Secrets Hidden in the Stacks

Adrienne Raphel. "Secrets Hidden in the Stacks." Poets & Writers, July/August 2020, pp. 14-17. https://www.pw.org/content/secrets_hidden_in_the_stacks

When University of Virginia (UVA) professor Andrew Stauffer sent his class to the library in the fall of 2009, he expected them to focus on the printed text of the books they brought back.  But Stauffer and his students soon realized that was just one story being told in these volumes.  While looking at nineteenth-century copies of work by Felicia Hemens, a poet widely beloved at the time for her sentimental verse, the students were immediately drawn to everything else happening in these books; not just the expected underlining and dog-ears, but bookplates, diary entries, letters, quotes, pressed flowers, and readers own poetic flights of fancy.

...

In this way,  Book Traces celebrates what Stauffer calls bibliodiversity; appreciating each book as its own object with its own life and history.  "We're fighting against the idea that once you've digitized a single copy, then you don't need others,: says Stauffer.

COMMENT

    The Book Traces project is not anti-digitization, but it it does show the limitations of treating books as merely texts. The article describes how the kinds of books that the Book Traces project seeks are specifically targeted for weeing because they are old, beat up and not rare.

     

American Gods

Neil Gaiman, American Gods. Tenth Anniversary Edition. Author's preferred text. 2011.

     "Hinzelmann, have you heard of eagle stones?"
     "Up north of Rhinelander? Nope, that's Eagle River. Can't say I have."
     "How about Thunderbirds?"
     "Well, there was the Thunderbird Framing Gallery up on Fifth Street, but that closed down.  I'm not helping, am I?"
     "Tell you what, why don't you go look at the library.  Good people, although they may be kind of distracted by the library sale on this week. I showed you where the library was, didn't I?"
     Shadow nodded and said so long.  He wished he'd thought of the library himself.  [p.372]

COMMENT

      The entire library episode actually extends from p. 372-377 -- too long for me to type out.  What does Shadow do at the library?  He requests a library card,  has a discussion with a librarian about a man who stole rare library books, researches Native American traditions, talks to a neighbor and purchases weeded library books at the library book sale.  
     Two of these book sale books are probably perfectly appropriate to weed, but one of them should certainly have been kept in the collection unless it was a duplicate-- Minutes of the Lakeside City Council, 1872-1884.  If this was indeed the only copy of local history it was completely irresponsible for librarians to send it to the book sale.  However, the contents of this imaginary book turn out to be a plot point since is contains evidence about children killed by a resident demon.  In real life Gaiman is an outspoken supporter of libraries. As a writer, he had to to betray the librarians and send this particular  book to the book sale in order to give his character  more time to read it.  

Jill Lepore, Master of Microhistories, Tackles Endeavor of a Grander Scale

Jennifer Schuessler, “Jill Lepore, Master of Microhistories, Tackles Endeavor of a Grander Scale,” New York Times, Sept. 17, 2018, p. C1-2.

Even when filing an essay spurred by a group of books, Mr. Finder of the New Yorker said, Professor Lepore will send in detailed footnotes that sometimes include primary source documents that seem to have never been cited before.  

“Her gravitation towards dust, towards opening boxes that haven't seen light for decades, as clearly never faded, “ he said. 

… 

She also vacuumed up secondary literature.

     “I wrote strictly chronologically, and for every chapter I would check out a gazillion books,” she said.  “The security guard at the library would always ask, ‘What year are you on?”

COMMENT

It’s those “dusty” boxes again. 

Professor Lepore has written a well-reviewed new history of the U.S. [1] and her attraction to dust is the specific thing that  makes her a great historian. (When librarians say "dust" they usually mean unused materials that are a target for weeding).  Mr. Finder’s comment also carries an implication  that most historians copy from each other when they cite sources. This copying can also be a side effect of keyword search engines that highlight the most popular links. Finding new primary source documents means not using the same research strategy as everyone else. 

I notice that Professor Lepore works from the print collection. Writing a book is information-intensive.  Many researchers find that reading from print is a quicker way to scan through a lot of text, slowing down to give more attention to the interesting parts. It's also a way to find things expressed in non-keyword vocabulary-- especially important since language changes over time. Online reading enforces equivalent attention to each page in a way that I, personally, dislike.  In my own research, I find that I often use ebooks for keyword searching and almost never actually read them. 

     It's interesting to me that Lepore who is clearly a library super-user mentions a relationship with the security guard but not with any librarians. Library support staff are often the ones on the front lines interacting with patrons, while librarians, hidden in their offices, miss making connections like this. I wonder how many librarians at the Widener Library knew that professor Lepore was making such heavy use of the U.S. History Collection?  I wonder if any of them cared what year she was on?

[1] Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, W.W.Norton (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.