Mamoudou Athie Loves the Library

 "Momoudou Athie Loves the Library" (Headliner, My Ten). New York Times,  February 27, 2022, p. AR8.

8. New York Public Library Theater on Film and Tape Archive
Suzanne Esper [one of Athie's acting teachers] would always talk about particular performances that have long since passed.  I was like, "I wish I could have seen that."  I feel like it was Suzanne that alerted me to the place, but I lived there.  And I've seen so many plays, so much Shakespeare, so many things that taught me so much from watching. 

'West Side Story': The Great Debate

 New York Times, "'West Side Story': The Great Debate", New York Times, pDecember 5, 2021, p. AR10.

CARINA DEL VALLE SCHORSKI
I  first saw "West Side Story" on a VHS tape my mom and I rented from the public library when I was maybe 9 or 10.  I grew up in California, away from my Puert Rican family in Washington Heights, so I thought I might find something about my culture that I didn't know before.  But nothing onscreen -- beyond the latticework of fire escapes -- reminded me of the people or neighborhood I new from frequent visits to New York.  I finished the movie feeling even more confused than I was before about what being Puerto Rican was supposed to mean -- to me, and to the average American. 

COMMENT
     The identity (or lack of identity) portrayed in a popular musical by and for white people is a disappointment to a person who is a little homesick for Washington Heights.  However, the movie version of Lin-Manuel Miranda's "In the Heights" was criticized for not having enough dark-skinned actors.  The library, of course, can provide both movies to anyone who wants to judge for themselves.

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. 

 

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. 

Fresh Litter

"Fresh Litter," (Talk of the Town), New Yorker, December 23, 2019, pp. 31-32.

The source material "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," is a collection of poems that T.S. Eliot wrote for his godchildren. "The poems were written in the nonsense tradition," Carolyn Vega, the curator for the Berg Collection, at the New York Public Library, explained recently.  Sara Beth Joren, publicist for the library chimed in: "And that's why when people hate on 'Cats' -- like "Oh there's no plot.' It's just like, 'Yeah, there wasn't supposed to be'. And anyway, there is a plot. There's a cat trying to get to the Heaviside Layer.  That's a plot.
     The two women were waiting for Francesca Hayward, one of the stars of the "Cats" movie.  Hayward, a principal dancer in the Royal Ballet, plays Victoria, a graceful white cat -- her first film role.  Vega was ready to give Hayward a quick Eliot lesson; she had brought out a first edition of "Old Possum" and some photographs of the poet. 

COMMENT

      An actor in need of information about her role consults a librarian.  Sure, there is plenty about T.S. Eliot on the Internet, but it could be quite a slog to discover how we got from Eliot the poet to the musical "Cats."  The librarian helps zero in on the nonsensical origins of what is, after all, a distinctly nonsensical musical.   Hayward reacts appropriately to the first edition, experiencing that spooky sense of history that is connected to physical artifacts.

Amazon's Expansive, Creeping Influence in an American City

Scott Shane, "Amazon's Expansive, Creeping Influence in an American City," New York Times, December 1, 2019, p.1, 26-28.

Public libraries are stocked with digital audiobooks from Amazon's Audible, and browsers can check reviews on Amazon's Goodreads.

