On March 9th, METRO hosted an afternoon symposium entitled Code, Craft & Catalogues: Arts in the Libraries. The symposium featured three separate panel discussions addressing the relationship between libraries and the world of art and design. This post will discuss the first two of those panels — in part for reasons of space, so as not to short-change the discussion of those panels’ relevance to information science, and in part because the third panel’s tie between art and libraries/information struck me as much more attenuated, with significantly heavier emphasis on one and the other on the periphery.
Panel 1: Privacy in Public
Greta Byrum of the Digital Equity Lab at the New School opened the first panel with a presentation about Privacy in Public, a multisite exhibition which took place at nine libraries across New York City this past winter. Each library hosted an artist’s work commenting on issues of data privacy. After she spoke, two of the participating artists, Toisha Tucker and Salome Asega, briefly presented on the works which they contributed to the exhibition, followed by a Q&A.
As Byrum noted, the issue of data privacy has become an important contemporary matter for public debate and discussion — from the various data breaches at organizations like Experian to questions of privacy on social media. As purveyors of information and as institutions which themselves collect data on patrons, libraries would seem to make an excellent public venue for exhibiting ideas and questions of data privacy. And by bringing in artists to create works, rather than publishing books or hosting lectures, it allowed both library and artist to speak about data privacy in a way which was interactive, rather than didactic; fun, rather than frightening. And because the exhibit had no online component and no social media hashtag, the exhibit itself became refuges of data privacy, in a way — one work using a Faraday cage to block all radio signals, literally so.
To provide an example of the type of art exhibited, Toisha Tucker created a scrolling marquee whose text is entirely composed of captions from Instagram posts geotagged or hashtagged in ways particular to the library where the work was sited, thus demonstrating the wealth of information, and breadth of seemingly private details which people freely hand over to Instagram and share with the public. In speaking about the genesis of her work, she shared a conversation she had with her brother in which he uttered the following: ‘I didn’t tell anyone. I posted it on Facebook.’
In a nutshell, that anecdote about how confused our assumptions can be about what is public and what is private, and the artwork it led to, is exactly the sort of message that an artwork might be able to convey that a lecture or statement of fact might not. When one sees a scrolling marquee of possibly personal Instagram posts scrolling by in your neighborhood public library, that has the potential for greater visceral impact than might a public lecture or presentation of numbers and statistics about data on social media. Other artworks in the show took similar but different approaches to privacy, allowing the aesthetic element of art to communicate, though in the familiar venue of the library, in ways we might not expect from libraries.
Panel 2: Helsinki and Library Design
The second panel discussed how we think about the design of libraries. Those who have spent time in university libraries have probably experienced vast, dim halls of dense stacks. This design, though perhaps off-putting, does serve a certain purpose: storing as much information in the space provided, while allowing students and scholars the ability to easily access resources. These stacks are not places where these researchers are drawn to out of aesthetics, but for task-oriented purposes.
Anni Vartola, a Finnish architecture critic, opened by presenting an exhibit she curated studying the design of Finnish public libraries as public spaces, demonstrating the ways that Finland has taken an approach different from the task-oriented one above. Rather, inspired by the writings of Valfrid Palmgren, Finland sees libraries as ‘a meeting place for all societal classes alike . . . which says “welcome” . . . and makes them feel at home,’ and as some of the last non-commercial interior spaces. 1
Laura Norris, Service Manager at the new Oodi Helsinki Central Library, then built on Vartola’s theoretical foundation, presenting how this newest of Finland’s library continues that approach, integrating information, architecture, and art into a singular user experience which makes the library a place that patrons want to be. In addition, Ilari Laamanen presented how three works recently exhibited at Oodi themselves provoke the library’s patrons to examine our institutions of knowledge, even while they themselves are present with one such institution, augmenting the library’s role as an institution encouraging thoughtful engagement with knowledge and information: as Vartola’s exhibit called it, ‘Mind-Building ’.
This approach squares with Pratt’s ‘iSchool’ approach to the information sciences. How libraries provide information through an inviting experience — accessible not just intellectually but aesthetically, in order to ‘support active citizenship, democracy, and lifelong learning’ — is a thoroughly user-centered approach to information design. Designing for users is not just about organizing information, or providing easy and ready access to information resources.
Conclusion
The success of the Finnish library system, and Oodi in particular, and the use of libraries as an exhibit space for art about information, demonstrates that designing for users also entails first making information and information spaces a place that users want to enter and want to engage with. If they never get in the door, if they never want to stay once in the door, their access to information is effectively more limited. And once they are in the door, the Privacy in Public exhibit gives us a way of rethinking the way libraries invite their patrons to engage with, and think about, information.
1 Compare to May & Black’s description of libraries-as-social-space in Nova Scotia: May, F. and Black. (2010) The life of the space: evidence from Nova Scotia public libraries, Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 5(2), 5-34, available at https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/eblip/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/6497