Author: csula

Inescapable Biases and the Construction of Catalog Realities

Emily Drabinski’s article, “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction” discusses an important issue library professionals must face.   All attempts to create some type of globally relevant system of classification and organization have problems embedded within them. How can a library catalog ever be expected to be finite and representative all the various mindsets and ways of knowing that exist in the world or even in one cosmopolitan city? Language constantly develops, new ideas emerge, societies change, borders are redefined, concepts evolve, and policies are renegotiated.  Humans create categories in order to impose some kind of structure on the world so as not to feel lost in complete chaos.  Such structures may be imperfect illusions, but it does not seem that we humans have yet fathomed a better solution to finding our way through the labyrinthian archive known as existence.  Until we do, library and information professionals must deal with an ever-growing mass of information.  They must also endeavor to ensure that ways of finding and sorting through it are relevant to as many different people as possible.

Drabinski references the history of radical librarianship and notes that the biased nature of cataloging has been a debated issue in LIS professions since the late 1960s.  While radical catalogers have made progress in making changes to biased subject headings and class marks, Drabinski thinks that making these changes is basically like treating a symptom of an illness without addressing its cause.  She feels that critical catalogers miss an important point in their work when making corrections to the Library of Congress’ classification system: the problematic nature of cataloging itself.  She writes, “such corrections are always contingent and never final, shifting in response to discursive and political and social change…[they] reiterate an approach to classification and cataloging that elides contingency as a factor in determining what classification and cataloging decisions are imagined to be correct in any given context.”

Drabinski’s call for LIS professionals to “theorize the trouble with classification and cataloging in library knowledge systems [as] the root” of the problem is similar to demands critical theory scholars have made on academics to acknowledge the impact that socio-historical constructions, power structures, economics and politics have on supposedly objective research.  In their article, “Rethinking Critical Theory and Qualitative Research,” Kincheloe and McLaren discuss how practices in critical theory aim to make implicit inescapable biases more explicit in academic research.  By openly acknowledging and grappling with these biases as part of the research process, critical theorists aim to move towards a more balanced or democratic way of both conducting and representing research.  Both Drabinski’s and Kincheloe and McLaren’s articles draw attention to a tendency in society and in academia to cling to notions of objectivity or the so-called myth of neutrality even though one’s understanding and experience of the world is in constant flux and dependent on numerous changing factors.

So what can LIS professionals do to achieve their goal of making information accessible whilst understanding that the cataloging systems they must work with are irreparably flawed by their very nature?  Drabinski advocates what she considers to be a Queer intervention to this problem: leave contested headings or class marks in place to allow for critical public discussion and deconstruction of their meanings.   She believes that a rupture occurs when someone encounters an “obviously biased classification decision or subject heading” making it easy for library users to see the “constructed quality of library classification.”

While I can appreciate Drabinski’s desire to use biased cataloging practices as an impetus to spark discussions between library staff and critical patrons, I’m not convinced it will have the outcome she desires.  The rupture she speaks of is dependent upon a user already being of like mind about the “incorrectness” of the subject heading or class mark in question.  What may be an obvious bias to one user may be nothing remarkable to another.  Furthermore, it does not make sense to knowingly allow a biased structure to remain in place just to serve as a potential discussion point. People who are likely to experience such a rupture going through a library catalog already experience them everywhere in everyday life just trying to do ordinary things like finding a public restroom, buying “nude tone” bandages or make-up, finding a job, hailing a taxi, voting, getting married…and the list goes on.  They need not go to the library just to find one other reminder of how “the system” is up against them.  It seems to me that aiming to adopt progressive cataloging methods would have more of the desired impact. For example, radical cataloging practices could cause a rupture for those who would use subject headings like “sexual deviance” to organize books about homosexuality.  In my opinion, this is where the rupture Drabinski seeks ought to be taking place.

Towards the end of their article Kincheloe and McLaren introduce an ethnographic research method called “deconstructive ethnography.” Over the past few decades anthropologists have strived for reflexivity in their work, and deconstructive ethnography takes reflexivity even further. Kincheloe and McLaren write, “Whereas reflexive ethnography questions its own authority, deconstructive ethnography forfeits its authority.”  This approach is interesting to consider since many think the goal of research is to produce some kind of authoritative knowledge.

