Showing posts with label Use Statistics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Use Statistics. Show all posts

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!



 

Saturday, September 15, 2018

Recently Returned Books

Gabbert, Elisa,” Recently Returned Books (Letters of Recommendation), New York Times Magazine, Sept. 9, 2018, pp 20-21.

My favorite spot in my local library — the central branch in Denver — is not the nook for new releases; not the holds room, where one or two titles are usually waiting for me; not the little used-book shop, full of cheap classics for sale; and not the fiction stacks on the second floor, though I visit all those areas frequently.  It’s a shelf near the Borrower Services desk bearing a laminated sign that reads RECENTLY RETURNED
The “recently returned” shelf is perhaps the subtlest most indirect way of advising readers, nudging them towards what others in the community are reading — an index of local interests, a a record of your neighbor’s whims.

COMMENT

     The most charming thing about this essay is how the author experiences the returned book shelf as a community connection. She imagines other people reading the books and wonders if they might be personal friends. I wonder if the librarians ever thought of it that way? The shelf is probably just there so that librarians can locate books in transit and so that shelvers can sort them onto carts.  

     As far as selecting what to read, the author lists her favorite ways to find books, none of which are keyword searching in an online catalog which is how librarians think people find books.

      I used to work with a library administrator who fancied  himself a prescient futurist. He loved to talk about how book circulation is going down and how "useless" books should be weeded so that shelf space could be put to “better” use. The circulation statistics he cited were deeply flawed, but never mind. He was utterly convinced that digital reading was The Future and that libraries should therefore purchase everything on clunky ebook platforms (the kind that will become instantly obsolete if technology ever really does replace print). 

    This administrator seemed to believe that book circulation arises from internal information needs of individual readers. He could never quite grasp that librarians (and booksellers) can persuade people to check out more books simply by putting more books in front of them. Likewise, librarians can suppress circulation by hiding books in onsite storage and remote repositories where nobody will ever stumble across them.


Wednesday, August 8, 2018

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.