Category: Field Report
Responsibilities of a Reference Archivist
The New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division, pictured above, “holds over 29,000 linear feet of archival material in over 3,000 collections.” Records include “paper documents, photographs, sound recordings, films, videotapes, artifacts, and electronic records,” and are found in collections pertaining to the American Revolution, Civil War, and literary figures such as Washington Irving, Truman Capote, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Joyce, to name but a few. The Division especially prides itself on its collection of “the papers of individuals, families, and organizations, primarily from the New York region, dating from the 18th through the 20th centuries.”[1. Collection Description of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, http://www.nypl.org/locations/tid/36/node/40928]
With so much information available to study, it can be overwhelming trying to figure out where to start. Enter Tal Nadan, the Manuscripts and Archives Division’s reference archivist. On a recent visit to the Division, Ms. Nadan walked me through her daily responsibilities and shared some interesting stories about the department.
“The main tasks of the Reading Room archivists are conducting reference interviews, coordinating visits, enforcing policy, and answering remote reference requests,” Nadan explained.
The purpose of the reference interview is to allow Nadan to understand the researcher’s questions, aims, and needs. Armed with this information, she is able to direct the visitor to the most useful and appropriate records. The division usually sees about 15 to 20 researchers a week, with a bump on Saturdays and during holidays. Said Nadan, “We tend to get busy right after Thanksgiving, though we are quiet from Christmas to New Year’s Eve.” Many visitors plan extra stays, and Nadan quickly becomes acquainted with those conducting month-long research. “I get a feel for what they are studying, and sometimes I am able to suggest documents that might supplement their research.” She is quick to point out, however, that she is not a proxy researcher. She will gladly retrieve requested information, but “I can’t be expected to go through boxes and boxes of information looking for appropriate material. I’ll pull up requested documents, and I’ll scan to remote locations, but they must decide what is pertinent. Meaning is created from what you get out of the archives.” A bookcase in the Manuscripts and Archives Division holds the published works of those who conducted research there. “It encourages researchers to stay in contact with us. It also strengthens our relevance within the community,” she explained.
Every morning at 10:00, Nadan retrieves material that had been requested in advance. On the day of my visit, 15 large boxes were sitting on a desktop, brought up just a few days before. Most of them contained documents relating to the New York World’s Fairs of 1939/40 and 1964/65.
Said Nadan, “It’s always a popular topic of research because it’s interdisciplinary, but with the [50th and 75th] anniversaries coming up next year, research is really amping up.”
Because the Manuscripts and Archives Division shares a room with the Rare Books Division, and because there’s no way 29,000 linear feet of archives could possibly fit in a small reading room, the records are kept under Bryant Park in the Bryant Park Stack Extension. Built between 1988-91, the extension adds about 40 miles of shelf space and is reached via the elevator in the Rose Main Reading Room and through a 120-foot tunnel. The extension is temperature-controlled and includes “conveyor systems, a microfilm storage vault, and fire suppression systems.” Boxes are organized by size, a trend the whole library follows, and are accessed one range at a time due to compact shelving. It takes about twenty to thirty minutes to retrieve a collection. The entire New York World’s Fair collections take up 1,007 feet alone. [2. Quick History Facts, http://www.nypl.org/locations/tid/36/node/65792].
Drawing of the Bryant Park Stack Extension
Even with the stack extension, Nadal laments the lack of space. “We don’t have enough room, enough funding, or a big enough staff.” With only two full-time archivists, two library technical assistants, and one person to process (who only rotates in one week out of five), the staff is kept quite busy. Nadan, who always wanted to be a librarian, enjoys working with the public and facilitating their research. The stresses brought on by a small staff and little funding haven’t manifested in “burn-out” or “alienation;” in fact, she looks forward to the challenges and rather finds a kind of “escape” in talking to visitors, even leading them on tours of the library. “Some people can find the library intimidating; I’m here to show them how accessible it is,” Nadan said.
