if the tongue tie would cause latch issues again or if they’d ever sleep through the night. 
...
I haven't been on BabyCenter much lately. I've spent entire afternoons reading academic research about social networking sites and motherhood, yet I haven't returned to those sites.  

COMMENT

The author describes compulsively logging into an online discussion board to read about pregnancy, babies and motherhood. Despite this obsession, she never admits to using a library to find books with information about these topics. Rather, she craves to learn directly from other women who are going through similar experiences. In a transitory American college town, she lacks a real-life community of moms and the La Leche League is one of the few organizations around that invites honest discussion about the experience of becoming a mother.

While the author claims that social networking was emotionally supportive, it is clear that it also made her feel isolated and sort of crazy.  Once she makes some real friends she quits using the website.  She also doing actual library research, this time not to find out about babies and parenting but trying to understand her own uncharacteristic behavior. 

The essay contrasts social interaction in physical and virtual space. Meeting strangers at the library is a not-quite-adequate substitute for sisters, aunts, grandmothers and neighbors.  However, it's clear that a virtual library with just access to information would not not have done the trick. The library meeting room works as a stopgap until the real thing comes along. 

Sunday, December 2, 2018

The Hypocrisy of Hanukkah

Michael David Lukas, "The Hypocrisy of Hanukkah," New York Times,  Dec. 2, 2019, p. SR2.

    This is the version of Hanukkah that I grew up with: presents and chocolate gelt; latkes with sour cream and applesauce; a few somber, off-key songs that no one fully remembered, about Judah Maccabee.  This is the version of Hanukkah I had in mind when my daughter and I walked down to our local branch of the Oakland Public Library to check out a stack of books about the holiday.
      Most of the books we found presented a familiar narrative -- dreidels and menorahs, evil Romans and pious Maccabees -- but between the lines, there were some hints at a darker story, enough to send be to Wikipedia and the Books of Maccabbees of the (definitely not Jewish but very helpful) Bible Gateway website, which led me back to the library for another stack of books, this one for myself .

COMMENT
      
     This story exemplifies a kind of search for religious identity that shows up in several other library stories I've collected [1]. This one has an especially good description of the research process of religious questioning.  It's significant that the quest starts with children's books since the naive juvenile literature version of religion is the one most people know. The realization that the children's books don't tell the whole story leads to an informative though biased Internet search and onward to more in-depth and well documented research in library books. 

     The search sows seeds of religious doubt, but the outcome is to reaffirm Jewish identity, and surprisingly, to reaffirm the way the family is already celebrating with an emphasis on presents and chocolate gelt.  The author jokes "at the end of the day, it's all about beating Santa,"  but for the writer it's all about  forming a religious identity as an assimilated Jew celebrating "the possibility of light in dark times and importance of even the smallest miracles."

Saturday, December 1, 2018

Before the Law

Evan Kindley, "Before the Law: Kafka's Afterlives," The Nation,v.307 no. 10, Oct. 29, 2018,  p.27-31.

When Hoffe died in 2007, at age 101, she left the Kafka manuscripts, along with control of the Brod estate, to her daughters, Eva and Ruth. At this point, Israel took action again, challenging the probate of her will and once more claiming that the Kafka papers were cultural assets and, thus, state property.  The case dragged on for years until, in 2016, it was finally decided by Israel's Supreme Court, which ruled that the Brod and Kafka materials were, in fact, cultural assets and put be transferred to the National Library of Israel."
...
Leaving aside the issue of whether the collection belonged specifically in Israel, the state's broader contention was that Brod's and Kafka's papers belonged not in private hands but in an archive-- i.e., that literary artifacts have a cultural importance that exceeds their monetary value, and therefore they deserve to be public property. 
...
The Marbach archive's position in the case was a delicate one. While it had the financial resources to buy Kafka's manuscripts and the scholarly resources to process and maintain them, there were obvious political reasons why the acquisition of an important Jewish writer's papers by a German institution might be questioned. Israeli scholars attacked the archive in the press. "They say the papers will be safer in Germany," the Israeli historian Otto Doc Kulka write in 2010.  "There Germans will take very good care of them.  Well, the Germans don't have a very good history of taking care of Kafka's things.  They didn't take good care of his sisters" -- all three of whom were killed by the Nazis.  Elsewhere the issue was lined to the larger one of Israeli statehood: "[T]he struggle to keep Brod's archive in Israel is one of the most important of the struggles over our continued existence here," the literary scholar Nuri Pagi insisted in 2011. 

 COMMENT

      Kafka died before he ever became famous. His friend Max Brod is the person who promoted his work posthumously. Without Brod, it seems unlikely that any library would have cared much about the literary debris of an obscure Czech writing in German. But once Kafka was famous his papers were gold.

