Democracy's Data

 Dan Bouk. Democracy's Data the Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them.  Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

I had read about this conference and seen it mentioned in many places as I began studying the 1940 Census.  In the context of later controversies, particularly over a question about income, this conference was frequently invoked to justify the census's decisions, to show that they had been made by expert, responsible men.  Yet for the first couple of years of my research, I found no detailed records from the conference.  I dug through file after file, box after box in the National Archives, to no avail.  I did not think I would ever discover what actually happened in that room.  Then, in what would be my final trip to that archives, in the summer of 2019, I was working my way through Director Austin's papers, and there it was, the summary minutes of the meeting, one that (although it was not a complete transcript) would allow me to reconstruct, more or less, how the Question Men built the data's frame.   pp. 33-39

One day in the National Archives, I stumbled upon  a silence in Price's paper itself.  Working through a box of bureau records, I found a folder titled "Negro Enumeration of 1920" containing a typed reply to a scholar who had, in 1922, made a reasoned case for a significant undercount of African Americans.  This surprised me.  I had never heard of serious scientific estimates of such undercounting before Price, and Price's paper hadn't said anything about Black researchers who had previously uncovered this.  Price's paper hadn't prepared me for Kelly Miller. 131

 

COMMENT

Imagine the astonishment and joy at finding the missing document after years of searching!  One thing that stands out in this story is, the meeting was well known, and known to be important.  It just wasn't well documented. 

The second story illustrates the way that information errors propagate through time.  Price's paper is frequently cited as the first research about undercounting Black people in the census.  It turned out that Miller, a Black mathematician, had already detected Census undercounts and explored the underlying causes, but since Price hadn't cited Miller's research that scholarship had been neglected. 

The Stranger I Become

 Katherine Coles, "The Stranger I Become: on Walking, Looking and Writing",  Turtle Point Press, 2021.

The author gratefully acknowledges the Emily Dickinson Archive, an open source website though which a number of libraries and institutions have made many of Dickinson's original handwritten poems and other materials available in facsimile for the use of scholars.  Having access to this material changed my relationship to and understanding of Dickinson's work.  [p.140]

COMMENT

There are many more articles about creating digital archives than a about using them, but I expect that this kind of acknowledgement to digitized archives will become increasingly common. 

Yale Says Its Vinland Map, Once Called a Medieval Treasure, is Fake

 

Alan Yuhas, Yale Says Its Vinland Map, Once Called a Medieval Treasure, is Fake, New York Times, Sept. 30, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/us/yale-vinland-map-fake.html

“The Vinland Map is a fake,” Raymond Clemens, the curator of early books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, said in a statement this month. “There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest.”

The university said that a team of conservators and scientists, analyzing the elements in the map’s lines and text, found high levels of a titanium compound used in inks that were first produced in the 1920s. Mr. Clemens said the team hoped to publish an article in a scientific journal. Ars Technica, Smithsonian Magazine and Gizmodo, among other news outlets, reported the conclusion this month.

...

Mr. Clemens said the map would remain in Yale’s collection, calling it a “historical object in and of itself” and “a great example of a forgery that had an international impact.”

COMMENT

A map that was supposedly made in 1440 was determined to be a forgery after many years of debate over whether it was authentic.  The archivist notes that the map is still worth keeping in the library collection as an example of a clever forgery. 

 

 

The Invention of Wings

 Sue Monk Kidd, "The Invention of Wings," Penguin Books,  2014. 

Acknowledgements
...
The following institutions, which along with Historic Charleston Foundation and Drayton Hall, served as resources: The Charlesong Museum, the Charleston Library Society, the College of Charleston's Addlestone Library and the Avery Research Center, the Charleston County Public Library, the South Caroliniana Library, the Aiken-Rhett House Museum, the Nathanial Russel House Museum, the Charles Pinckney House, the Old Slave Mart, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, Lowcountry Africana, Middleton Place and Boone Hall Plantation. [p. 371]
...

Jaqueline Coleburn, rare book cataloger at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., for her enormous assistance in providing me with a treasure trove of letters, newspapers, Anti-Slavery Convention proceedings and other documents related to Sarah and Angelina Grimke and early-nineteenth-century history. [p.371]

COMMENT

To write her historical novel, Kidd made use of a resources from a wide variety of cultural institutions including museums, historical societies and libraries.  She mentions one librarian by name who was especially helpful to locate historical materials that contribute to the historical accuracy of a fictionalized story. 

Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight

 David Gessner, Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight: Sheltering with Thoreau in the age of Crisis. Torrey House Press, 2021.

If  you look at Emerson's journals, which I have held in my hands at Houghton Library, the thoughts are so fully formed, and the script so neat, that they  intimidate.  Not mine.  Early on I started calling my journals "swill bins," where anything goes including snippets of weather, Dear Diary bad moods, caricatures and cartoons, early drafts of essays and books and sketches of birds. [p. 28]

The next morning, before driving to a radio interview, I visited the Houghton Library at Harvard, where, after applying for an inter-library permit and filling out my special request form, I was handed two of Emerson's journals.  It was starting to see Emerson's actual works on the actual pages and I just sat there for a moment staring at the scrawled longhand and relishing the fact that these were the same books in which he had kept the ledger of his life.  [p.36]

COMMENT

     Here, library red tape seems to create a sense of ceremony as an author pays a visit to the journal of a writer he deeply admires.  Gessner compares his own scattered thoughts to Emerson and find's his own to be sloppy by comparrison.

 

Ken Sleight, an inspiration for ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang,’ loses personal archive in Utah wildfire

 Zak Podmore, "Ken Sleight, an inspiration for ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang,’ loses personal archive in Utah wildfire" Salt Lake Tribune, June 16, 2021,  https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/06/16/ken-sleight-an/

Not a scrap of paper from Sleight’s boxes survived the blaze. Metal filing cabinets melted in the heat and the roof of the steel hut warped. The lettering was peeling from road signs in the ranch named after Abbey’s work — Desert Solitaire, Seldom Seen, Abbey Road — and great swaths of trees were burned. Four homes in Pack Creek Ranch were destroyed, and five others were damaged. Six outbuildings, including Sleight’s hut, were lost, according to Utah Wildfire Info.

Sleight’s nearby home and the rental cabins scattered throughout the ranch, which he bought with his wife, Jane, in the mid-1980s, were spared from the fire. But the loss of other homes in the neighborhood and the historical material that Sleight hoped to use for a book project and to donate to a university archives is devastating.

COMMENT

 A wildfire sparked by a campfire destroyed the historical archive collected by Ken Slight, a long-time environmental activist in southern Utah.   Slight, who was working on a book, had intended to donate the material to a University archives, but instead, due to a careless camper a valuable trove of regional memory went up in smoke.   Librarians could never assemble such a collections of records, letters and photographs associated with a person who is deeply involved in his community.  The archive would have been utterly unique. 

South Africa wildfire burns University of Cape Town, library of African antiquities

Lesley Wroughton "South Africa wildfire burns University of Cape Town, library of African antiquities", Washington Post, April 19, 2021 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/04/18/south-africa-fire-university-cape-town/

Officials from the University of Cape Town, known as UCT, said the Jagger Library, which houses priceless African studies collections, was among the buildings that burned.

“At this stage, we can confirm the Reading Room is completely gutted and thankfully the fire detection system in place triggered the fire shutters, thereby preventing the spread of the fire to other parts of the library,” Ujala Satgoor, executive director of UCT Libraries, said in a statement.“Some of our valuable collections have been lost,” she said. “However a full assessment can only be done once the building has been declared safe and we can enter.”

The library houses printed and audiovisual materials on African studies as well as 1,300 sub-collections of unique manuscripts and personal papers, and more than 85,000 books and pamphlets on African studies including up-to-date materials and works on Africa and South Africa printed before 1925, according to the UCT website. It also contains one of the most extensive African film collections in the world, the website added.

The university’s vice chancellor, Mamokgethi Phakeng, confirmed that some parts of the African Studies Collection were destroyed.

“The library is of course our greatest loss,” she told CapeTalk radio. “Some of these cannot be replaced by insurance, and that is a sad day for us.”

COMMENT 

As with the 2018 fire at the National Museum in Brazil, the loss of library archives is a severe cultural loss.  Other buildings can be rebuilt, but once one-of-a-kind endangered information is lost, it is lost for good.  Since the African studies collection contained documentation of non-literate cultures, the loss of archives makes it that much harder for African scholars to research cultural identity. 

