Tarot cards are having a moment with help from pandemic

Sarah Pulliam Bailey, "Tarot cards are having a moment with help from pandemic", Washington Post December 10, 2021 https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/12/10/tarot-cards-pandemic-trend/

The rise of contemporary artist-made tarot decks is being documented by MIT Libraries, describing the more than 400 decks as “unbound books” with narratives. MIT has purchased decks from crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter or directly from the artists on sites like Etsy with a particular interest in radical, feminist, queer, people of color, and spiritually and religiously diverse revisions. The idea for the MIT tarot library emerged after an MIT’s curator was staying in a hotel in Washington in 2018 when she saw a tarot deck for sale at the mini bar, according to Alex McGee, an archivist for MIT Libraries.

“That confirmed to us that tarot was having a moment,” McGee said. “If we’re arguing it’s an unbound book, how could we not create a space for it?”

COMMENT

I have often described Tarot cards as perhaps the only successful hypertext book. The librarians at MIT  agree. 

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

 

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

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

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

...

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

COMMENT

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

 

 

Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight

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

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

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

COMMENT

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

 

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.

Tax Credit for Children Leaves Neediest Behind

Jason DeParle, “Tax Credit for Children Leaves Neediest Behind,” New York Times, December 17, 2019 p. A1-

     Money helps children in part because of what it can buy— more goods (cheesy chicken spaghetti) and services (gymnastics classes or tutors).  Ms. Bradford, the teachers’s aide, is so eager to invest in her sons that she has used tax refunds to send them on Boy Scout trips to 42 states— even when a flood left them living in her car “I’m trying to instill in them that it’s education that gives you knowledge and power, not cars or clothes,” she said. Before traveling to Washington and visiting the Vietnam Memorial the boys — Tony 17, and Micah 13— wrote a report on a Monroe man killed in the war, which the public library added to its collection.  Finding the soldier’s name on the wall, Micah said, “felt like touching history.”

COMMENT

     The article is about people who are too poor to get the full amount of a child tax credit.  In this example, the extra money helps buy educational experiences that aren’t available at public school.  The library is part of an education plan that includes schools, extra-curricular clubs, field trips and independent research. 

     The student work was added to the local history collection.  This kind of hyperlocal collecting is important for community identity.  What’s more, the library collection is a way to validate the importance of student research.  Academic libraries typically require graduate students to deposit dissertations and theses, but many also allow professors to submit selected undergraduate work for the collection.  In public libraries, display space is available for K-12 students to show off artwork and projects to the larger community. Since people without kids seldom have reason to go into a school building, the library becomes a link between students and community 

Woman of the River

Richard E. Westwood, Woman of the River: Georgie White Clark, White-Water Pioneer, Utah State University Press, 1997.

I have had the generous help and cooperation of many people in getting this book together.  Karen Underhill and the staff at Cline Library, Arizona University, got me started and helped along the way by guiding me through the Georgie Clark collection and putting me in touch with Rosalyn J. (Roz) Jirge. This book would have been incomplete without the input and help from Roz.  She not only told me of her own experiences, but collected others' diaries, did interviews, transcribed taps of my interviews and supplied me with names and address of passengers and boatmen that were invaluable in my research. 

COMMENT

It's not uncommon to find a librarian listed in the acknowledgments of a book. This one has a nice description of a research strategy as well,  that includes tracking down people for interviews.  Sometimes the answer to a research question is not in the library collection but in knowing the right person to ask. This librarian happened to know that Roz Jirge was the right person. This kind of reference help is only possible when librarians have local knowledge.  Librarian training is focused on generic strategies to find published or archived information, but researchers are often focused on information gaps-- the biography that has not yet been written, the history that has not yet been told.  A recurring library story is about finding hidden treasure in dusty stacks or archival boxes -- the material that nobody has noticed and nobody has thought to use.