     It wasn't just fame that triggered this legal battle over Kafka's papers, though. Israel wanted to have the papers in the National Library as a matter of identity. In the lawsuit, the library is described in two different roles -- access and identity. The lawsuit emphasized universal public access to knowledge, but the German archive would have made the papers public, too. Israel wanted the papers for the National Library because of the way they represent Israeli/Jewish identity.

     One thing I find interesting about this account is how clearly Israel understood the library as a place to represent identity and place.  In the world of librarians, knowledge is often considered purely from an access standpoint-- universal and detached from a specific place. This assumption of placelessness underlies proposals to consolidate library collections in digitized online libraries or large, remote regional book warehouses with delivery on demand.  Nonetheless,  studies have shown that the unique items in library collections are largely related to geography and place-based differences. [1]  The library is not actually as placeless as it seems since the geographic dispersal of library collecting is essential in order to represent the true breadth of human knowledge and experience [2]

    It strikes me that there is a kind of synergy between this identity-based collecting and  in situ library stories about search for identity in library collections. By obtaining the papers the archivists are consciously creating a collection that represents Israeli/Jewish identity.

[1] Brunvand, Amy (2006) "Missing Information and the Long Tail: How Distributed Collection Development Assures the Continued Relevance of Libraries," Against the Grain: Vol. 18: Iss. 4, Article 10.

[2] Dempsey, Lorcan, Brian Lavoie, Constance Malpas, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Roger C. Schonfeld, JD Shipengrover, and Günter Waibel. 2013. Understanding the Collective Collection: Towards a System-wide Perspective on Library Print Collections. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research

 



Monday, November 26, 2018

Let's Talk Climate

James Westwater, "Let's Talk Climate" [Letter to the Editor], Salt Lake Tribune, November 23, 2018, p. A10.

The climate is changing, and not for the better.  The whole planet is warming. CO2 and other greenhouse gasses are accumulating exponentially in the atmosphere.
...
     What's causing all this, and what should be done? The Utah Valley Earth Forum has assembled a select team from Utah's four largest universities to discuss the climate crisis and address your questions. It's happening Wednesday, Nov. 28 at 7 p.m. at the Orem Public Library.  Details at UtahValleyEarthForum.org.

COMMENT

     This letter to the editor invites people to a panel organized by a citizen group that is concerned about climate change.  It's happening in Utah Valley, home to Brigham Young University. It's a majority Mormon and deeply red (for Republican) part of the state.  These citizens have taken it upon themselves to try to cut through the politics, and they chose to do that at the public library.

     I was so delighted when I got to the end of this letter and discovered that the writer was using library resources to help start a dialogue on community response to climate change. This is exactly what we librarians wish for-- public use of our open-access spaces to support citizen engagement and democracy.

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Braiding Sweetgrass



Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Sceintific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013.

To be heard you must speak the language of the one you want to listen. So, back at school I proposed the idea of a thesis project to my graduate student Laurie. Not content with purely academic questions, she had been looking for a research project that would, as she said, “mean something to someone” instead of just sitting on the shelf. [158]

COMMENT

The shelf is of course a library shelf. Grad students have to produce original research so they gravitate towards narrow, hyper-specialized ideas. Academic libraries collect student theses and dissertations which are seldom heavily used. They are listed in the library catalog and in specialized databases, which is to say, if you want to read them you have to go looking. Student work is usually considered a fairly marginal contribution to scholarship. I have heard of grad students slipping money into their dissertation as a reward for anyone who actually bothers to read it.  In fact, I recently helped a friend get an M.S. Thesis through Interlibrary Loan and when he opened it he found a ten dollar bill tucked into the pages. 

     Laurie decides to investigate Indigenous knowledge about picking sweetgrass. [1]  Members of one tribe say that you must pluck each blade and leave the roots.  Another tradition says you must pull up the whole bunch, but not take every bunch.  A white male dean calls the research “a waste of time” because everyone knows that if you disturb a plant it will damage the population.  

     Nevertheless, she persisted, pursuing the Indigenous idea that, “If we use a plant respectfully it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away.”  When she presented the resaerch to a committee of white, male scientists, Laurie rephrased this idea as “if we remove 50 percent of the plant biomass, the stems are released from resource competition. The stimulus of compensatory growth causes an increase in population density and plant vigor.”  The scientists applaud.  

     As a librarian, I find that theses and dissertations are often useful sources for hyperlocal research.  One way to make  your research original is by deep focus on a very specific geographic place within the globalized geography of knowledge. 


[1] Laurie A. Reid. The Effects of Traditional Harvesting Practices on Restored Sweetgrass Populations. Thesis (M.S.), State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, 2005.