Mary Ellen Moylan, Acclaimed Balanchine Dancer, Is Dead at 94

 Roslyn Sulcas "Mary Ellen Moylan, Acclaimed  Balanchine Dancer, Is Dead at 94" New York Times April 14, 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/arts/dance/mary-ellen-moylan-dead.html?auth=login-google 

Ms. Moylan had become “the first great Balanchine dancer." And yet her death, almost a year ago, went largely unnoticed in the dance world. Even a collection devoted to her in the archives of the University of Oklahoma School of Dance makes no mention of her death; neither do various biographical sketches of her online. Word of her death, however, began to trickle out through social media, and her daughter-in-law, Carol Bailes, recently confirmed it: Ms. Moyland died on April 28, 2020, in Redmond, Wash. She was 94. The family said she had had dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

COMMENT

An obituary of an influential dancer is also a commentary on the importance of journalism.  When Moyland died nobody reported it.  The library archive, dependent on published sources, had no record of her death.  In an age when journalism is in danger, so is the historical record held by libraries. 

How to Dig Up Family History Online

J.D. Biersdorfer. "How to Dig Up Family History Online." New York Times. June 25, 2020, p. B7.

While not all government records may be free or digitized, the National Archives hosts a page of links from other genealogy sites where you can look for information.

... 

Libraries and historical/genealogical societies may also have books and periodicals that recorded the development of the area and the people who lived there, although you may have to visit in person to look at the original material has not been scanned. (Some libraries also offer free access to the commercial genealogy services.)

COMMENT 

     The article mentions online genealogy sites and the National Archives as places to start.  Libraries come in further down the list once you have done your background research online. They type of local history that genealogists seek can be hard to find. There is a period when newspapers were preserved on microfilm, and many of these have never been digitized. One-of-a-kind Special Collections materials are hidden treasure in dusty boxes.  If you get a chance to poke through them, you might find something fascinating. 

The Love Song of T.S. Eliot

Maria Cramer, "The Love Song of T.S. Eliot," New York Times, January 6, 2020, p. C3.

   As planned, his estate released the statement on Thursday, coinciding with Princeton University Library's announcement the more than 1,100 letters the poet had written to Hale were finally available for public viewing.

     Hale gave the letters to Princeton in 1956 with the instructions that they be opened 50 years after both she and Eliot had died. ([Emily] Hale died in 1969, four years after Eliot).
     The relationship between the two has long been a source of speculation among literary scholars, who have known for decades of the letters' existence.  the letters were freed in October from wooden boxes bound with copper straps and ties before a small group of Princeton professors at the university's Firestone Library.
...
     The letters in the collection, which also includes photographs, ephemera and a brief narrative in which Hale describes her relationship with Eliot, are available for viewing only at the Firestone Library and will not be published online until at least 2035 when they are no longer under copyright.

COMMENT

     These days it's astonishing to think of someone writing 1,100 letters on paper and mailing them to someone.  Hale knew the letters had value since Eliot was famous in his own time.  Scholars have been waiting for 50 years to open those boxes and start the search for hidden treasure. 

    The library made a small ceremony of the opening, and also made the New York Times.  Having famous, mysterious materials is good publicity for a library.  Nonetheless, copyright prevents digitization.  If you want to read them, you'll have to go to Princeton. 

Robert Caro's Papers Find a Home

Jennifer Schuessler, “Robert Caro’s Papers Find a Home,” New York Times, January 9, 2020, p. C1. 

     The books are already monumental.  And now Mr. Caro is getting monumental treatment himself.
     The New-York Historical Society has acquired Mr. Caro’s papers  — some 200 linear feet of material that will be open to researchers in its library.  And just a as important to the 84-year-old Mr. Caro, it will create a permanent installation int its museum galleries dedicated to showing how he got the job done.

...

     The archive will be among the largest of an individual in the historical society's collection.  It includes research notes, drafts, annotated news clippings, correspondence, and other documents, from once-classified memos excavated at the L.B.J. Presidential Library to at least one artifact literally coaxed out of a secret trunk. 

COMMENT

     The article describes an archival collection acquired by a special library.  The collection originates from a research strategy that includes library research as well as other kinds of documentation.

     The article also describes Caro’s research process as “a kind of museum of a vanishing analog world.”  As a consequence of his careful gathering, his research materials can now be used by other historians.  This kind of idiosyncratic individual collecting stands in contrast to automated approval plans the mean every library buys the same things. There’s a photo of a typewriter, and the article says he has more than one just in case he needs spare parts. 