The concept of deconstructive ethnography is very interesting in the library context.  As Drabinski points out, library catalogs do provide an amazing potential to draw attention to the ways socio-political constructions create ideas of reality.  People seek things based off of what they think makes sense, using their own authoritative understanding of the world.  Librarians assign categories based on “authority records” and use “authority fields” to make catalog records.  Do these authorities recognize one another?  As libraries aim to provide equal access for all, it seems that they ought to adopt catalog and classifying practices that incorporate ways of describing and identifying that are in alignment with how those being classified define themselves. With new technology, there is no reason that catalogs could not be designed to provide a wide variety of access points in order to make items findable based on multiple perspectives of library users.  Would this be a sort of deconstructive cataloging?  Does there need to be an authoritative catalog?  While a permanent and universal system is an impossibility, a system that acknowledges its biases and accounts for the diversity of ways of knowing and accessing the world is not.

References:

  • Drabinksi, E. (2013), “Queering the catalog: queer theory and the politics of correction” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 83(2): 94–111.
  • Kincheloe, J. and McLaren, P. (2002), “Rethinking Critical Theory and Qualitative Research” in Ethnography and Schools Qualitative Approaches to the Study of Education (Immigration and the Transnational Experience Series) Eds. Zou, Y and Truebe, E.  pp. 87-130
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The Eye of Sauron

Eye_of_Sauron_by_ulstudor

 

Why should we care about whether we’re being watched or not? Most people would think that they’re not doing anything wrong but there are so many statutes and laws on the books they probably are. The National Security Agency (NSA) has run roughshod over our basic liberties, especially after 9/11 and the passing of the USA Patriot Act. According to the American Civil Liberties Union “The result is unchecked government power to rifle through individuals’ financial records, medical histories, Internet usage, bookstore purchases, library usage, travel patterns, or any other activity that leaves a record.”

Surveillance orders can be based in part on a person’s First Amendment activities, such as the books they read, the Web sites they visit, or a letter to the editor they have written. This has serious implications for libraries. Under the USA Patriot Act, if a library receives a formal request they are under a legal obligation to disclose the relevant information available. Additionally, under the act’s provisions, librarians who receive an order are prohibited from discussing the issue with anyone other than a library’s attorney and any staff who assist in fulfilling the request. Anyone who violates this could face severe penalties.

The U.S. Depart of Justice has put up a handy page that offers highlights of the law here.

Welcome to Panopticonia

“. . . supervision, control, correction—seems to be a fundamental and characteristic dimension of the power relations that exist in our society.” —Michel Foucault

The 18th century English philosopher Jeremey Bentham came up with a design for a circular prison, (the Panopticon), that in the 1970s the French philosopher Michel Foucault used to illustrate that constant surveillance can be used by the state as an means of control and disciplinary power. There are some theorists who reject Foucault’s premise and think we’re in a post-Panoptic world. One such argument is from the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman who posits that we’ve moved beyond Panopticism to seduction. I see that as just another tool in the surveillance arsenal, (albeit a subtle one). Ubiquitous video cameras, smart phones and tablets that double as tracking devices, incredibly sophisticated tracking software—surveillance has become so pervasive that we’re not living in a post-Panoptic world but pan-Panoptic one. Besides for all this surreptitious surveillance most of us are willing participants in the amassing of all this information. Through Internet outlets such as social media and  consumer sites we’re happy to share information globally that previously would have been private or shared with just family or friends.

The enormous blanket of surveillance extracts a huge toll on us. Manipulation and distortion of news, self-policing and censorship of news organizations, threats to freedom of expression—these are all things that have been enforced since the law went into effect. This reinforces a Panopticonic ideal that whether you’re being watched or not you assume you are giving the watcher, (i.e. government), total control. A recent example of this: the writers’ organization, PEN American Center conducted a survey, Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor, which found a large majority of its members deeply concerned about the extent of government surveillance. Like the canary in the coalmine, if artists, writers, and journalists are feeling uneasy what are the implications for the rest of us?

