Vivian Perlis Dies at 91

Anthony Tommasini, "Vivian Perlis Dies at 91: Oral History Project Captured Music's Giants," New York Times, (Obituaries) July 15, 2019, p. B7

     Ms. Perlis came to run the project accidentally, after taking a job as a research librarian at the Yale School of Music in 1967.  She had become involved there with the library's extensive Charles Ives collection and one day she made a visit to New York City to pick up some additional materials donated by Julian Myrick, who had been a pattern with Ives in an insurance business.
     Thinking that he might have some recollections to share, Ms. Perlis brought along a portable tape recorder
...
     She became a harpist with the New Haven Symphony while working the library job at Yale that led to her founding the oral history project.
     For years Ms. Perlis essentially had to secure funding for the project on her own. The Yale School of Music provided office space and work-study students to assist with the endless task of transcribing interviews. But she often felt "like and orphan," she said, as she labored in her basement headquarters.
...
From the start Ms. Perlis buttressed the collection with existing recorded interviews acquired from radio stations and historians, building it into one of the most extensive oral history archives in America. 

COMMENT

     This obituary makes me happy and sad at the same time.  In the 1960's Ms. Perlis wanted to do a Ph.D in musicology but Columbia University refused to give her the flexibility to take care of her kids.  Instead she became a pink-collar academic librarian and  got to do the project of her dreams collecting oral history from famous musicians, albeit with no professional recognition and almost no institutional support. The the library gave her space in the basement with no air conditioning while PhD musicologists derided her collection as "pipsqueak stuff."  I can only imagine how much her librarian colleagues must have resented her getting to spend time on her pet project that nobody cared about.  Until somebody did care, that is. 

    This tale is all too familiar in the world of academic libraries.  Administration actively discourages librarians from "niche" work that seems out of line with organizational priorities.  Yet that often turns out to produce the most unique and most valuable collections.  In this case the librarian built a collection worthy of an obituary in the New York Times.  I will bet the the people who tried to shut her down never accomplished anything even half as notable. 

     

Delia Owens

Delia Owens (By the Book), New York Times Book Review, July 14, 2019, p.8.

When I was a child, I thought reading was something you did when it rained. I was a tomboy out collecting and releasing frogs and salamander or riding a horse named Strawberry.  When I was about 9, my friend dragged me into the library and while she was searching for a book to read, I stumbled into a display table filled with guidebooks for birds, insects, reptiles and shells.  In an instant my world of nature was connected with the world of words. 

COMMENT

     In this story serendipitously finding a book in a library display makes an impact on an outdoorsy child.  Guidebooks are an underappreciated source of inspiration for many people because of the way they seem to contain the observable world.  Though they are intended to teach people about unfamiliar things, guidebooks are especially wonderful because of the way they reflect familiar things in the observable world and reveal some of their secrets.  For instance, a bird guide shows you where the neighborhood birds go in the winter and maps of places where people never see those birds at all.   Birds can be one of the more disorienting aspects of travel likewhen you look up and see that white vultures instead of familiar turkey vultures, or a screaming flock of green parakeets instead of starlings, or notice a bright red cardinal when no such bird inhabits your home ecosystem.  Guidebooks are part of a literature of place and as climate change shifts the range of species they may become important historical records.

     Nowadays there are apps that identify birds, flowers, stars, and such, and GPS systems that make maps of where you intend to go,  but these seem to me to lack the depth of guidebooks.  For one thing, they declare an answer without the need to think through one’s own observations.  For another, instant identification lacks a larger context of interrelations.  I doubt that an app would help a child connect nature with the world of words, but Owens says that Roger Tory Peterson field guides led her to read Aldo Leopold, Peter Matthiessen, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Karen Blixen and Charles Darwin.

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!

There Should be a Public Option for Everything

Ganesh Sitaraman and Anne L. Alstrott, "There Should Be a Public Option for Everything," New York Times, July 7, 2019, p,. SR10.

