A Night at the Museum

Jane Halpern, " A Night at the Museum: How a French Cat Burglar Pulled Off he Biggest Art Heist in Decades," New Yorker, Jan 14, 2019, p. 30-39.

At the age of ten, Tomic pulled off his first heist. He broke into a library in Mostar, climbing through a window that was nearly ten feet above street level.  He stole two books, each of which appeared to be several hundred years old.  (The older brother of a friend learned of the theft and returned Tomic's plunder.) Tomic said of his early criminal adventures, "It was intuitive. Nobody ever taught me anything." 

COMMENT

     Not one, but two stories about criminal careers that began at the library!  (see: Lee Israel).  Perhaps the temptation is that library patrons are invited to touch and use objects that are rare and valuable.  They seem to belong to nobody.

    Many years ago a graduate student friend admitted to me that he had stolen library books that were relevant to his PhD thesis.  The books were so specialized he could not imagine another person ever wanting to borrow them.   Sometimes you encounter stories of people who, like the friend's older brother, develop guilt over unreturned library books.  Sometimes people return stolen books  many years later, occasionally together with an appropriate fine.

    One college librarian I worked with used to buy books on sexual health and deliberately fail to install protective magnetic strips that would set off the anti-theft gates.  He thought there was a need to put such books in the hands of students too embarrassed to check them out.  When the books inevitably disappeared he'd simply replace them, deliberately stocking the library shelves with books meant to be stolen.

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.
   

     

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. 

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.


   

 

   

Drumming at the Edge of Magic

 Mickey Hart, Jay Stevens, & Fredric Lieberman. Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey Into the Spirit of Percussion,  HarperSanFrancisco, 1990.

     For a long time I thought I would walk into a bookstore and come out with a book explaining all of this.  I finally sought guidance from several of my more learned friends who suggested I try a good research library.  Have you ever been to a major research library, like Harvard’s Widener or Berkeley’s Doe? They’re imposing stone structures, every inch of which hammers home the message that this is a very serious building.  The first time I went into the library at Berkeley I felt as if I had entered a strange kind of church that was both very busy and very quiet – a kind of hushed, scurrying place.  Everywhere you looked, serious people were praying over piles of books.

      I couldn’t wait to get my pile.  I felt the same excitement that I remembered feeling when my grandfather took me to see the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History – this was where the answers were kept.

     My guide was a brisk, no-nonsense type with a Ph.D. Astonished that I’d never been inside a big library before, she was enough of a teacher to be moved by my sudden and naïve eagerness for knowledge. Leading me over to a computer terminal, she punched in the topic – percussion—and scrolled quickly through the entries, jotting down numbers.  I was captivated by the process, particularly by the fact that inside this immense medieval stone building pulsed a heart of high technology.  In a minute we were trotting toward the stacks, zipping past aisles, checking numbers as we went.

     We made a right turn down between two of the stacks and halted in front of a squared-off section of maybe two dozen books.  The mother lode? I gazed at the titles.  Blades was there, of course, along with Curt Sachs’s History of Musical Instruments and John Chernoff’s African Rhythm and African Sensibility, but there were also a few volumes I had never seen before.  Eagerly I skimmed some of the tables of contents, my excitement fading as I went—there didn’t seem to be much here.

     Why were so many of the drum books so thin? And why, now that you mention it, were there so few? Why were there shelves full of books about the violin and walls full of books about the piano but only a dozen or so about drums, most of them monographs on obscurities like the gong in fourteenth-century Manchuria or gigantic tomes on narrow subjects like the mbira (the thumb piano in Zaire).

     I wheeled to question my guide, who nervously backed away murmuring something about there always being gaps in the scholarly record; if there weren’t gaps there’d be nothing for aspiring Ph.D.s to do.   [p. 29]

COMMENT

     This is my favorite library research story of all times.