The clip below is an apt visualization of our sense of fear and frustration in the face of this incessant surveillance. In this, is the final scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation, Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert who finds out he himself may be under surveillance. He sets out to find the bug, destroying his apartment in the process. Not finding anything he ends up sitting in the wreckage playing his sax . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uivHPkrlAPo

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Archival traces and ephemeral events

Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” expands the notion of what can be considered an archive, and assigns more power to the act of archiving. For him, the process of archiving an event leaves a trace on an exterior substrate. A mark is made on a substance; memory is made tangible. This leaving of a trace is called the “repetition” of the event. As he notes,

There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside. [1. Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (July 1, 1995): 14, doi:10.2307/465144.]

This repetition is by nature removed from the original event. The archive possesses a quality Derrida terms “spectral”: “…neither present nor absent “in the flesh,” neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met…” [2. Derrida and Prenowitz, “Archive Fever,” 54.]

Yet at the same time it’s spectral, the way an event is repeated/archived is deeply linked to our understanding of that event. For Derrida, the archived form of the event ends up becoming an integral, inseparable part of it:

…the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media. [3. Derrida and Prenowitz, “Archive Fever,” 17.]

The act of or potential for archiving ends up influencing the event itself. But what about events that resist archiving, like certain kinds of performances?

Recently, the National Gallery of Art in Washington presented an exhibition on Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, and as part of their web content they produced a video on the history of the dance company. Included were a mix of photographs of the original dancers, photographs of restored costumes, and videos of later recreations of several of the dances. Some of the earlier restagings were done by the Monaco-based branch of the Ballets Russes formed shortly after Diaghilev’s death, whereas others were staged by companies like the Joffrey Ballet in the 80s.

Traditional archival records (like photographs, costumes, and drawings) were probably used to construct these restagings, but the videos of the restagings themselves can also be considered part of “The Archive” of the Ballets Russes: in the absence of a video trace produced of the first performance of a dance, these videos become the most tangible trace of the whole performance.

But should these archives of the Ballets Russes become part of the Ballets Russes? Though any kind of change of medium of reproduction (like the photographing of a painting) can be understood to enact changes on the “event”, reproductions of performances seem to be especially spectral and those changes can be jarring. In the realm of performance art, an awareness of the changes that occur when an original performance is repeated led some artists beginning in the 1970s, like Vito Acconci, to prefer not to reperform pieces—to keep out archival accumulation. Maybe the “death drive” is a concern, reperformance in a way superimposing or causing the forgetting of the original piece. As Derrida says,

If repetition is thus inscribed at the heart of the future to come, one must also import here, in the same stroke, the death drive, the violence of forgetting, superrepression (suppression and repression), the anarchive, in short, the possibility of putting to death the very thing, whatever its name, which carries the law in its tradition… [4. Derrida and Prenowitz, “Archive Fever,” 51.]

This has come up in the context of the performance work of Marina Abramovic—for example in 2005 when she reperformed some of her own works as well as the works of others (including Acconci). On the other end of the spectrum there are artists like Tino Seghal, an artist who vigorously prohibits any kind of archiving of his work. No photographs and very little writing about his pieces is permitted: in the catalog of the exhibition documenta (13) held in Kassel in 2012, the page describing his work was completely missing, and his name only appeared in the table of contents and index.

In some cases the resistance to archiving is a conceptual aspect of the work, but even when it’s not it can be said that in general the ephemeral nature of dance performances and performance art makes them difficult to archive. Part of this must simply stem from the fact that a performance is temporal, and doesn’t necessarily become fixed into a tangible medium: it doesn’t easily leave a trace.

Online media and websites can also be understood this way, even though a website seems fairly tangible at first glance, and for a while even looks the same upon repeated viewings. But like a performance, websites are dynamic. In his essay, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era”, Roy Rosenzweig points out that although it feels like we are drowning in digital documents, websites actually change or disappear rapidly. In an article on web archiving at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Heather Slania also brings up this point, noting that it is difficult to capture websites built in Flash and sites that link to databases, “…meaning that the only documentation left might be a website’s mere existence.” [5. Slania, Heather. “Online Art Ephemera: Web Archiving at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 32, no. 1 (March 1, 2013): 118. doi:10.1086/669993.]