COMMENT

     In this article about the Kraken-like tentacles of Amazon.com libraries feature in the role of customers.  When libraries lend audio books, Amazon skims a little off the top.  Instead of turning to librarians for book recommendations, readers can plow through crowdsourced reviews on Goodreads (which are a lot less useful than you'd think with regard to finding something good to read).
     Libraries are a keystone of  literary culture.  They support books and reading by buying stuff, putting money back into writing and publishing. Yet in the world of librarianship there has not been much acknowledgement of this role. Instead, there is a tendency to prioritize efficiency and cheapness.  During the transition to online newspapers, librarians never asked the question of how journalists would get paid.  Likewise, librarians have cut down on purchasing books from university presses without ever asking how young professors will get tenure if there is no place for them to publish books.
     Librarians like to point to libraries as core institutions for community resilience and civic engagement.  Yet abandoning newspapers and academic presses for the sake of "cheapness" was not socially responsible.  It's probably not socially responsible for libraries to switch procurement to Amazon.com either, particularly since prioritizing convenience and cheapness are exactly what lured librarians to make bad decisions in the past.
     Somebody (ALA?) should take a hard look at library spending in order to understand exactly who and what it's supporting. The long and short is, Big Tech distributes information but does not create it.  Amazon.com is the new Wal*Mart, vacuuming up dollars and sucking the life out of communities.  Only now it's happening to cities and not vulnerable small towns.   The article ends with Emma Snyder, the owner of an independent bookstore who says that her customers will pay $10 more for a book just because they don't like the world Amazon is building:  "Part of what people don't like is that Amazon debases the value of things.  We're commercial spaces, but we fundamentally exist to feed and nurture people's souls."  What if libraries applied this idea to spending?  Is there a way to re-focus collection development on building strong communities, not just on getting cheaper best-sellers?

Selling Treasure Chest of Black History

Julie Bosman, "Selling Treasure Chest of Black History: The Auction of Ebony and Jet Magazines' Photo Archive Has Scholars Worried," New York Times, July 17, 2019, p. B4-5.

     "It keeps me up at night, thinking about the future of this archive," said Tiffany M. Gill, associate professor of Africana studies and history and the University of Delaware.  "You can't really tell the story of black life in the 20th century without these images from the Johnson archive.  So it's important that whatever happens in this auction, that these images are preserved and made available to scholars, art lovers and everyday folks."
      Several museums have expressed interest, and the obvious candidates are the Schomburg Center from Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library; The National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
     Another possibility that is feared by scholars: A private collector buys the archive and stashes it away. 

COMMENT

    The photo archives from Jet and Ebony document a cultural history of African Americans in the U.S., but the like many other print periodicals, these once-popular magazines are victims of the Internet.  The photographic archives are set to be auctioned to whomever can pay for them.  That is likely to be one of the world's billionaires, but it's impossible to say whether they will be friend or foe to the interests of scholars.  On the other hand, if a library or museum buys them it will open up a whole new world of images; if a private buyer gets them they may be off-limits.

      Libraries, in other words, are a kind of public space in more ways than one.  It's not just the physical space but the information space where things like these photographs can be made accessible to the public.  One frequent library story is about finding hidden treasure in dusty boxes.  These photos no doubt contain such treasure if anyone is ever allowed to go looking for it.

Vivian Perlis Dies at 91

Anthony Tommasini, "Vivian Perlis Dies at 91: Oral History Project Captured Music's Giants," New York Times, (Obituaries) July 15, 2019, p. B7

     Ms. Perlis came to run the project accidentally, after taking a job as a research librarian at the Yale School of Music in 1967.  She had become involved there with the library's extensive Charles Ives collection and one day she made a visit to New York City to pick up some additional materials donated by Julian Myrick, who had been a pattern with Ives in an insurance business.
     Thinking that he might have some recollections to share, Ms. Perlis brought along a portable tape recorder
...
     She became a harpist with the New Haven Symphony while working the library job at Yale that led to her founding the oral history project.
     For years Ms. Perlis essentially had to secure funding for the project on her own. The Yale School of Music provided office space and work-study students to assist with the endless task of transcribing interviews. But she often felt "like and orphan," she said, as she labored in her basement headquarters.
...
From the start Ms. Perlis buttressed the collection with existing recorded interviews acquired from radio stations and historians, building it into one of the most extensive oral history archives in America. 

COMMENT

     This obituary makes me happy and sad at the same time.  In the 1960's Ms. Perlis wanted to do a Ph.D in musicology but Columbia University refused to give her the flexibility to take care of her kids.  Instead she became a pink-collar academic librarian and  got to do the project of her dreams collecting oral history from famous musicians, albeit with no professional recognition and almost no institutional support. The the library gave her space in the basement with no air conditioning while PhD musicologists derided her collection as "pipsqueak stuff."  I can only imagine how much her librarian colleagues must have resented her getting to spend time on her pet project that nobody cared about.  Until somebody did care, that is. 