Barbara Testa dies at 91

Katherine Q. Seelye, “Barbara Testa Dies at 91: A Discovery in Her Attic Rocked the Literary World,” (Obituaries) New York Times, January 3, 2020, p. A21.

    The story began in the 1880s with her grandfather, James Fraser Gluck, a lawyer who was also the curator of the library in Buffalo N.Y., now called the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.  He was a collector, and he aggressively solicited autographs and writings from contemporary authors, all of which he donated to the library.    Over the years, he had collected manuscripts from some of the biggest names in 19th-century letters, among hem Walt Whitman, Henry James and Louisa May Alcott.  He also had snippets from Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Poe, Keats, Shelley and Dickens.
     Mr. Gluck established a pen-pal relationship with Samuel L. Clemens — better known as Mark Twain — and at one point asked him for the manuscript for “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a novel that had shaken the rafters of the literary world when it was published in 1884.

COMMENT

    Long story short, Clemens sent Gluck his handwritten manuscript, but half of it was lost until Testa found it in the Attic in 1990.  She was in need of money and wanted to sell it, but the library filed suit, arguing that Clemens gave the manuscript to the library.  Still, the library paid $1 million to settle. 

    This is another collection development story in which a librarian follows a personal obsession rather than following an arbitrary standard of popularity or high circulation.  I believe that libraries should do more to deliberately support this kind of personal collecting which can produce extremely valuable and unusual collections.  One possibility would be to assign each librarian a small personal collection development fund to be spent on whatever they think would be good to have in the collection. 

One Elf's Path

Jenifer Schuessler, "One Elf's Path: Turning Satire Into a Legacy, New York Times, p. C1.

     Now [David] Sedaris has sold his archive to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, where his manuscripts, drafts, notebooks and other scraps will be part of the library's rich holdings relating to social satire from the likes of Gary Trudeau Saul Steinberg, David Rakoff and Mark Twain.
     The more than 150 volumes of Sedaris's complete diaries will be off limits during his lifetime. (A second volume of excerpts is in the works.) But the archive contains some three dozen other handmade books from his prefame years that hint at their visual and tactile richness.
      Timothy G. Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, said the archive showed the years of exploration it took Sedaris to become an "overnight" sensation. 

COMMENT 

     Before I started to collect library stories I did not realize how newsworthy archival acquisition can be.  If I were not reading through the limited perspective of librarianship, I would have read this article as primarily a biographical story about the writer David Sedaris and  his career as a humorist.  In library terms, though, the story is about archiving, and the newspaper article itself becomes part of the biographical archive. 

  The particular collection includes juvenilia.  Apparently as a second grader Sedaris was already showing the talent that would lead to his future career.  Between 1984 and 1990, he made unpublished art books for his friends.  He didn't get famous until he  broadcast "The SantaLand Diaries" in 1992.

   Fame, in other words, is what specifically attracted the archivists since the Beinecke is collecting around a theme of social satire.  It's not always obvious how or where to place limits on what libraries collect.   How do you know now what will be valuable to the future?   In different ways, journalists, librarians, and authors are all engaged in a process of  creating a historical  narrative.  The "manuscripts, drafts, notebooks, and other scraps" that were said in this collection would just be  debris in dusty boxes unless  someone thinks they are  interesting enough to put them into a story. 
     

Lee Israel, a Writer Proudest of Her Literary Forgeries, Dies at 75

Margalit Fox, "Lee Israel, a Writer Proudest of Her Literary Forgeries, Dies at 75," New York Times,  Jan 27, 2015, [online].

     Of her body of forgeries, Ms. Israel wrote in her memoir, “I still consider the letters to be my best work.”
     By dealing in typed letters, Ms. Israel was obliged to copy only the signatures. This she did by tracing over the originals, first covertly in libraries and later in her Upper West Side apartment, originals in hand. For over time, after whispers among dealers about the authenticity of her wares made composing new letters too risky, Ms. Israel had begun stealing actual letters from archives — including the New York Public Library and the libraries of Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Princeton Universities — and leaving duplicates in their place.
     “She would go into these libraries and copy the letter in question, go back to her home and fake as best she could the stationery and fake the signature, and then she’d go back to the institution and make the switch,” David H. Lowenherz, a New York autograph dealer, said on Monday. “So she was actually not selling fakes: She was substituting the fakes and selling the originals.”

