Showing posts with label Special Libraries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Special Libraries. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

My Brother Will was a Force of Nature

 Pat Bagley, "My Brother Will was a Force of Nature," Salt Lake Tribune, p B1, B6.

Will could be irascible.  He would pound the table to make a point, an action that sound technicians at KUER dubbed "Bagleying the table."  Injustices 150 years old were fresh wounds to him.  The folks at the Church History Library came to dread his demand for documents and called him Gimli amongst themselves.

COMMENT

Will Bagley was a historian who wrote about the LDS Church.  The librarians probably loved helping him with his extreme research projects, but they also probably really did call him Gimli. 

Friday, July 2, 2021

Invasive Species

 Rebecca Mead. "Invasive Species"  New Yorker July 2021, pp. 20-24.

In the late nineteen-eighties, Finnish researchers, led by a zoologist named Pekka Niemela, gained unusual access to a rare manuscript in the collection of the Vatican Library, "De Arte Venandi cum Avibus," or "On the Art of Hunting with Birds." The book, attributed to Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was made between 1241 and 1244. The Vatican's manuscript, which is in two volumes, was compiled by Frederick's son Manfred more than a decade later, after the original work was lost during the Battle of Parma.  The manuscript passed though the hands of several eminent noblemen and intellectuals before entering the papal collection in 1622. [p.23]

...

Thanks to the intercession of Simo Orma, an academic at the Finnish Institute in Rome, Niemela and a zoologist were granted permission to see the manuscript, under the watchful eye of the head librarian.  The scholars concluded that the four images were of the same bird, and, by examining the remains of pigment on the ancient pages, they ascertained the original creature's coloring.  They could also make an educated guess at the cockatoo's gender: female, as indicated by reddish flecks in the iris of its eye.  [24]


COMMENT

 The presence of an Australasian cockatoo in a one-of-a-kind ancient book reveals historic trade connections.  The picture was detailed enough so that researchers could determine the color of the actual bird, something that they probably could not have learned from a digital image.   Since the Vatican Library is not public, researchers needed special permission to see the book.

Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Woman in the Woods

 

Sandra Steingraber, "Woman in the Woods, Orion Summer 2021, pp. 54-63.

She finds in the woods a fully intact 2.5-acre deer exclosure constructed by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in 1937.  There are sapling and understory pine trees growing inside the fence.  In the biological station library, she finds a cache of old species inventories that researchers and students conducted within and around the enclosure with data going back over several decades.  She learns the techniques of dendrochronology and reconstructs the history of the forest the forest thought tree ring analysis.
....

Off to the right, a truck with an official state license plate drives away down a rutted lane.  It seems that the park naturalist, cleaning out his office at the end of the season, unearthed some correspondence from years past and thought the grad student from Michigan might find something of interest, so he threw the boxes n the back of the pickup and drove them over to her campsite.
...

There is a small library cart of paperbacks.  Only one book per cell.  [Washtenaw County Jail]....
There is ransacking and chaos.  All around the women, bedding , books, letters, bars of soap, pencils, toothbrushes fly though the air.  Who has it?  Who has the blue makeup?  No makeup is ever found, But tucked inside the pages of a library book in the cart one of the men in blue gloves finds the shard of a mirror.  The library cart is removed.  No more books. Everybody back in their cells. Clean up the mess. 

COMMENT

A PhD student finds that The Park library has one version of landscape history; the hidden correspondence contains an entirely different and far more frightening story revealing that the study are was a testing area for Agent Orange and that ecological data was falsified in order to promote use of the herbicide. 

Steingraber becomes a reporter for the student newspaper.  She is singled out for police harassment, apparently for writing editorials against military testing,  and ends up spending 12 days in jail.  In jail  the guards again misuse authority as a tactic of intimidation.  As a punishment for having (or not having) forbidden makeup, the library books are taken away. 

The jail cell is described as a "bookless room" -- the suppression of information whether through secrecy or violence is a crime against humanity.  

Sunday, March 28, 2021

A Fake? Or Biblical Gold?