    This tale is all too familiar in the world of academic libraries.  Administration actively discourages librarians from "niche" work that seems out of line with organizational priorities.  Yet that often turns out to produce the most unique and most valuable collections.  In this case the librarian built a collection worthy of an obituary in the New York Times.  I will bet the the people who tried to shut her down never accomplished anything even half as notable. 

     

Once Upon a River

Diane Setterfield. Once Upon a River: A Novel. 2018.

     The character of Henry Daunt is inspired by the magnificent real-life photographer of the Thames Henry Taunt. Like my Henry, he had a houseboat kitted out as a darkroom. In the course of a lifetime he took some 53,000 photographs using the wet collodion process His work came close to being destroyed when, after his death, his house was sold and his garden workshop dismantled.  On learning that many thousands of he glass plates stored there had already been smashed or wiped clean for use as greenhouse glass, a local historian, Harry Paintin, alerted E. E. Skuse, the city librarian in Oxford. Skuse was able to stop the work and arrange real of the surviving plates for safekeeping. I note their names here out of gratitude for their swift actions. It is thanks to them that I have even able to explore the Victorian Thames visually and weave this story around Taunt’s images.  [p.461]

COMMENT

  This anecdote describes the preservation function of the library.  It's not just a “book museum,” but a multi-media museum as well. As is often the case, the librarian stepped in to rescue a valuable history collection only after part of it had already been destroyed. While librarians are sometimes criticized as "gatekeepers," it is also true that outside of bookish professions people may not recognize the value of media artifacts. 

The heroic librarian is specifically mentioned by name since the rescued photographs were the basis for a novel. Unlike Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, this novel doesn't reproduce any of the  historic images that inspired it.  The but the images are only represented in the writing. This kind of output from library materials is so much more imaginative than the carefully documented scholarly communication and undergraduate term papers we tend to associate with library research.  

   There are a number of books about Henry Taunt and his photographs.  In his day, he even wrote a river guide-- A New Map of the River Thames (1872), which inspired interest in recreational boating including what is possibly the best river-trip book ever written, Three Men in a Boat (1889).  

  

Genevive Oswald [Obituary]

Marina Harss, "Genevivie Oswald, Innovative and Eclectic Dance Archivist, Dies at 97," New York Times, March 31, 2019, p. 25.

      In 1944, armed with a fresh undergraduate degree in music, Me. Oswald came to New York to study singing. At first she supported herself with a job selling train tickets at the old Penn Station, but before long she was working at the New York Public Library.
     Ms Oswald began by cataloging the 375 dance-related books and three dozen boxes of dance programs and clippings then held in the music division at the library's main building on 42nd Street.
     She became curator when the dance collection was formally established in 1947, presiding over a room on the library's ground floor.  In 1965 the dance collection moved into a new branch of the library at Lincoln Center.  This year it celebrates there 75th anniversary of the beginning of that tiny collection, which had grown to more than 41,000 books, 26,000 films, 2,700 prints and many other things.
.....
     Sometimes those records become a vital  link to a tradition in peril.  As the dance historian Lynn Matluck Brooks described in a 2011 essay for Dance Chronicle about Ms. Oswald, recordings made of the Classical Khmer Ballet of Cambodia at there Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1971 later became teaching tools for Cambodian dance teachers who had survived the massacres of the Khmer Rouge. The regime had attempted to obliterate all traces of Khmer culture, including dance.

COMMENT
     An obituary for a New York Public Library archivist shows how the methodical, longitudinal work of librarians and archivists can have a profound impact on community.  A small archival collection started 75 years ago has become one of the world's major dance archives through years of collecting and preservation.  It strikes me that it would be difficult to sell this kind of specialized project to contemporary library administrators who would no doubt find it too expensive, too specialized, too space-intensive and insufficiently "cutting edge" (i.e. technological). Yet I've used this collection myself to write about dance for  Catalyst magazine  in Salt Lake City, Utah.

