Dance With Us

 Ann Dils & Rosalind Pierson. "Dance With Us: Virginia Tanner, Mormonism, and Humphrey's Utah Legacy." Dance Research Journal 32, no. 2 (2000): 7-13. 

Pierson and I both seek to explain the magic of and produced by Tanner's teaching, but our texts--a memoir and a research paper--are distinct. Pierson writes from the warmth and certainty of her own experience, her memories perhaps stimulated or affirmed by research (see pp 14-16). Her account makes it clear that a memory is not just a mental picture but a remembering (derived from the Latin membrum, rather than memor) of experience, a calling up and inner restatement of sensory, somatic, and emotional experience. I write from the more distanced perspective of a researcher struggling with several kinds of documentation. I include more voices in my text, especially those of the Tanner students I interviewed or whose words are preserved in letters to her, now housed in the Virginia Tanner Papers, 1945-1979, in the Special Collections of the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

COMMENT

     Scholarly articles seldom  mention library interactions even though scholars are heavy library users judging from the typical extensive, well-researched reference lists. The erasure of personal experience is intended  to keep scholarly research objective.  I've noticed, though,  that when scholarly authors write for popular news media they love to relate their library adventures and the thrilling discovery of hidden treasure in the archives. 

     This is a rare scholarly article that does  mention the library. It's because the co-authors used an uncommon research strategy that combines personal memory with historical library research. This proved to be so confusing to whomever constructed the JSTOR online database where I found the article that they misinterpreted it as two separate articles. The digital copy of the article cut me off in the middle.  I had to locate a link to the entire scanned issue in order to read the whole article.

 

   

   
     

Robert Rainwater, 74, New York Public Library Curator

Roberta Smith, "Robert Rainwater, 74, New York Public Library Curator," New York Times, Obituaries, Dec. 6, 2018, p. A29. 

     He went to work at the New York Public Library in 1968 as a technical assistant in the art and architecture division, where his chief responsibility was answering questions from the public, either by telephone or mail.  The print division was next door, and in 1972 Elizabeth E. Roth, its keeper (as curators were then called) and on of the library's great repositories of institutional memory, invited Mr. Rainwater to join her department.  Upon her retirement nine years later, he became the keeper of the division.
     Mr. Rainwater became the librarian of the newly formed Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division in 1985. At the same time, he was named curator of William Augustus Spencer Collection of Illustrated Books, Manuscripts and Fine Bindings. 

COMMENT

     Mr. Rainwater was 25 years old and ABD in art history at New York University when he got the technical assistant job.  This suggests that at some point he had wanted to become a professor of art history.  Instead he got a job at the library and found a librarian mentor.  He ended up getting what sounds like the best art history job ever, curating art, prints and photographs and creating museum-quality displays in one of the best libraries in the world.   

    Back before everything was automated, libraries used to hire zillions of assistants-- pages and shelvers and  people to order books and file catalog cards and check out books and so on.  All of these people got to hang out at the library and interact with librarians and maybe even  consider librarianship as a profession.  Now that there are computers there are a lot fewer assistants.  It seems too bad that with the loss of these jobs to technology, young people are no longer finding their way into librarianship through mentorship.  

     NowI think librarians should try to deliberately re-create opportunities for mentorship to replace these lost library jobs.  Positions for interns and assistants could be designed to help mentor young people into the profession.  This might even be a strategy to help invite more diversity into the library profession. 

     

Baby Center

Jennifer Case, “Baby Center: An Essay on Place,” Orion, 35 (4&5), 2016.

BabyCenter was easy to participate in: all I had to do was log in. In-person gatherings were harder to devise. And yet I craved those, too, which is why I attended the local La Leche League meeting.  Some nights I hardly said anything at all. I just sat there in the basement of the library, nodding, nursing my daughter, comforted by the presence of others, other women with children, who talked about what they struggled with, what they loved, what they feared about having more children— if the tongue tie would cause latch issues again or if they’d ever sleep through the night. 

...

I haven't been on BabyCenter much lately. I've spent entire afternoons reading academic research about social networking sites and motherhood, yet I haven't returned to those sites.  

COMMENT

The author describes compulsively logging into an online discussion board to read about pregnancy, babies and motherhood. Despite this obsession, she never admits to using a library to find books with information about these topics. Rather, she craves to learn directly from other women who are going through similar experiences. In a transitory American college town, she lacks a real-life community of moms and the La Leche League is one of the few organizations around that invites honest discussion about the experience of becoming a mother.

