Showing posts with label Preservation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Preservation. Show all posts

Monday, November 25, 2019

The Testaments

The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale, #2)

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments, (2019)

To those who have questioned this material and its dating, I can now say with assurance that half a dozen independent suites have verified our first assumptions, though I must qualify that somewhat.  The Digital Black Hole of the twenty-first century that caused so much information to vanish due to the rapid decay rate of stored data— coupled with the sabotage of a large number of server farms and libraries by agents from Gilead bent on destroying any records that might conflict with their own, as well as the populist revolts against oppressive digital surveillance in many countries— means the it has not been possible to date many Gileadean materials precisely. A margin of error of between ten and thirty years must are assumed.  Within that range, however we are as confident as any historian can usually be (Laughter.) [p.409].

COMMENT

Libraries appear in Margaret Atwood’s fiction fairly often and she has strong, well-informed opinions about them.  This satirical paragraph is a good example.  At the end of the story, historians of the future try to piece together the evidence to figure out what really happened.   In Atwood's informaiton dystopia, digital material has utterly vanished,  vulnerable to war and misused to prop up a surveillance state.  In this story many of the words that do survive survive on paper.  Aunt Lydia records her own testimony using a antique-style pen and ink meant for teaching drawing.  

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

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.

Monday, June 17, 2019

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).  

  

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Lessons in Printing

Image result for klancy de nevers printing 
Klancy Clark de Nevers, Lessons in Printing,  Scattered Leaves Press, 2018.

      She was a reader. She read all the time. The Seattle Post Intelligencer accompanied her breakfast of coffee with sugar and cream skimmed off the top of the milk bottle. The evenings Aberdeen Daily World enlivened cocktail hour. Magazines like Time, Saturday Evening Post, or Life engaged her as she sat in her chair to the right of the fireplace. Stretching out on the couch after the housework was done, she devoured novels from the library, mysteries, the latest arrival from the Book-of-the-Month Club. She often reread her favorite book, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. My sisters and I also reread it often, recognizing the heroine, Cassandra Mortmain and our mother as kindred spirits. Cassandra also was sensible, outgoing and a doer. 
...
     I wonder whether he kept a dry eye as he tried to comfort his readers: "There is no need to shed tears for a vanished institution..." and promised to preserve the Post's Morgue as a valuable historical reference.  He knew that morgue would be cared for.  The fifty-seven volumes of news and features are still accessible, in large part because of the newspaper's glossy book stock holds up and displays photographs well.  The full collection is maintained by the Aberdeen Timberland Library, on microfilm by the state of Washington, and in both forms in my guestroom closet.

COMMENT

     Here’s a recurring library theme— reading habits as a reflection of a person’s true self.[1]  In this instance, the mother’s personality is reflected in the heroine of her favorite book.  Her daughters love the book, too, in part because it reminds them of  mom. 

     Mom's reading habits are a combination of subscriptions and library books. The description is from the days when libraries didn't usually circulate periodicals.  If you wanted to read them you had to sit in the library reading room.  

  The defunct newspaper was the Gray's Harbor Post which ceased publication in 1961.  The paper recorded a history of small-town life.  The demise of the paper was related to a declining economy related to resource extraction.  Once the newspaper was gone, there was no longer anyone to tell the story.


Sunday, April 14, 2019

He Didn't Just Like Her Profile Photo. He Understood It.

Tammy La Gorce, "He didn't Just Like Her Profile Photo. He Understood It," New York Times, April 14, 2019, ST11.

     In posting the Tifa shot, she had unwittingly sent up a smoke signal to a kindred spirit: "I wanted to show that I was actually a real-live nerd," said Ms. Nastasi, who is the associate manager of book conservation at the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
...
    Ms Nastasi, by contrast, was not sure what she wanted her professional life to look like, but she knew it would have to satisfy her appetite for frequent and meaningful change. "I like to try new things and I like to go big," she said.  That explains her shift from AmeriCorps to her stint as an event manger for Saucy by Nature, a catering company in Brooklyn, and eventually to the Thomas J. Watson Library.  There she acts as a sort of air traffic controller for rare and damaged books, ensuring they are properly tagged an labeled after being repaired and recirculated.

COMMENT

   This librarian's OKCupid profile had a photo of her in the costume of an obscure anime character.  When a man complimented her cosplay and not the sexiness of her costume, reader, she married him.