     The deep cultural importance of the dance archive is captured in the story of how the collection facilitated cultural restoration in Cambodia after a horrific genocide.  It's hard to overstate how important it must have been for survivors to know that these dances had survived. It's an extreme instance of how library collections can serve to support community resilience by preserving a record of how things were before the disaster.

    The obituary describes the problems of preserving the ephemeral art of dance which depends on years of specialized training and disappears into the moment.  Gegi Oswald said that she was "collecting around the absence of the dance itself."[1]   Perhaps in a way, that is not so different from other library and archival collecting where the historical moment recedes into memory leaving only traces behind.

    I have long thought that libraries should give all librarians at least a little money and space to collect their own obsessions.  Who knows what one person might be seeing that everyone else has missed?

[1]See, An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance

 
   

.  

       

The 'Rush' of a Poet Laureate

Alexandra Alter. "The 'Rush' of a Poet Laureate: Tracy K. Smith, Poet. " New York Times, January 27, 2019, p. BU4.

Monday
9:15 A.M. Get to Lewis Library on campus where the broadcast center is.  In a couple of hours, I'm scheduled to record a brief interview for an "on the Media" segment about my libretto for "A Marvelous Order." 

 COMMENT 

     It seems the life of a poet is not as relaxing as one might think!  As the poet laureate of the U.S., Smith is described as "an evangelist for her medium."  She is also a professor of creative writing at Princeton and on this particular day she is using a studio at the library to record a radio broadcast.

     These days, when a lot of poetry is often published on the Internet poets are often asked for a recording to go with the text version of a poem.  I've used the campus library for that purpose myself in order to get high-quality sound (For example, see: Can Opener by Amy Brunvand in Terrain.org)

    The library is a good place for a shared public recording studio because it's a neutral campus space, not controlled by a single department.  One department might use it to record educational podcasts, while another might use it to read poetry, and another for student projects.  Having the expertise and equipment in neutral library space means that the priorities can be set by users telling the library what they need.      

     

   

An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance

Walter Terry, “An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance.” Smithsonian, Oct. 1980, p. 61-69.

     The procedure for mounting each of the historic dances in “early Years” varied.  Rehearsals went on in company studios or in the University of Utah’s old Kingsbury Hall. But coaching sessions and practice also took place wherever and whenever there was time; individuals sought out advice from from New York to Hollywood. They sat in screening rooms at the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library, the greatest dance archives in the world, or they huddled by screens at home to see movies, whole and fragmentary, of the dances they were preparing. They sprawled on studio floors while listening to reminiscences and they rehearsed and sweated on those floors as they strove to capture the past 

     On occasion, someone from he Dance Notation Bureau in New York City would come to them with the score of a dance recorded in Labanotation, a highly accurate and detailed system. (It is named after Rudolf von Laban, pioneer, along with Mary Wigman of Germany’s modern dance, and it can record the position of thumb and the flicker of an eyelid as well as vast patterns by a huge company.  After notation set the dances, “live” experts would come to place final touches because, says Chmelar, commenting on one weakness of the notation system, “the breath of life is missing.”

COMMNET

     Here's a truly amazing story of extreme library research. The Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT) re-constructed a program of early modern dance performances from the 1920s-50s from evidence left behind.  The problem is, of course, that dance happens in the moment.  The traces it leaves are in the memory of the people who did it or saw it.  Other than that, the movement has been translated into words or images.

     But what about movies?  What about the that Labanotation?  The problem is, says  Robin Chmelar who performed Isadora Duncan choreography in the show, "the breath of life is missing."