While the author claims that social networking was emotionally supportive, it is clear that it also made her feel isolated and sort of crazy.  Once she makes some real friends she quits using the website.  She also doing actual library research, this time not to find out about babies and parenting but trying to understand her own uncharacteristic behavior. 

The essay contrasts social interaction in physical and virtual space. Meeting strangers at the library is a not-quite-adequate substitute for sisters, aunts, grandmothers and neighbors.  However, it's clear that a virtual library with just access to information would not not have done the trick. The library meeting room works as a stopgap until the real thing comes along. 

The Hypocrisy of Hanukkah

Michael David Lukas, "The Hypocrisy of Hanukkah," New York Times,  Dec. 2, 2019, p. SR2.

    This is the version of Hanukkah that I grew up with: presents and chocolate gelt; latkes with sour cream and applesauce; a few somber, off-key songs that no one fully remembered, about Judah Maccabee.  This is the version of Hanukkah I had in mind when my daughter and I walked down to our local branch of the Oakland Public Library to check out a stack of books about the holiday.
      Most of the books we found presented a familiar narrative -- dreidels and menorahs, evil Romans and pious Maccabees -- but between the lines, there were some hints at a darker story, enough to send be to Wikipedia and the Books of Maccabbees of the (definitely not Jewish but very helpful) Bible Gateway website, which led me back to the library for another stack of books, this one for myself .

COMMENT

      

     This story exemplifies a kind of search for religious identity that shows up in several other library stories I've collected [1]. This one has an especially good description of the research process of religious questioning.  It's significant that the quest starts with children's books since the naive juvenile literature version of religion is the one most people know. The realization that the children's books don't tell the whole story leads to an informative though biased Internet search and onward to more in-depth and well documented research in library books. 

     The search sows seeds of religious doubt, but the outcome is to reaffirm Jewish identity, and surprisingly, to reaffirm the way the family is already celebrating with an emphasis on presents and chocolate gelt.  The author jokes "at the end of the day, it's all about beating Santa,"  but for the writer it's all about  forming a religious identity as an assimilated Jew celebrating "the possibility of light in dark times and importance of even the smallest miracles."

[1] Transported; God is Going to Have to Forgive Me (Christian); Go and See 'Jane and Emma' This Weekend (Mormon); Transported (Jewish). 

Before the Law

Evan Kindley, "Before the Law: Kafka's Afterlives," The Nation,v.307 no. 10, Oct. 29, 2018,  p.27-31.

When Hoffe died in 2007, at age 101, she left the Kafka manuscripts, along with control of the Brod estate, to her daughters, Eva and Ruth. At this point, Israel took action again, challenging the probate of her will and once more claiming that the Kafka papers were cultural assets and, thus, state property.  The case dragged on for years until, in 2016, it was finally decided by Israel's Supreme Court, which ruled that the Brod and Kafka materials were, in fact, cultural assets and put be transferred to the National Library of Israel."

...

Leaving aside the issue of whether the collection belonged specifically in Israel, the state's broader contention was that Brod's and Kafka's papers belonged not in private hands but in an archive-- i.e., that literary artifacts have a cultural importance that exceeds their monetary value, and therefore they deserve to be public property. 

...

The Marbach archive's position in the case was a delicate one. While it had the financial resources to buy Kafka's manuscripts and the scholarly resources to process and maintain them, there were obvious political reasons why the acquisition of an important Jewish writer's papers by a German institution might be questioned. Israeli scholars attacked the archive in the press. "They say the papers will be safer in Germany," the Israeli historian Otto Doc Kulka write in 2010.  "There Germans will take very good care of them.  Well, the Germans don't have a very good history of taking care of Kafka's things.  They didn't take good care of his sisters" -- all three of whom were killed by the Nazis.  Elsewhere the issue was lined to the larger one of Israeli statehood: "[T]he struggle to keep Brod's archive in Israel is one of the most important of the struggles over our continued existence here," the literary scholar Nuri Pagi insisted in 2011. 

 COMMENT

      Kafka died before he ever became famous. His friend Max Brod is the person who promoted his work posthumously. Without Brod, it seems unlikely that any library would have cared much about the literary debris of an obscure Czech writing in German. But once Kafka was famous his papers were gold.