  The  librarian's occupation is interesting enough to that the writer that it is described twice in the profile.  It is taken as representing her commitment to social justice,  her appetite for meaningful change and her cultural involvement -- in  short,  evidence of her desirability as a partner for a smart, nerdy man.

"Fandom," incidentally has been identified as a trend by the Center for the Future of Libraries.

Saturday, March 2, 2019

The Other Mozart

Kylee Ehmann, "The Other Mozart," (Entertainment Picks), Feb. 23-27, 2019). Salt Lake City Weekly, Feb. 21, 2019, p. 16.

Contained within an opulent dress that covers the entire stage and balancing a towering hairstyle, Milo recreates Nannerl's isolation world, in which her genius was devalued because of her gender.  "Most female composers from the past have been forgotten, their music lost or gathering dust in libraries," Milo says.  "We will never know what could have been, and this is our loss."

COMMENT

    Again, the dusty library.  Sylvia Milo (playwright, actor and producer of a one-woman show about the older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus), cites metaphorical library dust to say that music by women composers is not being performed, but the dust also offers a bit of hope. The article says, "we know she continued to create music, though none of it survives."  Imagine the excitement if someone actually were to discover Nannerl's music in some dusty library.

  Lost manuscripts by W.A. Mozart still turn up occasionally. In 2014, a lost manuscript of Mozart's Sonata in A Major turned up at the National Szechenyi Library in Budapest, Hungary. In 2008 librarians in Nantes, France found a Mozart manuscript while they were cataloging the archives.  There really are some treasures hidden away gathering dust!



 

Friday, February 8, 2019

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. 



Thursday, February 7, 2019

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. 
     

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Hidden Traces

Sam Knight, "Hidden Traces: How Historical Manuscripts are Giving Up Their Secrets" (Annals of Science), New Yorker,  November 26, 2018, pp. 38-45.

Melloni is the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Sciences, an institute in Bologna dedicated to the history of the Church.  He had heard of the Marco Polo Bible, but he was unaware of its poor condition until a colleague spotted the crumbling book at an exhibition at the library in 2008, and pitched a project to restore it a find out more about its past.  "It was like a sort of Cinderella among the beautiful sisters," Melloni said.  Like other people accustomed to handling old texts or precious historical objects, Melloni has a special regard for what Walter Benjamin called their aura; "a strange weave of space and time" that allows for an intimation of the world in which they  were made.  "You have in your hand the manuscript,: Melloni said, "But also the stories that the manuscript is carrying.
....
Collins cautioned that historical proteomic techniques are still in their infancy.  "We still need to learn what these things mean," he said. But when you realize that the surface of any old object might be bearing newly discernible biological information -- that you are holding a manuscript and you are also holding the stories that the manuscript is carrying-- it makes you look again at the world's libraries and archives, and wonder what secrets they contain.  

Comment

     Books as physical objects are of the subject of  this article which describes scientific investigation of  the traces of protein left behind by people handling books and manuscripts.  Rather than using textual information, the researchers are looking for chemical clues about past authors and readers.  In the case of the Marco Polo bible, there were questions of whether the artifact was really the right age?  Did it really travel to China? "A manuscript's text is only part of it's story," Knight writes

     In order to test books, proteomic researchers need to get permission from librarians and archivists.  In some cases they use "destructive testing" which requires taking a small sample, a definite no-no for rare and valuable books.  Some libraries like the Bodleian Library and British Library have refused to permit even nondestructive testing which takes molecular samples.

      The author of the article realizes that his own notebook will forever carry traces of the fish he ate for lunch, but so what? Is that information important enough to be worth saving the physical object?  Probably not for the notebook, but for other paper objects proteomics can determine provenance or prove that certain conditions (like bubonic plague) were epidemic.  The information in libraries is not limited to what is recorded in text.

   

   

Sunday, December 23, 2018

Preservation Acts

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

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

COMMENT

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

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

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

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

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


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

   


Saturday, December 1, 2018

Before the Law

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

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

 COMMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

 



Thursday, November 15, 2018

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.  


Tuesday, November 13, 2018

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. 

Tuesday, November 6, 2018

No Immediate Danger (Carbon Ideologies v.1)


 No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies

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?

Monday, October 8, 2018

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.


Friday, September 21, 2018

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.