COMMENT

    Obviously, Lee Israel (1939-2014) shouldn't have been stealing library books, but her inspiration to crime was remarkably similar to the motivation of other researchers who love to poke around in the manuscript archives. In the movie Can You Ever Forgive Me (2018) Lee Israel (played by Melissa McCarthy who deserves an Oscar) is shown in a library doing research for a biography of Fanny Brice when a letter signed by Brice herself falls out of a book. As she gawks at the letter, McCarthy perfectly captures that sense of spooky connection with history that so many researchers describe.  She shows the letter to a buyer who has the same awestruck reaction.  The star-struck reaction leads Israel into a life of crime, in part because she is so deeply pleased that her own writing is good enough to be mistaken for the words of other more famous writers.

     I have heard librarians claim that that format doesn't matter as long as the information content is the same.  Israel's facsimiles had the same textual content as the letters she stole, but clearly they aren't the same.  It's not just the chemistry of the physical object [1].  The objects that Israel stole were valuable specifically because they have that spooky connection to history, an intangible thing that  is mentioned again and again as a transformational library experience. It seems that it even transformed the library experience of literary forger Lee Israel.

[1] Hidden Traces.
   

     

When Puccini Came, Saw and Conquered

Michael Cooper, "When Puccini Came, Saw and Conquered," New York Times, November 18, 2018, p. AR15-.

The Met Opera's archives contain a copy of the contact that brought Puccini back to New York in 1910 for the premier of "la Fanciulla del West." To promises of pay, expenses, and room and board, one more is added in handwriting: "cars." 

COMMENT

   This article is full of references to  historical documents-- letters, news reports and playbills that must have been found at a library or archive. However, the writer makes only direct reference to the research method in describing a handwritten note on a contract in the Metropolitan Opera archives. That single word "cars" is one of those spooky contacts with history because it affirms an impression of Puccini's personality.  It's clear that the writer  found the discovery of this hidden treasure so thrilling that he couldn't resist including it in the final article.

     The article also mentions that Puccini attended a shocking production of Richard Strauss' opera Salome based on the Oscar Wilde text. When we read about historical people getting all hot under the collar about some opera we think they were just being prudish and old-fashioned. I saw it at the Utah Opera a few years ago. It's really shocking.  Seriously.  Prudish people will not like it one bit. I am still surprised that Utah opera fans didn't riot.

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...
 
 

   

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

 

A Tasting Menu of Seamus Heaney's Poetry

Jim Dwyer, "A Tasting Menu of Seamus Heaney’s Poetry: An Exhibition Offers an Archive of a Productive Literary Life," New York Times, Oct. 31, 2018, p. C6.

DUBLIN— On a December day several years ago, the poet Seamus Heaney drove up to the back door of the National Library of Ireland, his car packed with 12 boxes of attic. The haul was more than 10,000 pieces of paper—drafts of poems on envelopes and halfway-there typescripts, even a clipping of one he first published in a newspaper and later reworked in pen and pencil on the printed page. Now that collection has been harvested to create a tasting menu of Heaney, young to old, in “Listen Now Again,” an exhibit to be housed for three years in a cultural space at the Bank of Ireland on college Green, here in Dublin.

COMMENT

     Heaney was a Nobel laureate poet and therefore his paper debris was deemed worthy of archival space. In the digital age many writers no longer leave behind this kind of paper trail.  There are no longer any typescripts. Revisions done on a computer leave no trace of previous versions.  Nonetheless, the thought process of famous people is thought to provide insight into their writing.  

     
     The library must have asked Heaney for the papers which he delivered himself. It occurs to me that if by some unlikely turn I ever became a famous poet I would have no papers to give.  I don’t save anything.  It all goes in the recycle bin as soon as I’m done marking it up and typing the revisions.  In fact, I find early drafts deeply dismaying with their sloppy word choice and poorly-expressed ideas.  

    
     While Heaney used the library to store a record of his work, the exhibit curator used it as source material for a museum museum display. Dusty boxes, however exciting the contents, are not very visually appealing.  The challenge for the curator was to find a way to give textual information some kind of visual impact.  In this case a nod to Irish history with a circle of pillars that resemble Neolithic standing stones and the progress of revisions shown through multimedia displays.  For ordinary poets, the best we librarians can do is just to keep the pretty dust jackets on and set up some book displays. 