     Walter Terry, the dance critic who wrote the article, hated this project. “In theory, the multiple-source procedure used by the RDT to stage its fist program of historic dances was admirable.  But there were pitfalls," he wrote.  Terry believed that the movements of modern dance are inextricably connected to the original style of the original dances, and that the dances could only be properly transmitted by a teacher/guru who had learned the original.  Linda C. Smith, who was Executive/Artistic co-director of RDT felt differently.  If the dance had validity, she responded, then it had validity on her dancing body.    

       In library terms these two are arguing over preservation issues.  In Terry's view, the recorded traces in the archive are memory aids, but not living documents.  Smith, by contrast, views the archives as preserving a form of memory that can be re-activated in a meaningful way. 

     I actually saw this program back in the 1980s, and it made a big impression on me.  It was not merely danced, but was accompanied by a lecture on dance history.  The audience left knowing who the original artists were and why they were important.  Seeing these dancers with the "breath of life" was an entirely different experience from watching films or looking at still photos in books.  I think Terry was wrong to think that the reproductions were "tampering with history".  We recreate fictionalized history in all kind of ways with novels, movies, and plays and other art.  Why not  use what's in the  library archives to re-create an experience of seeing early modern dance?  As Linda C. Smith pointed out, she never claimed to impersonate Isadora Duncan.  Rather, she was dancing her own interpretation of dances that Duncan made, taking the inspiration of the dances into the future. 

Robert Rainwater, 74, New York Public Library Curator

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

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

COMMENT

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

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

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

     

Beyond 'Rent,' Tunes Awaiting Their Star Turn

Michael Paulson, "Beyond 'Rent,' Tunes Awaiting Their Star Turn: Bringing New Life to Unknown Songs by Jonathan Larson," New York Times, October 7, 2018, p. AR7.

     The concert is a passion project for Jennifer Ashley Tepper, the club's creative and programming director and a longtime fan of Larson's work-- her bat mitzvah sign-in board depicted her dressed as Mimi, popping out of a pile of "Rent" playbills.  She dived into his archives at the Library of Congress, listening to hours of recordings and sifting through boxes of documents to reconstruct his catalog.
     Larson wrote about 200 songs over 18 years, starting when he was in college.  They were for unproduced musicals, workshops and benefits; there were pop songs, political songs and songs cut from his to posthumously produced musicals, "Rent" and "Tick, Tick...Boom!"
     Many are about being a struggling artist in New York. Few of the songs existed in written form, so the producers of the "Jonathan Larson Project," as the 54 Below concerts are being titled, had to transcribe and orchestrate them from recordings. 

COMMENT

     As far as research projects go, this one is high profile. After Larson died in 1996, Mark Horowitz, an archivist at the Library of Congress, contacted his family to ask if they would consider donating his papers.[1] The songs were on audio cassettes (remember those?) and computer data files. The archivists registered copyright protection and made back-up copies of the media files. [2]  Preserving historic media is a big problem for libraries. Plastic materials used for recordings are generally not chemically stable. Computer technology keeps changing and it's hard to keep up. You either have to save the device that plays the media or you have or continually migrate it to some new-fangled media platform. All of this is expensive and time-consuming so librarians have to pick and choose what to save.

     Transcription is also an issue for researchers using multi-media sources. Transcription software exists, but none of it is totally automatic.  It's still a time-consuming, nitpicky process to listen and transcribe recordings.

     Nonetheless, in a blog post she wrote for the Library of Congress, Tepper describes her research as "the adventure of a theatre historian's wildest dreams."[3]  The photo accompanying the New York Times article shows singers using sheet music on music stands.  Essentially, Tepper's transcriptions made Larson's music accessible by migrating it from digital formats to paper, and then from paper into live performance.

[1] Jonathon Larson Papers 1978-1996

[2] Amy Asch, "Creating Jonathan Larsen's Archive: a Letter from the Woman who Built his Library of Congress Collection," Playbill, Jan. 28, 2016.

[3] Jennifer Ashley Tepper, "Finding Jonathan Larsen’s Lost Works In Tapes and Boxes…and Turning Them Into a Show," Library of Congress> Blogs > Music, Sept. 6, 2018.