An on-going project within the archives division is the digitalization of records. Currently, “more than 4,000 entries for archival collections and other materials held throughout NYPL have been made available for online browsing.” [3. See note 1]. During my visit, Nadan spoke of recent meetings she attended concerning MPLP (more product, less process) and search optimization with the goal of making online collections easier to find and access. Right now, many collections within the Manuscripts and Archives Division are not digitized. This is due to the labor-intensive nature of the work, no staff on-hand to do the work, and no funding to support the work. The only collection that has been fully digitized is the LGBT collection, made possible by a grant from Time Warner. For now, thousands of documents and records remain in their analog state only. Hopefully this will change over time.
To anyone conducting research, it’s plain to see how crucial Nadan’s role is. Without reference archivists like her, it would be nearly impossible to find all the appropriate records needed. Luckily, Nadan is happy to lend her services. “My job is very rewarding,” she said. “I’m happy anytime I can help further someone’s research.”
Protected: Law and Order
Issues of Responsibility and Opportunity in Digital Archiving
Thinking a great deal lately about the concept of the archive and specifically digital archiving, I recently spent a morning in the Condé Nast Research Library and was interested to see how/where these issues might be at play. In conversation, the senior librarian informed me that the library operates separately from the archive and described the difference as such: the archive serves as the center for preservation while the library provides access to information. While this sounds like a simple and practical divide, the idea was further complicated when I asked about articles published only online. Who handles the preservation of these articles that must make up a huge contribution to the collection of these media brands? She smiled somewhat ruefully and said she wasn’t sure. Not only did the library have no involvement with this process but the librarian actually said she was too apprehensive to even ask questions. With only three librarians, and one other part-time staff member, she said they didn’t have the resources to tackle that issue if it was raised. I was interested in this division between the archive and library and asked some further questions about photo requests, receiving yet another vague response. The librarian informed me that they had “some photo records” and could respond to “some” requests leading me to believe that the divide between the two departments isn’t quite as strict as was originally portrayed. The interaction got me thinking about issues of responsibility in terms of digital archiving.
Condé Nast has digitized the entirety of Vogue from the very first issue, an expensive undertaking that was outsourced to a different company. Currently, a yearly subscription costs $3,250. Digitizing is expensive and time-consuming and corporations like Condé Nast must decide what paper materials to digitize while also considering how to incorporate born digital materials into their archive. As of now, it is quite unclear how that is being handled.
The archive as a physical collection and theoretical concept forms a basis for much of scholarly research and when examined brings up issues of authority, authenticity, ownership, and policy. Attempts to define these objects of study get at the very nature of the disciplines they serve. Associate head of the humanities library at MIT, Marlene Manoff names various concepts of the archive such as the “social archive, the raw archive, the imperial archive, the postcolonial archive, the popular archive, the ethnographic archive, the geographical archive, the liberal archive, archival reason, archival consciousness, archive cancer, and the poetics of the archive”—a list which speaks to the way this concept has permeated many fields (11). Derrida in his influential Archive Fever, claims that the archive produces as much as it records the event. “The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage], a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way” (18). Within this context the structure of the archive also determines what can be archived, and history and memory are then shaped by the technical processes of “archivization”.
These technical processes have seen huge transformations with recent advances in information technology. Manoff claims that the methods for transmitting information shape the nature of the knowledge that can be produced, and points to social theorist Adrian Mackenzie’s claim that the centrality of the archive to cyberspace stems from the fact that existence in virtual culture is premised on a live connection. In Mackenzie’s phrasing, “to die is to be disconnected from access to the archives, not jacked-in or not in real time” (10). In this culture of connectedness, there is a new kind of instant archivization where the moment of production and preservation happen at once.
This situation leads to two potential opposing issues. On the one hand we are producing very vulnerable digital records at an alarming pace, however; if digital archiving efforts prove effective we could end up with a more complete historical record than ever before, an information overload.