To illustrate this point, Slania includes an image of a flash website captured in a crawl done with Archive-It, which appears as a gray box. Of course, the image captured in that crawl is an archival trace, but as Slania says, it only testifies to the existence of the website. How useful is that kind of trace? In this case probably not terribly, but it brings up the point that just as the process of archiving shapes the event itself, so does the character of the archive (what kinds of traces are left) shape the kinds of questions researchers ask.

A recent effort to restore Douglas Davis’ “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence”, an early example of Internet art, could provide a model for archiving web-based materials. Even though it was created less than 20 years ago, the site was already in need of restoration, which was undertaken by the Whitney in summer 2013. Problems like “link rot” (when hyperlinks no longer function since the site linked to has disappeared) arose, as did the question of whether to alter the code so that it functioned in modern browsers. Ultimately the team decided to present multiple versions of the site: a live version that works in modern browsers, the original site (with its broken code), and screenshots of what it looked like in Netscape (an old browser). The live version satisfies researchers who want to understand the interactive aspects of the original site, while the presence of the untouched original site, along with the residual broken hyperlinks left in the live version of the site, are a testament to the fragility of web structures—and to the challenges of archiving dynamic ephemera.

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Seen and Heard—a mini film festival.

Citizen-Kane-Microphone
Screenshot of the microphone representing narrator Orson Welles from the trailer from Citizen Kane.

“The primacy of the written word went into abeyance. And that uniform layer, in which the seen and the read, the visible and the expressible, were endlessly interwoven, vanished too. Things and words were to be separated from one another. The eye was thenceforth destined to see and only to see, the ear to hear and only to hear.”
—Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966)

Foucault was writing about the “being of language” and the reorganization of culture in the classical world but he could have been describing the transition from silent to talking pictures, (or further, the ongoing change from analog to digital and the impact on accessing and assimilating information). There’s no doubt the written word is alive and well—just look at the amount of writing online—though it’s dwarfed by the amount and availability of still and moving images.

With a Foucauldian transitional moment in mind, (utilizing both eyes and ears), I’ve picked a few commercially produced movies from the 1950s to today which touch on political and social issues such as the gathering and disseminating of information, the need and relevance for books, libraries, and archives, free access of information, the power of the state, (and individuals who challenge it), the needs of society versus the individual, totalitarianism and the toll on those in it, and the nature of privacy and surveillance and the costs to society.

Storm Center (1956), a bit of a pot-boiler, is nonetheless an interesting look into McCarthy era America. As one of the first movies, (albeit post-McCarthy), to examine it overtly, it’s the story of a small town librarian standing up against the banning of books in her library. Though somewhat simplistic it puts forth a powerful argument against censorship and state control of information. In the scene below the librarian argues before the city council that there are a number of books on the shelves that she doesn’t agree with, (she uses Mein Kampf as her example), and the council is almost swayed until one of them uses information, (one assumes from illegal government surveillance), that she once belonged to organizations that were found to be Communist fronts to destroy her. Though not subtle, the issues of individual rights in a democratic society, the role of libraries, the needs of access of information are all touched upon.

The Time Machine (1960), based on the novel by H. G. Wells, tells the story of a man from Victorian England who travels to the future in the device of the title. Filled with cold war allusions of what the future would bring—in one fantastic sequence showing him travelling through time as he sees his street changing culminating in a nuclear holocaust—he ends up in the distant future where mankind has developed into two races, one who live above ground and the other below. Leading up to the scene below he asks the people who live above about their books. He’s taken to an ancient library where he finds that they have been left to decay and turn to dust. He’s shown “talking rings” that these people spin for pleasure but have no understanding of what they are saying. Here we are confronted with a conundrum: What’s the point of an archive if no one is left to understand it?