     The drummer for the Grateful Dead walks into a library in Berkeley and... the librarian fails to recognize him. Then she gives him wrong advice.  Only in a moment of zen it turns out to be exactly the right advice.

     As things transpire, if you are Mickey Hart you have connections. Not long after this library incident, Hart's friends invited him to dinner with Joseph Campbell who literally wrote the book on The Power of Myth (1988). After chatting for a while about drums, Campbell (who like the librarian had also never heard of the Grateful Dead band, but knew the folktale)  offered the same advice  the librarian had given. He told Hart to write a book. 

   Micky Hart did what any respectable cult-band percussionist would do and hired a writer to help him write and a music professor to help with library research.  The book they wrote together is a marvel.

    It occurs to me that the reason that Hart failed to find books about shamanic drumming in the first place is because he was looking for indigenous knowledge.  The root problem is, most shamans don't write books.


 

What are we Teaching Boys when we Discourage Them from Reading Books about Girls?

 
Shannon Hale. “What are We Teaching Boys when We Discourage Them from Reading Books about Girls? (Special to the Washington Post), Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 14, 2018. P. D2. 

A school librarian introduces me before I give an assembly. “Girls, you’re in for a real treat. You will love Shannon Hale’s books. Boys, I expect you to behave anyway.” 

 COMMENT

     The librarian who Hale mentions is one of several anecdotes about teachers, booksellers, parents and other adults who should know better. Hale says that  she has plenty of fans who are boys (No surprise. She's a good writer.), but they’ve  been reading in secret because they feel embarrassed to enjoy “girl” books.  It must be really aggravating for an author to get fan mail from people who have been shamed about liking her books. But as Hale points out, the social effects of gender-stereotyping books are far more harmful than just irritating writers. Boys who are told they can't read about girls are learning that it's shameful to feel empathy for girls. Hale recommends that we can all do better by learning to say that  a book is about girls without saying it’s for girls. 

     Hale mentions that books about boys like Harry Potter are considered gender neutral, though perhaps Harry Potter is not the right example since since the series has exemplary diversity as well as a lot of strong female characters like Hermione Granger, Luna Lovegood, and Minerva McGonagal Even Harry Potter had its own run in with gender stereotyping. When it first came out the publisher told J.K. Rowling to use initials rather than her actual name because they thought boys wouldn't want to read a book written by a woman. (They also felt it necessary to issue an edition with an “adult” cover for grownups who felt ashamed to be seen reading children’s books).

     The two illustrations of Hale’s book covers that were chosen for the Salt Lake Tribune article are The Princess in Black and the Hungry Bunny Horde and Real Friends.  Both books feature highly feminized cover designs --pastel colors and cute, long-haired  female figures making smiling eye-contact with prospective readers. 

My copy of Princess Academy (top left) that I bought when the book first came out shows a group of women trekking through a rugged mountainous landscape. I was sorry to see that the new cover (top right) has an image that looks a lot like Belle from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast.  Even I, a dispassionate middle aged librarian, might feel a twinge of embarrassment to be caught reading a book with a fake Disney princess on the cover.

Six Kinds of Rain

Kathleen Dean Moore and Erin E. Moore, “Six Kinds of Rain: Searching for a Place in the Academy,” in Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work and Identity, ed. By Jenifer Sinor and Rona Kaufamn, Utah State University Press, 2007, pp. 27-38.

“In this folded space, it’s hard to know where a university is. Maybe the university has become a paradox, a place with no particular place —  in a familiar geography of classrooms, restrooms, computer networks, and labs where uncomfortable table-chairs and library shelves are an iconography recognizable around the world. This global University has a common language, shared ethical codes, standardized measures of status, and ingrained methodologies, economic systems and taboos. What the University doesn’t have is a meaningful relationship to a particular place— its absence the final achievement of the goal implicit in the word university. [pp.31-32]

COMMENT

Let's sing along with Malvina Reynolds’ classic song!