Information consultant, Terry Kuny, commented on this situation fifteen years ago,
As we move into the electronic era of digital objects it is important to know that there are new barbarians at the gate and that we are moving into an era where much of what we know today, much of what is coded and written electronically, will be lost forever. We are, to my mind, living in the midst of digital Dark Ages; consequently, much as monks of times past, it falls to librarians and archivists to hold to the tradition which reveres history and the published heritage of our times.
Kuny places the responsibility for this future preservation work on librarians and archivists, and it seems that in terms of the opposing dilemma—information overload—these same professionals would take center stage. Manoff points out that archival work is “about making fine discriminations to identify what is significant from a mass of data. These kinds of distinctions are also central to the work of librarians and archivists” (Manoff 19). However issues of digital preservation have far-reaching implications relevant to almost every discipline, and one of the biggest issues currently facing digital archiving is a lack of a clear path or a defined sense of responsibility as I saw at Condé Nast.
In Scarcity and Abdundance: Preserving the Past in a Digital Era, Roy Rosenzweig points to an absence of process in digital archiving. “Over centuries, a complex (and imperfect) system for preserving the past has emerged. Digitization has unsettled that system of responsibility for preservation, and an alternate system has not emerged. In the meantime cultural and historical objects are being permanently lost” (745). He discusses historians’ lack of attention to these issues, in part due to an assumption that these are “technical” problems outside of the purview of scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Manoff points out that, “archival discourse has also become a way to address some of the thorny issues of disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge production and the artificial character of disciplinary boundaries” (11). The most important and difficult issues of digital preservation are social, cultural, economic, political, and legal—issues humanists should excel at. Yet this professional division between historians and archivists leads to a confusion of responsibility that seems to go beyond solely this historian/archivist split. Within the discourse surrounding archives, libraries, museums and archives are often conflated and there is confusion not only concerning the overarching questions of how and what to save but also who will be doing it. Digital documents are disrupting our traditional system of publication, dissemination, and preservation. Digitization challenges our notion of ownership, who owns the materials and thus who is responsible for their preservation. Licensed and centrally controlled digital content erodes the library’s ability and responsibility to preserve the past. Why preserve something you do not own?
Rosenzweig ends his discussion, pointing to “one of the most vexing and interesting features of the digital era…the way it unsettles traditional arrangements and forces us to ask basic questions that have been there all along” (760). Digital preservation and the challenges it presents open up an opportunity to re-think disciplinary boundaries, to potentially form greater cross-disciplinary connections, and in doing so strengthen our own field. One thing is for certain, there isn’t time to wait for a perfect solution and if seen as an opportunity for joint action, this recreation of the processes of preservation can be an exciting opportunity. Let’s not avoid asking the questions that need to be asked.
Sources
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january00/01hodge.html#Kuny
Derrida, J. & Prenowitz, E. (1995). “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” Diacritics 25(2): 13
Manoff, Marlene. “Theories Of The Archive From Across The Disciplines.”portal: Libraries and the Academy 4, no. 1 (2004): 9-25.
Rosenzweig, R. (2003). “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era” The American Historical Review 108(3)
Aspects of the Digital Challenge
What will people in the future think of us?
This is a question that every generation wonders about, but can never know the answer to. According to this commercial, our generation will be known for bright colors and loud, electric music. But the fact is, we can never know exactly what the past was like, and no one in the future will know exactly what life is like now.
Since the beginning of time, however, humans have tried to get around this truth by compulsively saving and leaving behind stories, objects, and/or photos, hoping to leave a legacy along with them. In fact, these records have become regarded as being of great importance. They are organized, called archives, and are seen as glimpses into the past.
Whether one views an archive as simply a storehouse, a true portrayal of past events, or an inherently biased set of records, the power archives have in current society is undeniable. Archives are seen and used as credible sources and “wield power over the shape and direction of historical scholarship, collective memory and national identity.” [1. Footnote Schwartz, Joan M., Terry Cook. “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.” Archival Science 2 (2002) 1-19. Print.]