 Jennifer Schuessler,  "A Fake? Or Biblical Gold?" New York Times March 28, 2021, p.AR8- AR9

     Dershowitz also traveled to the Berlin State Library to look at Shapira's papers.  There, scattered in a bound volume of jumbled invoices and notes, he found something he said no one had ever noted three handwritten sheets that appeared to show Shapira trying go decipher the fragments, with many question marks, marginal musings, crossed-out readings, and transcription errors.
     "It's amazing because it give you a window into Shapira's mind," Dershowitz said.  "If he forged them, or was part of a conspiracy, it makes no sense that he'd be sitting there trying to guess what the text is, and making mistakes while he did it."

COMMENT

Idan Dershowitz is a researcher trying to find evidence that a notorious forgery was actually genuine. The original documents have disappeared, but searching through the dusty boxes, he discovers evidence that at least suggests that if they were forged, Shapira was not the forger.  

Friday, March 12, 2021

Personal Jesus

 Vinson Cunningham, "Personal Jesus: What Thomas Jeffereson did to the Gospels," New Yorker, January 4 & 11, 2021,  pp. 77-80. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/what-thomas-jefferson-could-never-understand-about-jesus

"The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth" was brought to public attention in 1895 by Cyrus Adler, an observant Jew from Arkansas, who was a librarian and a curator of religious items at the Smithsonian.  Nearly a decade earlier, as a doctoral student searching the private library of a wealthy family, Adler had happened upon a set of Bibles that Jefferson had owned, with key passages of the Gospels snipped from their pages.  Now, charged with mounting an exhibition on American religion and still mulling over that discovery, Adler finally figured out where the missing passages had gone: into Jefferson's little book, which was hidden away in the library of Carolina Ramsey Randolph, Jefferson's great-granddaughter.  Adler bought the book from Randolph for four hundred dollars and promptly put it on display in the Capitol, where in Jefferson's time, it would almost certainly have been a scandal. Now it was met mostly with affectionate enthusiasm, as another example of Jefferson's wide-ranging brilliance.  [p.80]

Comment

     A librarian/historian solves a puzzle of why Thomas Jefferson cut up his Bible and tracks down the missing pages.  This story has all the elements of librarian heroism, recognizing and saving an important historical document. The fact that he put it on display illustrates a sense of triumph which I have felt myself upon discovering hidden treasure. 
 


Friday, November 20, 2020

The Anti-Coup

 Andrew Morantz. The Anti-Coup. New Yorker, November 23, 2020, pp. 36-45.

     In 2011, at the Occupy Wall Street encampment, in New York, activists set up a community kitchen, a library, and a media hub to disseminate live steams generated by the movement-- all examples of what Sharp called "alternative social institutions."  If protests are expressions of what a movement is against,  then alternative institutions can be manifestations of what a movement is for, a glimpse of how the world might look one it has been transformed.


COMMENT

 A library is  part of a utopian community,  as is a functioning media system.  



Friday, January 10, 2020

Robert Caro's Papers Find a Home

Jennifer Schuessler, “Robert Caro’s Papers Find a Home,” New York Times, January 9, 2020, p. C1. 

     The books are already monumental.  And now Mr. Caro is getting monumental treatment himself.
     The New-York Historical Society has acquired Mr. Caro’s papers  — some 200 linear feet of material that will be open to researchers in its library.  And just a as important to the 84-year-old Mr. Caro, it will create a permanent installation int its museum galleries dedicated to showing how he got the job done.
...
     The archive will be among the largest of an individual in the historical society's collection.  It includes research notes, drafts, annotated news clippings, correspondence, and other documents, from once-classified memos excavated at the L.B.J. Presidential Library to at least one artifact literally coaxed out of a secret trunk. 

COMMENT

     The article describes an archival collection acquired by a special library.  The collection originates from a research strategy that includes library research as well as other kinds of documentation.


     The article also describes Caro’s research process as “a kind of museum of a vanishing analog world.”  As a consequence of his careful gathering, his research materials can now be used by other historians.  This kind of idiosyncratic individual collecting stands in contrast to automated approval plans the mean every library buys the same things. There’s a photo of a typewriter, and the article says he has more than one just in case he needs spare parts. 

Thursday, June 13, 2019

Book Publishers, Unbound at Last

Jane Margolies, "Book Publishers, Unbound at Last," New York Times, June 12, 2019, p. B6.