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they got put in boxes
And they came out all the same
There are doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

     In Becoming Native to this Place (1993) Wes Jackson asks, what if universities had a homecoming major? I would add, if they did have one, what would need to change in Academic libraries? 

     In the name of efficiency, academic collecting has been largely outsourced to approval plans and digital aggregators. That means libraries are spending a lot of money to buy very similar digital collections no matter where the institution is located. This in turn has led to proposals to replace academic libraries with huge regional book warehouses in order to “share” shelf space. [1] The book-warehouse idea presupposes that all campuses are interchangeable. All of this only makes sense if  you don’t truly think of your  university campus as a “community”

     Interestingly, even the people who most strongly advocate replacing libraries with book warehouses have realized that diversity (a.k.a. "unique print book manifestations") in academic library collections derives from collecting that reflects geography. Place is still important, no mater how much universities have been trying to ignore it.  If academic libraries start to pay attention to place it suggests a better way forward than replacing libraries with remote warehouses. 

     What if academic libraries decided to adopt a core mission of  fostering  resilient community? That would trigger a shift in library collection priorities away from globalized, generic knowledge towards specific local and hyperlocal knowledge.It would make regional Special Collections more prominent. But more importantly, it could help with the sustainability agenda to make the world a better place.

[1] OCLC Shared Print Management https://www.oclc.org/en/services/shared-print-management.html

Loss from Brazil Fire Felt Like 'New Genocide'

Manuela Andreoni and Ernesto Londono. Loss from Brazil Fire Felt Like ‘New Genocide,” New  York Times, September 14, 2018, p. A4. 

“It’s the museum that’s on fire!” Said Jose Urutau Guajajara, a member of the Tenetehara-Guajajara tribe who had been researching his people’s heritage in the archives of Brazil’s National Museum for more than a decade.  “We can still manage to put it out with buckets.”

    By the time they reached the centuries-old place , home to the world’s largest archive of indigenous Brazilian culture and history, flames had butted the building’s core and a dense column of smoke towered above it. 

…

“This is like a new genocide, as though they had slaughtered all these indigenous communities again,” Mr. Gajajara said. “Because that was where our memories resided.”

COMMENT:

The grief of cultural loss is unbearable.

Libraries and archives preserve textual information, which means they privilege textual cultures whether they mean to or not.  Artifacts and texts that describe pre-genocide indigenous cultures were often collected by cultural outsiders. Yet those scraps of information are often all that’s left to reconstruct cultural memory.

In the University of Utah Marriott Library there is a truly beautiful artwork [1] that incorporates textual excerpts from the library collection of  Mormon pioneer diaries. The library is justifiably proud to highlight this special collection.  Still, the diaries tell a one-sided text-based story. The Mormon pioneers didn't move into an inhabited place. They settled a cultural landscape that was already occupied by Ute, Goshute, Paiute, Shoshone and Navajo people. The diaries don't record non-textual cultural memory that is embedded in Utah’s desert landscape. That failure of information has real-world consequences. 

[1] Paul Housberg, Another Beautiful Day has Dawned Upon Us (2008). Handcrafted, kiln cast colored glass silvered on the back. Selected diary passages, from the Library’s private collection about the westward migration, are included in the four unique murals. The work was commissioned by the State of Utah as part of Utah’s Percent-for-Art Program, 2008.

Branching Out

Nalini Nadkarni. "Branching Out," in Nature Love Medicine: Essays on Wildness and Wellness. ed. by Thomas Lowe Fleischner, 2017, pp. 27-40.