Now we have arrived at a transitional point. Advances in information technology will begin to change what archives collect and, in turn, their role in society. Questions regarding who is responsible for preserving the past, whether we should be trying to save everything, and how we define historical evidence are all becoming increasingly important. As Roy Rosenzweig points out, “One of the most vexing and interesting features of the digital era is the way that it unsettles traditional arrangements and forces us to ask basic questions that have been there all along.” [2. Footnote Rosenzweig, R. (2003). “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era” The American Historical Review 108(3)]
Complicating this process is that there is currently no consensus among archivists as to how to handle digitization. The archival world will soon reach a tipping point: decisions will have to be made, and they will have a major affect on how archives are perceived and used in the future.
The Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at the New-York Historical Society, although not entirely pressured by the digital movement, is dealing with some of the challenges it brings.
A Special Collections library, it includes printed, manuscript and architectural collections. Although it has been digitizing since 1998, and has several collections freely available over the Internet, its incorporation of technology is an ongoing process. It is a process that directly affects the Library’s two main purposes: access and preservation.
As part of the Library’s move toward digitization, it has started using a program called Aeon, an online request system designed for Special Collections and archives. Specifically, it is used by Special Collections that don’t circulate. Patrons are registered into the system when they first visit the library and can then request items directly through an online catalog through a personalized account. This system allows the Library to monitor each request, keep track of what items are being used, prepare for events, and more easily manage transactions. Statistics kept by the program can also help with obtaining funding.
However, for every benefit that technology offers, ongoing issues remain. For instance, NYHS continues to maintain a large card catalog for manuscripts. Each card contains a rather extensive description of the archival material, regardless of the document’s length. Researchers can look through the cards, which have more detail than the online catalog, to find precisely the resources they need. The information and detail on these cards is fascinating, but the library hasn’t yet found a way to put them online. Ideas such as scanning each individual card or simply typing them up have been discussed, but time and expense are just two of the obstacles currently preventing such a venture. For now, the card catalog remains the only way to access this information.
Furthermore, NYHS is in a consortium with NYU and other libraries in New York City. This entails access to each institution’s collections via an online catalog and finding aids. NYU is also responsible for any IT work, programming, and formatting of the online database. This helps with consistency, but leads to other issues: for example, while NYHS has certain ideas and needs because they are Special Collections, NYU has a more general library and, thus, sometimes has conflicting desires for how technology should be used.
Another issue has to do with the cost of processing collections. NYHS, and the other libraries within the consortium, use a program called Archivists Tool Kit. Currently, though, there is a pressing debate over Archive Space, which will soon replace Tool Kit. There is a fee structure associated with Archive Space, which has many people in the Archive community up in arms. Tool Kit has no such fee and, as a result, some members within the consortium are resistant to the change.
Such additional expense is a major issue associated with technology. Programs are not static and when a collection is digitized, it isn’t a onetime cost. Often, IT people must be hired to help install, upgrade and troubleshoot these programs. In this sense, a fee structure with automated upgrades may actually be cost effective.
Continuous changes in technology directly affect archival processing and how archivists allocate their time. With each new program, there is need to reformat previously digitized collections. Because NYHS is within a consortium with NYU, when NYU chooses to switch, it will be imperative for NYHS to switch, as well, in order to keep their digital collections updated.
These day-to-day issues are all related to the elephant in the room: born-digital archives. Which of these materials should be archived? How will they be archived? NYHS hasn’t been directly affected by this issue yet, but it is something that is rapidly approaching and is in the back of their minds.
Dealing with born-digital archives leads to problems with storage, software, and preservation, and will eventually redefine the archival community. As technology continues rapidly to advance, things like floppy discs and VHS tapes become obsolete. Furthermore, unlike non-digital archives, like books, there is no way of knowing if a VHS tape is broken unless you can test it, for which a VHS player would be needed.
Raising these issues is merely scratching the surface, and there seems to be a sense of pessimism in the archival world as to how they will be dealt with. The smaller issues NYHS is currently dealing with prove the point that a consensus must be reached among archives and libraries before a solution is possible.