When Abrams Books recently moved to new offices in Lower Manhattan from its longtime home in Chelsea, it hired the consultants that companies typically calling for their expertise in audiovisual, m lighting temperature and ventilation needs,     It also hired a library consultant, who identified the first and latest editions of almost every title the 70-year-old publisher had ever printed, which were then line up on towering oak shelves.  The 10,000-volume library is the first thing visitors see when they enter the new workplace.     That may sound musty, but Abrams was striving for a modern workplace.  Designed by the architecture firm Spacesmith, the 41,0000-square-foot office has an open plan, m a spacious cafe and state-of-the-art technology.

COMMENT

     In a redesigned publisher's headquarters, the first thing visitors see is an impressive library of all the books Abrams Books has published.  The books serve as a kind of architectural decor that communicates the 70-year history of the company in a concrete way.  The author of the article feels obliged to take a dig at a company "committed to print in a world going digital," and yet the publishing industry has stabilized and is even beginning to grow again.  Maybe the world of reading has become as digital as it's going to get.  When ebooks started to gain a foothold, librarians who never studied calculus believe that the trendline of digital publishing would keep going up until nobody read print any more.  But in fact, not all curves are straight lines, and not all readers want ebooks.

     Librarians may sneer at the decorative use of books, but a photo with the article shows just how effective this design strategy is.  The library stacks are enticing-- they make you want to go in and browse.  If Abrams were going to publish your book, they help you envision it on the shelves of a bookstore or library.  It doesn't look musty at all.  It looks kind of magical, like a place I'd be happy to work. 

     


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.

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Deep in Time

Holly Haworth. “Deep in Time: Standing Still in the Age of Oil.” Orion. 37(2), 2018, pp. 36-47.

Along the trail I bend and squint to look at the fossils. I am carrying the Guide to the Permian Reef Geology Trail that I picked up in the park library. The book’s authors, who represent the oil companies ARCO, Marathon, Texaco and Chevron, have documented the types of rocks and fossils within the reef at several stops on the trail. I match the shapes that I see with the photos in the guide. [p.42]

COMMENT

     A few years ago I did a quick-and-dirty citation analysis in order to see what kind of materials students in our new Environmental Humanities program were using for their Masters theses. I found that their citations fit a normal humanities research profile (lots of books, relatively fewer journal articles) with the notable addition of some unusual types of research materials -- local newspaper articles, government land use plans, photographs, maps and guidebooks.  It made sense because Environmental Humanities explores the relationship between people and place. These types of resources are all ways to associate information with a particular geography.

    Conventional instruction for information literacy tends to ignore place-based research. Librarians focus on a universal kind of knowledge that's contained in books and scholarly journal articles. However, the old style of inquiry is  not working out as well in an age when sustainable change requires engagement with place. One way librarians can help build resilient communities is by developing place-based information literacy courses.  Environmental Humanities research provides a  model for what place-based research could look like.

     Popular guidebooks don't just report on what's there; they can generate a kind of feedback loop that in a way creates a sense of place.  Roger Tory Peterson’s Guide to the Birds (1934), for example, or the Powell Expedition reports that inadvertently became the first recreational guidebook to the Colorado River. Some guidebooks become controversial when they draw crowds into formerly peaceful areas, for example, or reveal the location of fragile archaeological sites. One author of Utah hiking guidebooks became notorious for overambitious agendas that lure ill-prepared novices into trouble. Guidebooks like Atlas Obscura expose undiscovered places and are accused of contributing to overtourism. One hazard for library copies of guidebooks is that patrons are likely to take them out into the field.  I’ve done it myself, most recently with a library copy of  Guide to the Green and Yampa Rivers in Dinosaur National Monument

     Librarians should keep an eye out for unique local guidebooks that record  a sense of place. One of my favorites is a guidebook to the trees growing by the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City, Utah. [1].  With the guidebook in hand, the trees appear in a whole new light. Another recently published treasure is Jordan River Water Trail & Bike Path by Elliott R. Mott [2]who hopes his guide to a neglected urban river will help create change. He writes, "It is hoped this book will accelerate the transformation and pave the way to developing a first class pollution free, wildlife rich, urban water trail." 

[1] Jenifer Baguley, Trees, Spirituality and Science: A Guide to the Trees of the First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City, U of U Center for Science and Mathematics Education, 2013.

[2] Elliott R. Mott, Jordan River Water Trail & Bike Path, Roosevelt & Torrey LLC, 2018.