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. 

Why beavers were parachuted into the Idaho wilderness 73 years ago

 Lucy Sherriff. "Why beavers were parachuted into the Idaho wilderness 73 years ago," National Geographic,     Sept. 16, 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/why-beavers-were-parachuted-into-the-idaho-wilderness

“I’ve found it,” the voice on the other end said conspiratorially.  “You found what?” Clark asked, recognizing the voice of Michal Davidson, a collections archivist who worked in the Idaho State Archives.  “The beaver film,” she responded. It had been six years since Clark first learned of this now-infamous film which shows beavers parachuting from the sky in 1948 as part of a Fish and Game experiment to relocate them into remote wilderness.  She couldn’t wait to screen it.

…

Clark, who has worked in Fish and Game for 33 years, was determined to unearth that footage.   “It was the most fascinating story I’d ever heard.  I had to find it.”  She phoned the state archives and checked back roughly every six months to see if the film had turned up.  Finally, in 2014 she received the call.  The documentary had been mislabeled and misfiled. The old film was dry and the archivist worried it would fall apart if removed from the canister. They had to wait several more months for an expert to digitize the film before they could watch it.

COMMENT

A multi-faceted tale of superhuman librarianship-- the initial reference question led to a six year search for a missing film.  When it was finally located in the wrong place, it had decayed and was in need of digital preservation. 

 

Metropolitan Diary

 Joyce Marcel. "Back in Time" (Metropolitan Diary), New York Times, March 14, 2021, p. 32.

I was doing research on an accident that happened in 1945, when I was 3 and living on 51st Street in Brooklyn....

A friend who is a former librarian and now does genealogy research contracted a librarian in Brooklyn and learned that the Brooklyn Public Library had digitized its telephone directories.

Within a day, I had the name of the family that had lived next door.  It was an unusual name, so I did a search online and found a Buddhist scholar who, to my surprise, lived in the Vermont town next to mine. 

I left the man a garbled, giddy phone message asking if, by any chance, he was related to a family that had once lived in that house on 51st street, which has since been torn down.  

The next day he called back to say that he was related to all of the people who had lived in the house and that the person I was looking for was his grandfather. 

COMMENT 

Even former librarians still have the impulse to help people find information.  The digitized phone books record a snapshot of people and businesses from the past.  Libraries used to have shelves full of them.  

Create a Digital Commonplace Book

 J.D. Biersdorfer. "Create a Digital Commonplace Book," New York Times, February 10, 2021, p. 

If you’ve never made a commonplace book before, first learn how others have used them. Academic libraries, along with museums, are home to many commonplace books, and you can see them without leaving the couch. John Milton’s commonplace book is on the British Library site, and the personal notebooks of other writers and thinkers pop up easily with a web search. The Yale University Library has scanned pages of historical commonplace books in its holdings, and the Harvard Library has a few in its own online collection, as well as images of a version of John Locke’s 17th-century guide to making commonplace books, which was originally published in French. And the Internet Archive has hundreds of digitized commonplace books for browsing or borrowing, including one from Sir Alec Guinness.

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986). 

I worked transferring books to computer discs, to cut down on storage space and replacement costs, they said. Discers, we called ourselves.  We called the library a discotheque, which was a joke of ours.  After the books were transferred they were supposed to go to the shredder, but sometimes I took them home with me.  I liked the feel or them and the look.  Luke said I had he mind of an antiquarian.  He liked that, he liked old things himself. 

COMMENT

     It seems that before the repressive Gilead theocracy took over Offred had a job at a library.  Notwithstanding her prowess at Scrabble, she was para-professional staff, not a  librarian. The detail of the library job shows Atwood as a master satirist.  Offred herself has been an  book-burner, albeit an inadvertent one.  Now the book burners are in charge and the world is a total nightmare.  The digitized books did not survive regime change, and this, along with the lack of paper money and elimination of newspapers has helped  fanatics suspend the Constitution. Libraries have been burned, there are no computer connections and women are forbidden to read.

    In the afterword a group of historians discuss Offred's narrative and describe how it had been recorded orally using an already obsolete technology of musical tape cassettes.   In order to transcribe them, the historians-of-the-future have to reconstruct a tape player.  

   Atwood's awareness of library preservation formats is extraordinary and prescient.   Oppression of women has left a gap in the historical record for Gilead scholars, but so has the use of non-archival digital technologies.

    

A Dusty Artifact Shows the Reach of a Social Reformer

Hillary Howard, "A Dusty Artifact Show the Reach of a Social Reformer," New York Times, August 25, 2019, p. Y29.