     It wasn't just fame that triggered this legal battle over Kafka's papers, though. Israel wanted to have the papers in the National Library as a matter of identity. In the lawsuit, the library is described in two different roles -- access and identity. The lawsuit emphasized universal public access to knowledge, but the German archive would have made the papers public, too. Israel wanted the papers for the National Library because of the way they represent Israeli/Jewish identity.

     One thing I find interesting about this account is how clearly Israel understood the library as a place to represent identity and place.  In the world of librarians, knowledge is often considered purely from an access standpoint-- universal and detached from a specific place. This assumption of placelessness underlies proposals to consolidate library collections in digitized online libraries or large, remote regional book warehouses with delivery on demand.  Nonetheless,  studies have shown that the unique items in library collections are largely related to geography and place-based differences. [1]  The library is not actually as placeless as it seems since the geographic dispersal of library collecting is essential in order to represent the true breadth of human knowledge and experience [2]

    It strikes me that there is a kind of synergy between this identity-based collecting and  in situ library stories about search for identity in library collections. By obtaining the papers the archivists are consciously creating a collection that represents Israeli/Jewish identity.

[1] Brunvand, Amy (2006) "Missing Information and the Long Tail: How Distributed Collection Development Assures the Continued Relevance of Libraries," Against the Grain: Vol. 18: Iss. 4, Article 10.

[2] Dempsey, Lorcan, Brian Lavoie, Constance Malpas, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Roger C. Schonfeld, JD Shipengrover, and Günter Waibel. 2013. Understanding the Collective Collection: Towards a System-wide Perspective on Library Print Collections. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research

 

Let's Talk Climate

James Westwater, "Let's Talk Climate" [Letter to the Editor], Salt Lake Tribune, November 23, 2018, p. A10.

The climate is changing, and not for the better.  The whole planet is warming. CO2 and other greenhouse gasses are accumulating exponentially in the atmosphere.
...
     What's causing all this, and what should be done? The Utah Valley Earth Forum has assembled a select team from Utah's four largest universities to discuss the climate crisis and address your questions. It's happening Wednesday, Nov. 28 at 7 p.m. at the Orem Public Library.  Details at UtahValleyEarthForum.org.

COMMENT

     This letter to the editor invites people to a panel organized by a citizen group that is concerned about climate change.  It's happening in Utah Valley, home to Brigham Young University. It's a majority Mormon and deeply red (for Republican) part of the state.  These citizens have taken it upon themselves to try to cut through the politics, and they chose to do that at the public library.

     I was so delighted when I got to the end of this letter and discovered that the writer was using library resources to help start a dialogue on community response to climate change. This is exactly what we librarians wish for-- public use of our open-access spaces to support citizen engagement and democracy.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Sceintific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013.

To be heard you must speak the language of the one you want to listen. So, back at school I proposed the idea of a thesis project to my graduate student Laurie. Not content with purely academic questions, she had been looking for a research project that would, as she said, “mean something to someone” instead of just sitting on the shelf. [158]

COMMENT

The shelf is of course a library shelf. Grad students have to produce original research so they gravitate towards narrow, hyper-specialized ideas. Academic libraries collect student theses and dissertations which are seldom heavily used. They are listed in the library catalog and in specialized databases, which is to say, if you want to read them you have to go looking. Student work is usually considered a fairly marginal contribution to scholarship. I have heard of grad students slipping money into their dissertation as a reward for anyone who actually bothers to read it.  In fact, I recently helped a friend get an M.S. Thesis through Interlibrary Loan and when he opened it he found a ten dollar bill tucked into the pages. 

     Laurie decides to investigate Indigenous knowledge about picking sweetgrass. [1]  Members of one tribe say that you must pluck each blade and leave the roots.  Another tradition says you must pull up the whole bunch, but not take every bunch.  A white male dean calls the research “a waste of time” because everyone knows that if you disturb a plant it will damage the population.  

     Nevertheless, she persisted, pursuing the Indigenous idea that, “If we use a plant respectfully it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away.”  When she presented the resaerch to a committee of white, male scientists, Laurie rephrased this idea as “if we remove 50 percent of the plant biomass, the stems are released from resource competition. The stimulus of compensatory growth causes an increase in population density and plant vigor.”  The scientists applaud.  

     As a librarian, I find that theses and dissertations are often useful sources for hyperlocal research.  One way to make  your research original is by deep focus on a very specific geographic place within the globalized geography of knowledge. 

[1] Laurie A. Reid. The Effects of Traditional Harvesting Practices on Restored Sweetgrass Populations. Thesis (M.S.), State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, 2005.