New in Town

Frank McCourt, "New in Town: The Initiation of a Young Irishman," New Yorker,  Dec. 3, 2018, p. 20-24 [reprinted from Feb. 33 & March 1, 1999].

     It's a warm October day and I have nothing else to do but what I'm told and what harm is there in wandering up to Fifth Avenue where the lions are. The librarians are friendly.  Of course I can have a library card, and it's so nice to see young immigrants using the library. I can borrow four books if I like as long as they're back on the due date. I ask if they have a book called "The Lives of the Poets" by Samuel Johnson, and they say, My, my, my, you're reading Johnson.  I want to tell them I've never read Johnson before, but I don't want them to stop admiring me. They tell me feel free to walk around, take a look at the Main Reading Room, on the third floor. They're not a bit like the librarians in Ireland, who stood guard and protected the books against the likes of me.
      The sight of the Main Reading Room, North and South, makes me go weak at the knees. I don't know if it's the two beers I had or the excitement of my second day in New York, but I'm near tears when I look at the miles of shelves and know I'll never be able to read all those books if I live till the end of the century.  There are acres of shiny tables where all sorts of people sit and read as long as they like, seven days a week, and no one bothers them unless they fall asleep and snore. There are sections with English, Irish, American books, literature, history, religion and it makes me shiver to think I can come here anytime I like and read anything as long as I like if I don't snore. 

COMMENT

     To this new immigrant, the freedom of America is represented by a public library where anyone can come in to sit and read as long as they like.  After an Irish bartender chides nineteen-year-old McCourt for drinking instead of educating himself he heads for the New York Public Library to find a copy of Lives of the Poets.  In the baffling big city, the library is the one place where his literary ambitions don't seem laughable.

   
   

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. 

Armstrong's Life as He Saw It

Giovanni Russonello, "Armstrong's Life, as He Saw It: The Musician Kept an Archive of Materials to Document His Career.  Now the Collection has been Digitized," New York Times,  November18, 2018, p. AR1-.

     Behind his blistering trumpet solos, revolutionary vocal improvising and exuberant stage persona, how did Louis Armstrong see himself? What was it like to be the first pop virtuoso of the recorded era-- the man whose earliest releases set the tone for America's love affair with modern black music, and who went on to become one of history's most famous entertainers?
     Those questions aren't rhetorical.  There's actually a deep well of resources on hand to help answer them.  For his entire adult life, away from the spotlight, Armstrong amassed a huge trove of writings, recordings and artifacts. But until this month you would have had to travel far into central Queens to find them.  Now anyone can access them. Thanks to a $3 million grant from the Fund II Foundation-- run by Robert F. Smith, the wealthiest African-American-- the Louis Armstrong House Museum has digitized the entire collection he left behind and made it available to the public at collections.louisarmstronghouse.org. 

COMMENT

     Ricky Riccardo, the archivist at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, makes it sound like the famous musician Louis Armstrong had a bit of librarian in him: "Posterity drove him to write manuscripts and are tapes and catalog everything," he says adding that Armstrong wanted to be in control of his own story.

     Armstrong's single-focus collecting strategy is one that would be hard for librarians to follow yet it created an important archive well worth digitizing.  If a library had, say, a Louis Armstrong special collection it probably wouldn't get a $3 million budget. There is always a kind of guessing game about how to spend the budget, and librarians sometimes guess wrong. It's much easier to look backwards in time to know what turned out to be important.

    Still, the value of hyper-focused collections like this makes me wonder if libraries could create them deliberately.  If I were Queen,  I might give each librarian a "passion project" budget each year to spend on their own collection choices, whatever that happened to be. I think that the result would be worth the money.  A diversity of obsessions represented on the shelves would inevitably improve the "long tail" information resource for all library users everywhere [1].

     Digitization of this particular collection is a gift, but at the same time it's a little bit sad to think of the people who won't be making the pilgrimage into central Queens to stand in Armstrong's house and handle his  things.   Several library anecdotes [2] report a spooky sense of connection that comes from by handling objects from the past.  I have yet to find a story that relates a similarly powerful experience from viewing an online image.

[1] Brunvand, Amy. "Missing Information and the Long Tail: How Distributed Collection Development Assures the Continued Relevance of Libraries.Against the Grain 18, no. 4 (2013): 10.

[2] [[there.]] ;  Inside the List; etc...
 
 

   

[[there.]]

Lance Olsen. [[there.]], Anti-Oedipus Press, 2014.

:::: My first excursion upon arriving in Iowa City to begin work on what would strike me in retrospect as nothing if not a fraught M.F.A. was into the corner of library stacks housing these by previous Workshop graduates.
     I touched the heavy spines protecting Flannery O'Connor's writing, John Irving's, T. Coraghessan Boyle's, hoping some of their prose would rub off on my hands.
     It's the same electric gratitude I feel walking the halls of the American Academy.
     Hello Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Jeff Eugenides. 

COMMENT

[[there.]] is a travel journal about displacement in time and space.  Olsen uses eccentric punctuation:

:::: for what cannot be articulated accurately.

[[ ]] for what must be removed from the chronic to be experienced.

The MFA theses in the library would have been signed by the now famous students who wrote them.  In this passage Olsen explicitly describes a physical experience, visiting books, powerful objects that might rub off some of their magic. He mentions touching the spines but not reading the text, though he might have and just didn't write about it.  In context it becomes clear that Olsen is conscious of visiting a  kind of book museum, a literary Wunderkammer.