Fahrenheit 451 (1966) takes a look at a dystopian society that has outlawed books in an oppressive future. Based on a novel by Ray Bradbury, the government uses an armed force known as “firemen” to set rather than put out fires in the pursuit of destroying all books. They can search anyone, anywhere, at any time in the name of eradicating books and the anti-social behavior they are thought to cause. One of these firemen begins to question his task after he starts saving and reading the books he’s supposed to burn. Used here as a metaphor for individuality, books become powerful symbols for personal liberty and the need to question accepted norms. The issues of privacy, surveillance, and perverse manipulation through the use of mass media is evident in the clip below when the fireman’s wife has a date with her television.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAFGUEUVweU

Which brings me to the new film The Fifth Estate (2013). Covering the conflicting needs of established and new media, this is the story of Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange through the eyes of a former associate. From the opening credits (a two-minute montage covering the history of information gathering), the film brings up some fascinating points about the evolving nature of journalism. Is publishing and posting online with no editing or oversight justified? And is there’s any responsibility that goes along with that? It also touches on the issues of privacy, surveillance, the need, (if any), for authoritative sources, and the nature of information organization on the Internet. Below is a clip showing the sniping between traditional journalists from The Guardian and the new media equation embodied by Wikileaks. As a commercial movie with an eye toward reaching a wide audience it poses these questions with no definitive answers. At this transitional moment even the awareness of these issues takes on enormous importance.

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Curator, publisher, aggregator, librarian: creative professional?

In March of 2012, a heated debate ensued after Maria Popova of Brainpickings introduced the curator’s code—two Unicode characters (ᔥ, the “via”, and ↬, the “hat tip”) meant to help people credit the origins of the links they share online. The “via” indicates a direct link to a piece of content, while the “hat tip” is used to credit another person who’d previously shared the content. Though these terms had been around before the advent of the curator’s code, the code was an attempt to standardize the terms and to publicize the ethics of recording how links are shared.

via
ᔥ Brainpickings

The curator’s code is a piece of Popova’s broader position that arrangement and information architecture are meaningful (she uses the term “combinatorial creativity”). The core idea behind the code is that “content curation and information discovery” are valuable, creative forms of labor, and those laborers are worthy of being getting credited for that work.

Sometimes called curation or aggregation (many people on both sides of the debate don’t feel there is an adequate term), this kind of work can take on a few different forms. It might be a twitter feed comprised of links briefly commented on, or a blog post (on a site like HuffPo) featuring a longer summary and a link back to an original article. Basically, “content curation and information discovery” fall under the umbrella of the act of grouping, collecting, or listing other sources.

In the context of journalism the link back to the original source is especially important to the original creator of the content, since it can mean more page views (which is tied to revenue). Linking back also builds social capital—as David Carr said in an interview, “…often the only compensation that’s out there. That ego compensation or artistic compensation.” In that way it can also be important to an artist or social media personality. The principle of linking back (with or without a “via”) isn’t a foreign concept, since it does basically what a copyright notice does—identify the author (or owner) of a thing.

And that aspect of the curator’s code was generally accepted. Besides some aesthetic issues and practical gripes with the Unicode characters, the backlash flared when the definition of who should get credited with authorship was broadened to include the aggregator/curator, with particular issue taken with the word “curator.” “ ‘Curation’ is an act performed by people with PhDs in art history” commented Matt Langer (on Gizmodo). As Marco Arment elaborated in his post (titled “I’m not a curator”):

I completely disagree with Popova on the value of discovery.

The value of authorship is much more clear. But regardless of how much time it takes to find interesting links every day, I don’t think most intermediaries deserve credit for simply sharing a link to someone else’s work.

Reliably linking to great work is a good way to build an audience for your site. That’s your compensation.

But if another link-blogger posts a link they found from your link-blog, I don’t think they need to credit you. Discovering something doesn’t transfer any ownership to you. Therefore, I don’t think anyone needs to give you credit for showing them the way to something great, since it’s not yours. Some might as a courtesy, but it shouldn’t be considered an obligation.