Throughout our history, Americans have turned to public options as a way to promote equal opportunity and reconcile markets with democracy.  For example, public libraries allow anyone to read, check out books or surf the internet.  This expands educational opportunities and guarantees access to information to everyone, but it doesn't prevent people from buying books at the bookstore if they choose. 

 COMMENT

     The oped argues that if capitalism is going to survive we need to reverse trends towards privatization of public spaces and deliberately offer  public options, government supplied goods and services that coexist with the private marketplace and that are available to all. The public library is offered as an example. People are still free to buy books and pay an ISP, but they also have the library as an option. The authors argue that "We don't have to choose between competitive markets and equal opportunity.  Public options are a way to mitigate the damage that comes with the worst aspects of capitalism while creating a common fabric that ties us together."

     With Republicans in Congress forming an Anti-Socialism Caucus, it seems essential to push this point. Privatization of everything is not only bad for citizens, it's bad for capitalism. Public options compete in a free-market, but they don't stop entrepreneurs from offering fancier, better, more convenient services to rich people.  Public parks don't stop people from having yards,  public transit doesn't stop people from driving cars, and the Post Office isn't the only place that can deliver packages. Sociologists are beginning to pay more attention to civic infrastructure that holds communities together and much of it consists of public options.  Ironically, "anti-socialism" that attacks public options is probably anti-capitalism as well.

   




   
   

SLC Airport Wants Public Input On It's New Master Plan

SLC Airport Wants Public Input On Its New Master Plan (Local Briefs), Salt Lake Tribune, July 6, 2019, p. A10.

The new $3.6 billion re-build of Salt Lake City International Airport was envisioned 20 years ago in the Airport's current master plan.  Now, the city wants to know what residents think the airport should look like 20 years from now.
..
It invites all interested parties to share ideas at a meeting July 17 from 6 pm. to 7:30 pm at the Salt Lake City Public Library.

COMMENT

Refreshments, parking validation and live streaming on Facebook encourage the public to weigh in on community planning.  The public library provides space for the meeting.  The notice of the meeting is published in a local newspaper, and presumably (I didn't check) listed in library events.  In any case, it's hard to know how citizens would discover this opportunity for public comment without the newspaper and the library.

Once Upon a River

Diane Setterfield. Once Upon a River: A Novel. 2018.

     The character of Henry Daunt is inspired by the magnificent real-life photographer of the Thames Henry Taunt. Like my Henry, he had a houseboat kitted out as a darkroom. In the course of a lifetime he took some 53,000 photographs using the wet collodion process His work came close to being destroyed when, after his death, his house was sold and his garden workshop dismantled.  On learning that many thousands of he glass plates stored there had already been smashed or wiped clean for use as greenhouse glass, a local historian, Harry Paintin, alerted E. E. Skuse, the city librarian in Oxford. Skuse was able to stop the work and arrange real of the surviving plates for safekeeping. I note their names here out of gratitude for their swift actions. It is thanks to them that I have even able to explore the Victorian Thames visually and weave this story around Taunt’s images.  [p.461]

COMMENT

  This anecdote describes the preservation function of the library.  It's not just a “book museum,” but a multi-media museum as well. As is often the case, the librarian stepped in to rescue a valuable history collection only after part of it had already been destroyed. While librarians are sometimes criticized as "gatekeepers," it is also true that outside of bookish professions people may not recognize the value of media artifacts. 

The heroic librarian is specifically mentioned by name since the rescued photographs were the basis for a novel. Unlike Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, this novel doesn't reproduce any of the  historic images that inspired it.  The but the images are only represented in the writing. This kind of output from library materials is so much more imaginative than the carefully documented scholarly communication and undergraduate term papers we tend to associate with library research.  

   There are a number of books about Henry Taunt and his photographs.  In his day, he even wrote a river guide-- A New Map of the River Thames (1872), which inspired interest in recreational boating including what is possibly the best river-trip book ever written, Three Men in a Boat (1889).  

  

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.