Otherwise, our generation will be known for having an abundance of technology, and for not knowing how to use it.
Protected: Preserving the Past in Spite of the Present
A Day In The Life of a Children’s Librarian
Recently I was able to observe Meghan, a children’s librarian at my local library. First, she invited me to Baby Time, a story time session in the Program Room for babies aged 16-24 months. I sat in the room waiting for the session to begin. Babies and caretakers were sitting around the room, reading board books, playing with stuffed animals and snapping photos with their smart phones.
Then Meghan got started. She sang “If You’re Happy And You Know It,” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” While she did this, Meghan had a Cabbage Patch Doll on which to demonstrate. She pointed out body parts on the doll, so the caretakers would know to do that on their baby as well.
One book she read to the kids was called Baby Goes Beep. It was a story about all the sounds babies make. For example, laughing, crying, burping and clapping. Another story was read about the children’s body parts, and the Cabbage Patch Doll was used once again. After that, Meghan sang “Where Is Thumpkin” to teach the name of each finger.
After the Baby Time session, we went upstairs to the Children’s Room for further observation. I saw a map of Westchester and part of Connecticut with books placed in various locations. For example, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was placed on the map in Tarrytown (Sleepy Hollow). Meghan told me that they had chosen books that take place locally and displayed them for people to learn about.
I also saw their book displays. They had a Fall Books section, about the change of season and fall activities. The display next to that was Banned Books, complete with caution tape in front of the shelf. Some of these books included the Harry Potter series and the Diary of Anne Frank.
Since I observed at the beginning of October, Meghan decided to take the Banned Books display down and put up a Halloween one in its place. We pulled books off the shelves having to do with Halloween. It was fun to be able to look up books up the database and find them on the shelves. It was a nice taste of something a reference librarian does.
The shelves were organized by category and book type. There were skinny books, chapter books, fiction, foreign books and graphic novels. I counted five computers and one iPad for patrons’ use.
Then Meghan explained the other jobs of a reference librarian. She said they have to pull books that people have requested off the shelves and scan them onto their accounts, decided which books to keep or not, based on when they last circulated, and keep a record of all the programs for each month for statistics. She showed me how she makes a chart with each program, the time date and place of each one, as well as who ran it.
One term that came to mind after doing the observation is burnout. Burnout is defined as mental exhaustion, not being able to deal with people anymore, loss of energy, and having a negative attitude. This is discussed at length in Marcia Nautatil’s book, The Alienated Librarian. I don’t believe Meghan has any of these symptoms or problems, and is very energetic and happy with her job.
Digital Humanities: Projects, Power, and Opportunity
As technology continues to advance and change, libraries are increasingly working to provide the digital services their users want and need. This is an ongoing challenge, and each institution responds to it differently. Columbia University, for example, has three digital centers on campus for their students and faculty. There is the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, which offers a variety of services, such as running the university’s institutional repository, Academic Commons; the Digital Science Center, which has services such as offering the hardware and software used for advanced statistical analysis of scientific data sets; and finally, the Digital Humanities Center, where I was able to do a field observation on October 18.
The Digital Humanities Center works to provide the technology and services to assist researchers and students of the humanities who are using digital sources or who are working on digital scholarship projects. I was able to spend the morning there with Alex Gil, the Digital Scholarship Coordinator at the Center, located in Columbia’s Butler Library. First, Alex gave me a tour of the Center, which has several PCs and Macs that have a variety of software programs for editing projects (such as Adobe Creative Suite and citation management software,) and different types of scanners (some better for text, some for images). This is just a basic overview of some of the facilities provided by the Center, but the full list of services can be found here on their website.