Thanks to this researcher, the historical memory of Roz Jirge has been written in a book that is now available in the library collection, and anyone can read the story of a river running pioneer.  Not so long ago, I took a river trip through Westwater Canyon at high water (30,000 cfs).  The river guides lashed the rafts together in "double rigging" that they said was invented by Georgie White Clark to run the big rapids in the Grand Canyon.  I'm glad those guides knew their river history!

Shale Play

Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Steven Rubin, Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

     I grew up in Westmoreland County during the 1970s, when steel mills started closing along the rivers of Pittsburgh. Surface mining operations and slag heaps, abandoned coke ovens, and coal patch towns were just familiar parts of the industrialized, rural landscape I called home.
     With this project, I returned to those places with purpose, opened my laptop in the Pennsylvania Rooms of public libraries and in the Coal and Coke Heritage Center on Penn State’s Fayette campus. I talked to people in diners, attended public meetings and scribbled a lot in my notebooks. Jim Rosenberg and the Fayette Marcellus Watch group welcomed me to their monthly meetings at chain restaurants on the strip outside Uniontown, and I visited the homes of some of the group’s members. Typically, I told people I wanted to write about fracking and asked if I could transcribe their experience in their own words.  [pxxiii]

COMMENT

     You wouldn’t guess it from the research methods, but this writer was working on a book of poetry. 

     The Environmental Humanities have created a new clientele for special collections and archives that focus on local history. Writers and  artists are making use of place-based collections to inform work about the relationships between people and places. Library collections like the Pennsylvania Rooms and academic special collections hold a key to interpreting place-based identity that in turn informs community resilience and the possibility of sustainable change.

      Not that fracking is sustainable. The stories in Shale Play are unbearably sad ones about people trading their forests, farms, rivers, animals, good health, dignity and sense of community for a pocketful of money. Even so, the poems attest that the wounded land and damaged communities are still there despite the overlay of colonial industrialization. Perhaps in some form they will manage to outlast the bastards. 

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, Penguin Random House, 2015.

     I needed more books. At Howard University, one of the greatest collections of books could be found in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, where your grandfather once worked.  Moorland held archives, papers, collections and virtually any book ever written by or about black people. For the most significant portion of my time at The Mecca, I followed a simple ritual. I would walk into the Moorland reading room and fill out three call slips for three different works.  I would take a seat at one of these long tables. I would draw out my pen and one of my black-and-white composition books. I would open the books and read, while filling my composition books with notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences of my own invention.  I would arrive in the morning and request, three call slips at a time, the works of every writer I had heard spoken of in classrooms or out on the Yard: Larry Neal, Eric Williams, George Padmore, Sonia Sanchez, Stanley Crouch, Harold Cruse, Manning Marable, Addison Gayle, Carolyn Rodgers, Etheridge Knight, Sterling Brown. [p.46]
...

     The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, their right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.  I was made for the library, not the classroom.  The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.  Slowly, I was discovering myself. [p.48]

COMMENT

     "The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. " It's a statement so beautiful I'd like to engrave it on the marble facade of a library, if libraries still had marble facades.

     Ta-Nehisi Coates was destined to grow up to be a bookish, well-read person. His father, W. Paul Coates, worked as African American Studies reference and acquisition librarian at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center; He also owned a bookstore and founded Black Classic Press.

     The "jail of other people's interests" is Coates fils' rationale for his idiosyncratic research method but it also gets to the core what libraries are all about. Education has done its job when students are able break free from lectures, classroom assignments and the pursuit of grades. All that schoolwork is a foundation, but the library is the place where students truly become independent thinkers and complete their transformation into scholars.

Dance With Us

 Ann Dils & Rosalind Pierson. "Dance With Us: Virginia Tanner, Mormonism, and Humphrey's Utah Legacy." Dance Research Journal 32, no. 2 (2000): 7-13. 