     The trunk had sat in the library of a midtown Manhattan acting school for decades.
No one seems to have ever fully rifled through its contents save for a researcher her and there, said Whit Waterbury, an archivist and librarian at the Neighborhood Playhouse, the conservatory where Robert Duvall, Jeff Goldblum and Allison January trained.
...
     At first, he didn't think much of the dusty thing, with its fragile binding and fading yellow ribbon on the outside.  He set it aide to focus on documents more clearly related to the school and its founders... But then last spring, he actually flipped thorough its pages.  There was Eleanor Roosevelt's signature. And Amelia Earhart's. The journalist Jacob Riis wrote a nice note. So did Alfred E. Smith, a four term governor of New York.
...
     Last year, for its 125th anniversary, Henry Street Settlement introduced a permanent exhibition, which covers the history of the organization, and of the neighborhood it serves, at its headquarters.
      Officials there have plans to digitize the book and incorporate it into the exhibition. 

COMMENT

   Once again, the tale of hidden treasure in dusty archives,   The word "dust" covering the potential on unnoticed texts, in this case, a guestbook for Henry Street Settlement signed by many notable people and demonstrating the historic importance of the organization.   One person is quoted as saying, "The trunk was something out of Narnia."   Whoever put it in the trunk must have had a sense that it was worth keeping, but since it was in the box they could never have imagined how it would raise that spooky sense of touching history for people in the future.

     Now the guestbook will be digitized, which is to say, it will become an online representation of official history.  Digitization is an odd paradox.  The electronic version will be easier for more people to see, but it won't inspire comparisons with Narnia.  It's inevitable that some of the magic will be lost in translation. Digitization also means selecting the most interesting artifact out of the box, but better access for this single object paradoxically makes it less likely that someone will find something amazing and wonderful than sorting through paper objects stored in a dusty box.

Life Goes On

Thessaly La Force, "Life Goes On" (Notes on the Culture), T: The New York Time Style Magazine, August 18, 2019 p. 98-

     Unbeknownst to [Judy] Chicago, Mary Ross Taylor, one of the administrators who then ran Chicago’s feminist nonprofit, Through the Flower, which had raised funds for the work’s completion and later it’s resuscitated tour, wrote to the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art asking if it would be interested in acquiring the research material relating to the piece ["The Dinner Party"].  They declined, finding the material of no interest. Today, Chicago’s archives are stored across three libraries: the Schlesinger Library of the History of Women in America, which is part of Harvard University; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; and Penn State University.  She is also working with these institutions to build a digital portal of her complete oeuvre, which she plans to unveil later this year.

COMMENT

     It always makes a good story when a library turns down material that turns out to be historically important.

Local Programs Fire Up Readers

Scott D. Pierce and Sheila McCann. Local Programs Fire Up Readers, Salt Lake Tribune, May 31, 2019, p. D1-

     Schools are wrapping up, the weather is warming up, and June is a day away.  Another clear sign of summer: Libraries, businesses and others are gearing up to engage and reward summer readers.…     The theme of this year’s challenge is “A Universe of Stories,” honoring the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.     Last year, almost 28,000 kids from infants to age 12 sing up along with 7,500 teens and more than 23,000 adults, said Liz Sollis, communications manager for the [Salt Lake] county library system. “We’ve actually seen a huge increase in adult participation over the last few years, “ she said.

…    

Four reading trackers for its summer reading program are available: Babies & Toddlers, Kids, Teens, and Adults, each with suggested activities.  The [Salt Lake City] system also suggests going paperless by using its Beanstack site online or by downloading the Beanstack app. 

COMMENT

This article is a local tie-in to one reprinted from the Washington Post.[1]  It lists summer reading programs at local libraries, businesses and other organizations that offer prizes and rewards for reading.  

   As an avid reader, I feel somewhat skeptical about the effectiveness of rewards.  I mean, to me getting time to sit and concentrate on reading already seems like a pretty big reward. However, it’s clear that the programs are popular and they serve a purpose if they make reading fun again. Museum and sports events tickets, free books, and food rewards might work for some people. Choosing what to read may also be the first step in developing self-directed lifelong learning skills that aren’t dependent on classroom teaching.

    The Salt Lake Public Library system is pushing a digital book subscription, which also seems questionable.  Unless kids are using a dedicated e-reader, anything on screens offers far too many distractions that interrupt reading.  Use of ebooks probably also means fewer trips to the library and consequently less immersion in the possibilities such as audio books or graphic novels.  In many library stories, a profound coming-of-age experience happens when kids first move from the juvenile section to the regular stacks.  That transition simply can’t happen online. 

   Digital reading seems even more dubious when it comes from an overtly commercial source.  Scholastic Read-a-Palooza, described in the article,  is an online summer reading program that logs the number of minutes kids read and unlocks digital rewards.  This is beginning to sound a lot less like pleasure and a lot more like the usual schoolwork drudgery, specially if parents can spy on reading minutes. Personally, I would not suggest going paperless. I’d suggest that the long, lazy days of summer are the perfect time to immerse oneself in the kind of absorbing deep reading experience that only print can offer.  The real purpose of summer reading, after all, is not to do better on standardized tests but to rediscover the joy of reading books that are not homework. 