Langer noted

… when we do this thing that so many of us like to call “curation” we’re not providing any sort of ontology or semantic continuity beyond that of our own whimsy or taste or desire. “Interesting things” or “smart things” are not rubrics that make the collection and dissemination of data that happens on the Internet anything closer to a curatorial act; these categories are ultimately still reducible to “things I find appealing,”…

Joe Lazauskas, reacting to Langer’s post, noted that for him sharing content and creating original content are not equally valuable activities, and agreed that “there’s no standard that distinguishes curation from sharing, it’s just a means of attributing artfulness and profession to the act of presenting non-original content to an audience.”

***

Whichever side of the curator’s code debate one goes with, its questions about the definition and cultural value of curation are important, and relevant in other contexts. For example, like web curators, librarians engage in “the act of presenting non-original content to an audience,” selecting and communicating sources they have not created to users. If not when web curators do it, can a librarian’s collection, gathering and sharing, arrangement, aggregation, selection, and curation be considered artful, valuable, creative, and/or professional? This is an important question for a field that has historically struggled with its professional identity—particularly regarding the cultural value and impact of its activities. In her book The Alienated Librarian, Marcia J. Nauratil traces thwarted professional development and public recognition to the feminization of the field, but another root might be our culture’s devaluation of the work of curation/knowledge organization—clearly seen in the reaction to the curator’s code.

How can we come to an understanding that these activities are creative, not in the sense that something original and new is created, but in the sense that meaning is created? In books like Questioning Library Neutrality, the political impact of accessions and collection development becomes clear. One core tenet that emerges is that the choice to include or not include a source in a collection is not neutral, but rather carries weight. In the library these choices of inclusion and exclusion impact the users, representing or under-representing their interests—and in that way they are creative, in that they create meaning or a message or an effect on people. Another aspect that comes up in QLN is that how a source is cataloged—for example, what subject terms are used and the specific wording chosen for them—imparts bias. A “neutral” position still communicates something—you say something by saying nothing. Maybe another way to phrase that is silent or explicit arrangement says something—it creates meaning, and in that way it is interpretive. Even though the brand of interpretation is different from what many people would traditionally accept as creative, seeing collection and organization through the lens of neutrality can lend more credibility to the idea of curation—thereby lending credibility to the project of librarians and others who gather and present information to others.

Links/Bibliography
*I tried to trace where I got my links from, but it was actually harder than I expected (since my way of working is to open a bunch of tabs and look at everything at the end). I’ve been thinking about this topic since last year, so that added to the confusion–I’d bookmarked some of the following pages then, and for this post did some additional googling.

Popova’s previous writings:

In a new world of informational abundance, content curation is a new kind of authorship (6/10/11) [↬ Megan Garber]
Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity (8/1/11) [↬ Popova, Introducing the Curator’s Code]

Introductions to the curator’s code:

Maria Popova, Introducing the Curator’s Code: A Standard for Honoring Attribution of Discovery Across the Web (3/9/12)
Swiss Miss (3/9/12)
David Carr, A Code of Conduct for Content Aggregators (3/11/12) [↬ Swiss Miss]
Megan Garber, The Curator’s Guide to the Galaxy (3/11/12)
Duncan Geere on Wired, ‘Curator’s code’ proposed for web attribution (3/12/12)
Brooke Gladstone’s On the Media interview with Popova (3/23/12)

Reaction to the curator’s code:

Twitter discussion of the curator’s code
Daniel Howells’ post (3/11/12) [↬ Swiss Miss]Jennifer Daniel’s satire on Bloomberg (3/12/12) [↬ Michael Surtees]
Marco Arment, I’m not a curator (3/12/12) [↬ Daniel Howells]
Matt Langer, Stop Calling it Curation (3/12/12) [↬ Daniel Howells]
It’s Nice That post (3/13/12) [↬ Daniel Howells]
Michael Surtees’ post (sometime in March? undated) [↬ Daniel Howells]
Brad Zackarin, The Curator’s Code in the Classroom (3/14/12)
Iain Claridge, My Collector’s Code (3/14/12)
Maria Popova, Einstein on Kindness, Our Shared Existence, and Life’s Highest Ideals (3/19/12)
Glen Isip’s post (3/20/12)
Joanna June on Hack Library School, We are all curators (3/23/12)
Maria Bustillos on Buzzfeed, Why we need “Curators” (4/3/12) [↬ curatorscode.org]
Joe Lazauskas, Rethinking the Curator’s Code: The Hidden Dangers of Elevating Content Sharing (6/20/12)
Learning by Doing, The Curator’s Code: The Art of Online Attribution (8/6/13)

For more, see the press and debate section of the curator’s code website.