                Although immense amounts of knowledge are contained in the science libraries around the world, rates of deforestation, climate change, species invasion, and over-consumption if tree-derived products are increasing.  Humans— especially those living in urban environments and working in windowless cubicles— are more and more separated from their connections to trees, soils and wind.  Midway into my academic career, I realized that communication of all my scientific findings to scientists — through my academic papers and talks at ecology conferences —did very little to fulfill my childhood dream of being a grownup who protected trees. [p. 31]

COMMENT

 The fact that so much academic writing has no market has misled some academic librarians into misunderstanding the motivation and interests of academic authors. Often, academic writing is an indirect path to the rewards of scholarly reputation, job promotion and successful grant applications, valued according to citation statistics. Some librarians therefore assume that scholars only care about reputation. However, in this case Nadkarni has a much larger goal. She wants her writing to create change in the world. This ambition places her squarely into an academic no-man’s-land between science and activism.

      There has long been an ongoing debate among scientists regarding the role of activism in the sciences and where to place appropriate limits. In his classic textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology (1953), Eugene Odum hoped that ecology would emerge as an  interdisciplinary bridge between science and society.  Instead what happened is the vocabulary shifted.  "Ecology" became more scientifically focused and integrated in Biology departments. The term “environmentalism” gained favor to imply ecological activism. In the academic environment, biological scientists criticized environmental studies as  being a “church of the environment” for idealistic students.  Eventually, the word “environmentalism” was deemed too narrow and after the Brundtland Report (1987) it was replaced by the word “sustainability." Sustainability was defined by a triple bottom line of ecology, economics and society, an attempt to deliberately pull science and society back together.  However, once again scientists balked at the fuzziness of social science and policy. The ideas of sustainable development, criticized as insufficiently evidence-based, spun off  “sustainability science” on the one hand and “resilience” on the other.  And so it goes.  As each new term becomes “tainted” by association with activism, scientists imagine that the next effort to save the planet will succeed due to rigorous standards of objectivity.

     In the end, Nadkarni was not able to create change within the context of pure science. Instead she engaged with humanities by inviting “forest novices” to help interpret what she was seeing —  artists, dancers, musicians, and indigenous people from the Arctic who have never seen a tree.  

 

     Academic librarians like to structure collections and organizations to mirror the structure of  academic departments at a university, but that means libraries are bound by the same limitations. Interdisciplinary ideas can end up marginalized, or caught in a tug-of-war of words and definitions. I wonder how many of the science libraries that have Nadkarni’s academic papers also have a video of the dance performance inspired by her work?

Donald Trump Would Made a Terrible Navajo

Sierra Teller Ornelas, "Donald Trump Would Make A Terrible Navajo," New York Times (Dec. 2, 2017).

In elementary school, I wanted to do a report on them [Navajo Code Talkers], but when my dad took me to the library to do research we couldn’t find any books that covered their achievements. This was before the internet, and I didn’t have any code talkers in my family, so my search ended there. I remember how angry my dad got, driving us back home empty-handed. 

COMMENT

     I empathize with the anger of the father at finding nothing in the library about his heroes. In the 1990s I was a librarian at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado which offers free tuition for Native American students. As a a consequence, about 10% of students there were Indigenous people. The college is located close to  the Navajo Nation so a lot of students were from "The Rez." The library had a Southwest Room where we kept special collections of materials about the local area under lock and key. Anglo students (as we called them) would come into the library to research the usual undergraduate topics-- abortion, gun control, medical marijuana, doping in sports, and so on -- and we'd have plenty of material for them. But when Navajo students wanted to learn about code talkers, uranium mining, downwinders, the Long Walk, or what the heck was going on in complicated tribal politics they had to use the Southwest Room with it's shorter hours and non-circulating books. By categorizing certain materials as rare and valuable, we librarians were inadvertently forcing students who were already educationally disadvantaged [1] to do graduate level research just to write undergraduate papers about their own history and community 

[1] Ben Meyers, "Who Lives in an Education Deserts? More People than You Think," Chronicle of Higher Education (July 17, 2018). 

Our analysis showed that 29.5 percent of all Native Americans live more than 60 minutes’ drive from a college. Compared with white Americans, Native American adults are more than five times more likely to live in an education desert.