Alex also showed me the recently opened Studio at Butler. The Studio is a space designed to facilitate educational and digital scholarship projects. There are tables, whiteboards, and some tech (such as a projector) provided, but users are asked to bring their own devices as needed for workshops or events. Researchers from within and outside Columbia can use the Studio to have an event related to the purpose of digital scholarship. There is a host of events, such as a weekly tech brownbag lunch, which is a more informal discussion among the tech specialists within the library to come have lunch together and discuss any topic they choose within the realm of technology. There are also several workshops on different subjects, including an upcoming event on mobilizing collaborative learning with technology. The full calendar of events can be found here.
During my time at the Center I was able to see Alex work on a lot of different projects, and there are a couple in particular that I’d like to highlight. First, the launch of a website for a global digital humanities conference in Mexico City happening in May 2014 which he helped build. The focus of the conference is the advancement of digital humanities in academic and cultural institutions and the future of DH in these settings in a global context. To launch the site, Alex posted the link for the call for papers to Twitter, Facebook, and through email. On Twitter we were able to see how many people had retweeted the information, saved the announcement as a favorite, or replied to the original posting. Through this medium, we were able to see how the information was being shared and passed along by others in the digital humanities field, and how rapidly it made its way to different countries across the world. While launching the site, Alex emphasized the importance of utilizing the different methods of online communication such as Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress to be an active participant in discussions and to learn about upcoming conferences and new research in the field. These forums can be valuable tools for learning and sharing information both within the digital humanities community and reaching out to share research with the wider world.
Next, Alex told me about the Developing Librarian Project at Columbia. This is an ongoing project that began in 2012 and was designed to help train current history and humanities librarians in the skills needed to fully support digital research and scholarship. While it is a training program, it is also a digital scholarship project in its own right: the librarians are creating a digital history of the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. This sort of institutional support for continued professional development for librarians is quite valuable. As digital scholarship increases in scope and complexity, librarians will need to be constantly working to stay up to date with the changing technology. Programs like this, which help library staff train on the job rather than forcing them to find courses and workshops outside of work, have a host of benefits for both librarians and their users. When training is so accessible, librarians will be able to advance their skills and knowledge more and more. And, as the librarians gain this advanced tech knowledge, they are then better able to serve the faculty and student library users, so it is equally beneficial for their institutions.
As I was doing my observation, I couldn’t help but think about some of the ideas regarding archives and power that have long been discussed by scholars and theorists. In particular, ideas about archives as centers of power in which history is constructed, and especially those about archivists having power as they are the keepers of records which create this knowledge [1. A good overview of different ideas relating to this can be found in: Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook. (2002). “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.” Archival Science. 2. 1-19.] Places like the Digital Humanities Center at Columbia work to make the technology for digital scholarship more accessible to users, for instance offering assistance with personal digital archiving for users. The Center, and other digital humanities centers, seem like they could help make more people active participants in libraries and in record keeping, thereby distributing some power traditionally held in the archive to the wider world. The DH Center and the open access Academic Commons run by Columbia’s Center for Digital Research and Scholarship may help mitigate restrictions on knowledge, which was previously limited to those within small and select academic communities.
However, while centers like this are potentially a powerful tool for opening access to previously restricted knowledge, I think the effects would be limited, at least at first. Most of the materials made available online through Columbia’s repository or through projects by the DH center would be of a high academic level, the knowledge contained within would still be restricted to those with the training and education to understand that sort of content. So, the content is available but the knowledge within is not necessarily accessible by a general audience. However, if more institutions such as public libraries or local nonprofits were able to offer similar training programs or projects as the DH center that includes content on a variety of subjects and accessible to those from a variety of backgrounds, a more noticeable shift could occur. Digital humanities can help to provide the tools that can be used to increase access to knowledge, but it is not a solution to the problem of restricted knowledge in and of itself.
While my observation was a bit different than some, as I did not interact with library users, I was able to learn a great deal about a variety of projects in the digital humanities field. I’ll be going back another day to attend a workshop at the Studio at Butler and am hoping to learn more about utilizing digital humanities in education and scholarship. While the amount of tech that I need to learn before I can really get involved in this field feels somewhat intimidating, the variety of opportunities that the field affords left me feeling very excited to study them.