Pierson and I both seek to explain the magic of and produced by Tanner's teaching, but our texts--a memoir and a research paper--are distinct. Pierson writes from the warmth and certainty of her own experience, her memories perhaps stimulated or affirmed by research (see pp 14-16). Her account makes it clear that a memory is not just a mental picture but a remembering (derived from the Latin membrum, rather than memor) of experience, a calling up and inner restatement of sensory, somatic, and emotional experience. I write from the more distanced perspective of a researcher struggling with several kinds of documentation. I include more voices in my text, especially those of the Tanner students I interviewed or whose words are preserved in letters to her, now housed in the Virginia Tanner Papers, 1945-1979, in the Special Collections of the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

COMMENT

     Scholarly articles seldom  mention library interactions even though scholars are heavy library users judging from the typical extensive, well-researched reference lists. The erasure of personal experience is intended  to keep scholarly research objective.  I've noticed, though,  that when scholarly authors write for popular news media they love to relate their library adventures and the thrilling discovery of hidden treasure in the archives. 

     This is a rare scholarly article that does  mention the library. It's because the co-authors used an uncommon research strategy that combines personal memory with historical library research. This proved to be so confusing to whomever constructed the JSTOR online database where I found the article that they misinterpreted it as two separate articles. The digital copy of the article cut me off in the middle.  I had to locate a link to the entire scanned issue in order to read the whole article.

 

   

   
     

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.

American Eclipse

David Baron, American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018.

During long days at the James Madison Memorial Building, across from the U.S. Capitol, I requested box after dusty box from storage and discovered a priceless lode; faded, handwritten letters; dog-eared news clippings, telegrams and train tickets, photographs and drawings; and fragile, yellowing diaries that retained the observations, dreams and desires of people who, like me, found magic in the shade of the moon. As I read these aging documents in the sterile glow of fluorescent lights, I grew immersed in a narrative far richer than any I had imagined.  Those relics revealed a tale not just about eclipses, but about how the United States came to be the nation that it is today. [p.xii] 

COMMENT

     Libraries often measure the value of collections with use statistics. The word "dusty" typically indicates that something has not been recently moved and therefore it is obsolete and unneeded— a target for weeding in order to free up valuable space for “better” uses than “book storage” ("storage" being another word that indicates an item not actively circulating even though it is on an open shelf). By contrast, in the context of this historical archive dusty boxes are a priceless resource precisely because they have not been used. These stored boxes contained history that had been waiting unread since 1878.  Disconcertingly, the fact that an item has gathered dust might indicate a lack of value (at least within the specific community served by the library), or it might indicate an exceptional opportunity for a researcher.Librarians generally deal with this cognitive dissonance by dividing libraries into "stacks" that value usage above all and "special collections" that specifically value rare and unique items regardless of use.

      The problem is, librarians can make mistakes when they decide how to interpret dust. In one book-weeding dust-up [1] librarians tossed a set of rarely-used Chinese language books. The librarians defended their action because "the recycled volumes were not rare" and "only one or two professors... were able to read the classical language in which they were written."  Of course, all foreign language material has an inherently limited audience. The fact that the librarians couldn't read the language probably should have prompted them to defer to someone who could. Instead, they deemed classical Chinese scholarship old-and-in-the-way of a new Center for Student Life, re-purposing dusty stacks for academic offices, multi-purpose rooms and a cafeteria.While a cafeteria probably will get more use than Chinese books (everybody eats), it also replaces an opportunity for scholarship with a far less educational opportunity for lunch.

      Some librarians (I'm one) believe that in the age of the internet when many books are fairly easy to get stacks should become more like special collections. The dusty books that lack immediate value could be cleared away in order to make space for dusty boxes full of hidden treasure. The only obstacle is, in order to do that librarians would need to write an active collection policy to use in tandem with their weeding guidelines. Due to bureaucratic divisions between stacks and special collections as well as pressure from space-hungry outsiders who want to colonize library space they typically don't.  Most libraries engaged in massive weeding projects have a policy that says what to get rid of, but no policy for what is essential to keep. 

[1] Bluemle, Stefanie R., and Carla B. Tracy. "The lives of books: Legacy print collections and the learning-centered library." College & Research Libraries News 75, no. 10 (2014): 560-581.

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.