Related stuff:

Jesse Hicks’ interview with David Carr on The Verge (4/3/12) [↬ curatorscode.org]
Curator’s code suggested in a libguide for the Mina Rees library (CUNY)

 

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From the Elite to the Accessible

NYT2010052712314909C

A visit to the Frick Art Reference Library

Turning off Fifth Avenue onto East 71st Street you walk along a windowless grey stone building until you reach the main entrance. Up the stone steps through shadowed doors you enter a space of dark wood and marble. To the immediate right there’s a small curved reception desk. You give your name to the guard, sign in, and are directed to the discreet elevator. The doors open on the third floor where you’re face to face with a marble bust in a niche. To the left, a dim room with stacks and wooden file cabinets. Right, the main reading room—high ceilinged with painted wooden beams, elegant chandeliers, long communal tables, large, tall windows. In front of an Italian renaissance altarpiece, (which I found out later to be a copy) sits the reference desk with three workstations. You walk up to one of the people seated behind it . . .

Hollywood could not have done it better. If one were to imagine what a private library should look like, it would be this.

Reading_Room_2010_B

The Frick Art Reference Library—imposing, impressive—but looks would be deceiving. Over the last few years the library has taken strides to be more accessible to the general public. For starters anyone can walk in with no appointment, register, get a library card and go on up to start looking through their collections.

Research librarian Suz Massen, (whose official title is Chief of Public Services), went over the history of the library, some of the services, and how it’s evolved. Founded as an art photo archive in 1920 by Helen Clay Frick, (after the death of her father, industrialist Henry), it was first housed in the unused bowling alley in the basement of the Frick Mansion. The library grew to encompass collections relating to paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints from the fourth to the mid-twentieth centuries by European and American artists as well as archival materials and special collections pertaining to the history of collecting art.

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The library in the bowling alley, circa 1923

As a separate research facility, (it was not combined with the Frick Collection until 1984), its mission “to encourage and develop the study of the fine arts, and to advance the general knowledge of kindred subjects” served a rarified elite, (including having a dress code until 1989—jackets and ties for men, modest skirts and low heeled shoes for women). Though the library is privately funded, (and thus not under the same financial pressures of a public institution), it now provides services with the general public in mind. There are over 6000 visits a year with 1700 specific research visits. One of the constant struggles is balancing access and usage with conservation. Meeting the needs and expectations of their clients has become more involved and complex including knowledge of new technologies, digitization, online access, social media, etc. With more interest and recognition comes a tradeoff—just a few years ago research queries that had a 24-48 hour turnaround now can take up to 15 days.

Though one could argue that this wealthy, private institution is the height of “bourgeois librarianship” disseminating “high culture” (Cossette 1976), with no need for a broader audience, they realized to have relevancy they have a responsibility to the larger community. As André Cossette in his book Humanism and Libraries points out: “An institution cannot function if it runs contrary to the objectives of the society of which it is an element.” The changes and challenges facing this institution are issues that many libraries face as more and more information is available digitally.

Nothing can quite take the place of being in the physical building, interacting with the staff, and going through the actual collection. The Frick has tried to make that experience as accessible and fulfilling as possible, (though granted they have a pretty great premises to work with), while at the same time making more material available online. Even an institution like this can feel the pressure of the marketplace. The increasing needs of their clients, the demands of more online access, availability of staff, etc. all add to the challenges for any modern library. The Frick’s management and staff have been able to adapt with foresight and flexibility, though with the power and freedom that come with a healthy endowment.

The Frick Art Reference Library

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