Oslen writes:

     Travel removes us from clock time, from the capitalist insistence that minutes are money, our lives meant to be segmented, regulated, reified.  Travel serves as compelled dislocation and temporal smear. When that is no longer true, it is no longer travel: you have arrived somewhere.
      The same being the case with innovative writing practices.

By this definition, the library shelf of MFA theses is "somewhere," while the process of writing them involved a kind of dislocation.  Olsen is writing about an experience of library-as-place, not an interior facility of tables and chairs, but "somewhere" expressed in the collection of other writers who occupied the same place at different points in time.

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) 

   

At Social Security, Service at Arm's Length

Mark Miller, "At Social Security, Service at Arm's Length: Fewer Field Offices and Longer Waiting Times as the Number of Beneficiaries Mount," New York Times, November 25, 2018, p. BU5.

Along with other community leaders, Ms. Holt mounted a campaign to save the office, proposing ways to the Social Security Administration to reduce expenses.  But the Quincy office closed anyway, in March 2014-- a casualty of the cuts required by eight years of Congressional budget tightening.
     For anyone without a car, public transportation to Tallahassee is severely limited: There is a once-daily commuter bus, s. Holt says, and it is often overflowing with riders.
      Social Security did install a video kiosk in the Quincy library. That kiosk connects benefit claimants with the Tallahasssee office; today it serves 75 to 100 people daily during library hours. But it's not a trouble-free solution, Ms. Holt said. " We have people who can barely read because of vision problems, or hiring problems. Video is not the answer for many of these people." 

COMMENT

     Since 2010, Social Security has closed 67 field offices causing long wait times, a jammed phone line and long delays in solving appeals and errors. Meanwhile, each year  about one million more people begin to receive benefits.  When this particular Social Security office closed, the public library became a substitute for a staffed office.  However, it's not a very good substitute. The video kiosk,  is not accessible to people with certain kinds of disabilities and is staffed only by librarians who lack institutional knowledge about  Social Security and can't trouble-shoot problems. 

     Social Security has tried to address budget shortfalls by increasing the use of technology, but has run into a problem that would be familiar to any librarian -- the digital divide.  Older people, people without internet access, people who lack of computer literacy, people who are not fluent in English, homeless people, people with disabilities -- all sorts of people have trouble using computers un-aided.  What's more, technology is hardly ever really do-it-yourself.  Customer support and human intervention are needed to help people fill out complicated forms correctly. For instance, the complexity of IRS forms has created an entire industry of tax-filing software and accountants. 

     When libraries used to hand out paper tax forms it was always problematic that people wanted advice about which forms they needed, but they were asking the wrong people for help.  The reported 75 to 100 people per day is a lot of people in need of help.  It seems like one solution might be for Social Security staff to periodically visit the library kiosk in order to offer personal help, similar to the way some large urban  libraries staff social service desks to help homeless people.  While it's a great idea to  put a Social Security  kiosk at the library, but it's still not free. The library clearly needs more support in order to make it work. 

The Gap in Broadband Access

Steve Lohr, "The Gap in Broadband Access," New York Times, Dec. 5, 2018, p. B1.

The country seat, Republic, has basic broadband service, supplied by a community cable TV company owned by residents. But go beyond the cluster of blocks in the small town, and the high-speed service drops off quickly. People routinely drive into town to use Wi-Fi in the public library and other spots for software updates, online shopping or schoolwork, said Elbert Koontz, Republic's mayor. 

COMMENT

     The gist of this article is that the U.S. government has about $4 billion available for grants and subsidies in order to bring broadband to rural areas. Microsoft wants some of that money, especially because, " it enlarges the market for their products and services."  Does anyone see a problem here?

   Note how the article frames the public service offered by libraries and coffee shops as a nuisance. Maybe using the library and coffee shops for occasional fast Internet is not actually as onerous as Microsoft claims it is. Maybe people like to go into town now and again to buy groceries or have coffee or borrow a library book.

     While Microsoft says 162.8 Americans lack fast Internet, FCC numbers suggest that a lot more people in rural areas already have Internet. It's just slow. The device Microsoft is proposing to use to provide access costs "just" $300 (!) which might sound cheap to Bill Gates.  Microsoft plans to reach 3 million rural residents.  To me it sounds like Microsoft plans to suck $900 million directly out of  the pockets of disadvantaged rural people under the guise of helping them.

     It irks me that the government has $4 billion to help Microsoft market products and services, but no money for libraries that have already found a way to immediately fill the community need for fast Internet. I admit, it might not be quite as convenient of having your own, but it's up and running right now and it doesn't have $300 in upfront costs to use it.  With a little ingenuity, local people are making it work for them.  Maybe if the library got a piece of the pie for rural Internet access they could make things work even better.

    But what about the digital divide?  Sadly, it's real, but fast Internet access is no magic bullet.  I've had some experience with it since I use slow internet myself.  At school my kids are forced to use clunky software that has very little educational value but which has once in a while caused them to actually fail classes because of the way it limits  teachers' ability to adjust grades and assign extra credit work.  One year the school failed to hire a competent math teacher.  The administrators told the kids to just use videos from Khan Academy.  If you ask me, a mitigating factor for the digital divide is a gap between overblown expectations for what computers will do and what computers actually do.