Discovery Interrupted

Jeffrey Friedman, “Discovery, Interrupted: How World War I Delayed a Treatment for Diabetes and Derailed one Man’s Chance for Immortality," Harper’s, vol 337, no.2022, Nov. 2018, pp. 45-54.

My research began as a browsing of letters and laboratory notes on the Rockefeller University archives, and later expanded to include study of the materials housed at Yale, Johns Hopikns, and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, as well as conversations with members of Kleiner’s family. I published an earlier consideration of the scientific aspects of Kleiner’s story in Nature Medicine, a medical journal, in 2010. 

COMMENT

     This description of the research process is given in a footnote.  Perhaps Friedman is used to writing for journals and couldn’t bear to leave out the citations for a popular magazine. Or maybe he just found digging around in the archives to be such an interesting and delightful passtime that he wanted to tell us about it.            

     The article is about an obscure researcher named Israel Kleiner who almost discovered a cure for diabetes (the people who eventually did won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1923). Friedman writes, “I immediately wanted to know more about Kleiner and his story especially given my own interest in hormone research.”  

     The research problem— Kleiner was not at all famous. He worked alone in his lab. His few published journal articles, including one “masterpiece,” were written without co-authors. He later became a college administrator. What documentation of his life existed was in records from the places he had worked and in the memory of people who knew him. What Friedman discovered in the archives is a kind of bureaucratic tragedy. Even though Kleiner was on the verge of a major breakthrough, the director of the Rockefeller Institute fired him because he thought infectious disease research was more important than diabetes research. After all, in the era before antibiotics soldiers died from infections, not from diabetes.  (There may also have been anti-Semitism going on). Friedmam thinks the director lost sight of the value of pursuing knowledge for its own sake. He writes, “scientific inquiry is an arc of knowledge, a series of steps on a path toward a deeper understanding of the unknown, and the breakthroughs only come because of the body of knowledge that previous observations have built.”  Libraries store this body of knowledge in the form of scholarly journals. 
     All these years later, Friedman feels a sense of outrage on behalf of Kleiner. He writes, “I can say with certainty that under similar circumstances neither I nor most other ambitious scientist I know would have maintained Kleiner’s apparent sense of equanimity about his missed opportunity.” And yet it is still true that researchers can only do their work if they have funding and lab space.  No matter how objective science is, money is always political, and that means so is missing information in the scientific record. 

A Famous Nude Gets a Face and an Identity

Adam Nossiter, "A Famous Nude gets a Face and an Identity: Historian Solves Mystery of a Gustave Courbet Painting," New York Times, Oct 2. 2018, p.C1;C6.

     The feminist art historian Linda Nochlin called the work "pornography" but also "a little masterpiece of overt sexuality."
     And now finally the matter of its sitter seems to have been solved, thanks to a chance discovery by a mild-mannered French historian toiling in the archives.
...
     Mr Schopp's breakthrough came innocently enough.  He had been working on annotation the letters between Dumas and the writer George Sand, and had long been perplexed by a passage in the old typewritten copies, where Dumas inveigh against the  "insolent" and "cowardly" Courbet, who had committed an artistic heresy, in the view of Dumas:
     "One doesn't paint with one's most delicate and sonorous brush the interview of Mademoiselle Queniault of the Opera, for the Turk who took refuge inside it from time to time -- all of it life-size, and life-size also two women passing for men."
...
     But what about that world "interview" in the typescript, and the other painting referred to?  Mr. Schopp went back to the source -- the manuscript of the Dumas letter at the National Library.
The word Dumas had actually written was "interior," not interview.  He underlined it, to emphasize that he was playing with worlds.
     "I dared to utter an inner 'Eureka,'' Mr. Schopp writes in a new book about the affair, "The Origin of the World: Life of the Model," which will be published in France this week. 

COMMENT 

The first rule of research is, when in doubt consult the original source. The name of the model for a famous (and famously risqué) painting by Gustave Courbet was unknown, even though the answer to the mystery was hiding in plain sight.  It took a researcher brave enough to admit that the transcription made no sense to go back and investigate what the original manuscript actually said.  It didn't help that Dumas had misspelled the name of Constance Queniaux, foiling a keyword search strategy.  The journalist is pleased to report that the sexy Ms. Queniaux lived long and prospered.