[1] How to Draw ‘em In.

Rear

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...
 
 

   

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) 

   

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.

 

   

   
     

Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake. Doubleday, 2003.

Jimmy had a couple of term papers to finish before the holidays. He could have bought them off the Net, of course-- Martha Graham was notoriously lax about scorekeeping, and plagiarism was a cottage industry there -- but he'd taken a position on that.  He'd write his own papers, eccentric though it seemed; a line that played well with the Martha Graham type of woman. They liked a dash of originality and risk-taking and intellectual rigor.
     For the same reason he’d taken to spending hours in the more obscure regions of the library stacks. Ferreting out arcane lore. Better libraries, at institutions with more money, had long ago burned their actual books and kept everything on CD-ROM, but Martha Graham was behind the times in that, as in everything. Wearing a nose-cone filter to protect against the mildew, Jimmy grazed among the shelves of mouldering paper, dipping in at random.
     Part of what impelled him was stubbornness; resentment even. The system had filed him among the rejects, and what he was studying was considered— at the decision-making levels, the levels of real power— an archaic waste of time.  Well then, he would pursue the superfluous as an end in itself. He would be its champion, its defender and preserver. Who was it who’d said that all art was completely useless? Jimmy couldn’t recall, but hooray for him, whoever he was. The more obsolete  book was, the more eagerly Jimmy would add it to his inner collection.  [p195]

COMMENT

     Margaret Atwood’s razor-sharp wit skewers the "library of the future."  On the very first page of the Maddaddam trilogy human civilization has managed to destroy itself. Among the few (fully human) survivors is Snowman-the-Jimmy, now living among genetically-engineered Crakers, hyper-sexual blue demi-humans designed by asocially maladapted young man. The joke is that Jimmy’s education (at Martha Graham Academy, a school named to honor interpretive dance) is worse than useless. He has no survival skills. The remnant library offers no help since everything of value was converted into digital formats that can't be read now that the grid no longer exists.

   In an utterly sadistic twist typical of Atwood’s fearless writing, the actual print books that remain in the Martha Graham library are not only literally toxic, but  come from that most useless of genres— self-help books. In the end,  the remnants of useful human knowledge are transmitted by Toby, a middle-aged woman with practical knowledge of gardening, beekeeping and herbal medicine that she acquired by living with preppers in a doomsday cult. 

     Atwood's satire takes a dig at a kind of library futurism that was especially in vogue around 2003.  Futurists, predicting the imminent  Death of Print, were in a rush to digitize everything. In the process they attacked core values of librarianship and libraries as outdated and useless. The futurists did a lot of damage.  They convinced politicians to reduce library funding, and convinced librarians to reject collection and preservation as important activities.  The pushed people out of libraries into online space. If only those digital-futurist librarians had read Oryx and Crake perhaps they might have felt a bit less hubris about imposing their flawed vision on the actual future.  

No Immediate Danger (Carbon Ideologies v.1)

 

William T. Vollmann. No Immediate Danger (Carbon Ideologies V. 1). Viking 2018. 

Carbon Ideologies also contains about 129,000 words of source notes, citations and calculations.  I am sorry to say that Viking could not justify the cost of printing these.  Therefore, Carbon Ideologies will be the first of my books to contain a component which exists only in the electronic ether (see https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/carbonideologies).  I will deposit a copy of that section in my archive at the Ohio State University. [p.v]

COMMNET

     Carbon Ideologies, a two-volume doomer tour de force, is addressed to a future person in a world ravaged by climate change. Vollmann's editor wanted him to trim content from this sprawling book.  He agreed to trim the list of references as long as all the content could remain. As Vollmann dryly points out, it is ironic to store references for this particular book in a system that will fail as soon as the grid fails. If Vollmann's gloomy predictions come to pass the single archived hard copy in Ohio probably doesn't stand much of a chance, either. 

     There is a digital preservation initiative at Stanford University with the acronym LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) but even that depends on a functioning grid to supply electricity for access to digital archives. The librarians at Stanford are aware of this weakness. The LOCKSS website says that, " technology failures, economic failures and social failures all pose threats to the protection of digital content."  In Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel Oryx and Crake the grid goes down in a spectacular fashion.  She satirizes digital libraries  to explain why the entire history of human knowledge is lost in the "Waterless Flood."

     Which raises questions with no good answer.  What kind of library would be useful in the face of climate change?  How should librarians approach preservation in an age when the imminant collapse of civilization is a realistic possibility?