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.

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.

Between the island of Manhattan and Queens, there is a narrow island named Roosevelt Island in New York City’s East River. Roosevelt Island Visual Art Association (RIVAA)[1.  RIVAA. (2013). rivaa.com, About Me Part, website], a non-profit organization composed of an international diverse group of artists, dedicates to enhancing the quality of life in the community through art, community events and workshops in the unique island. Supported by private donations and artist contributions, RIVAA opened the first gallery on Roosevelt Island in 2002. RIVAA is not just a gallery. It works closely with the community. RIVAA supports the community in its efforts to enhance cultural development and collaborates in educational events to promote public involvement through the arts. I took two days to participate in the outdoor art for “Fall for the Arts” annual festivals and the daily works of RIVAA’s gallery.

Fall for the Arts festival is a creative art activity that the whole community can participate. In the main lawn of Roosevelt Island, all the artist of RIVAA will spend one day to paint or sculpture while the resident can join in the painting or give the opinion to the artist and the artist will teach the young and kids how to paint or mix colors. Those paintings and sculptures will be exhibited on the lawn for two months. This event shows the community gallery’s property of participation in public involvement and education for the community. The gallery is not only an institute of art collection and exhibition but also a bridge and communication medium between community and artist. This kind of responsibility gives the community gallery more works to do, such as musical performances, theatre, dance, book signings and poetry readings and various community gatherings.

Which means inside the gallery, things usually are not simple. The artists in RIVAA will volunteer to organize and do the daily works in the gallery by a swift worksheet. At the same time the organization has its own management team with backgrounds in business, finance or management to focus on the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the gallery. This kind of combination makes lots of misunderstanding between the managers and the artists. The artists are visual-oriented which means all they matter is whether this art product is looked beautiful. While the managers are usually been marketing directed and mostly care about the budget and social influence. In the book of The Alienated Librarian (Nauratil, Marcia J. 1989)[2. Nauratil, Marcia J. (1989). The Alienated Librarian. New York: Greenwood Press], it pointed out “libraries have traditionally been product-oriented. The materials, Programs, and information ……have been directed toward increasing public awareness of this value. In contrast, the market-oriented organization identifies the needs and desires of various market segments, develops products and services to appeal to selected segments, and then promote them.” This kind of difference between the manager and the artist makes they have some silent conflict inside the gallery. “The marketing orientation lies in its essential compatibility to the privatization and commoditization of information.” which makes the community gallery looks not exactly like its self-introduction. Nauratil also mentioned “quality of work-life movement has been toward participative management. Worker participation can range from slipping ideas into a suggestion box to codetermination- shared decision making between labor and management.” With no doubt the more participation can reduce divergences and enhance collaboration. But I think the first thing should be find out an agreed, unified principle and purpose to work on together. A work environment without burnout is probably an impossible goal. But a pleasant working conditions, reduced paperwork, time-out, variety, and clear organization goals can buffer job stress and help individuals to feel better about their works.

One interesting thing between the managers and artists is when artist has no clue of the name of his/her paint the manager usually will force to name it to label and record the paint. The fact is when the painter drew it s/he doesn’t consider too much meaning and just want the paint looks vivid (especially for some abstract paint). But with the label of name, when people watch the paint people get to connect the literature words and the deep meaning of the work combine with their own experience and apprehension. In the book of Archive Fever: Freudian Impression[3. Derrida, Jacques and Eric Prenowitz. (1995). “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” Diacritics 25(2):9-25, 53-63] Derrida asserts that archive cannot remain outside what it memorializes and this removes some of the objectivity with which records and archival documents are typically treated. A well-know advertisement of Dove aired this year also indicates the similar opinion with Derrida. In the video, several women describe themselves to a forensic sketch artist who cannot see his subjects. The women also are described by strangers they just met. The sketches are compared, with the stranger’s image invariably being both more flattering and more accurate.

 Dove video advertisement

As a part of the society, records managers are likely keenly aware of the socio-juridical systems that lead “truth” to the records they manage. But during the process of records in different medium and under different people the records itself have lots of change. As in the Dove advertisement, everyone see thing with various perspectives, when you familiar something it will be hard to objective to describe it as when you describe it you are analysis and assemble it with all your experience and your value standard in your mind. This kind of change can be positive also can be destructive. When records the historical information this kind of interpretation under a certain situation and people might change the truth of the history. This will absolutely be a disaster for the future. While the better thing is the RIVAA community gallery has no need to think about such significant problems.

The distinguished difference between the artists and managers is that the artists own their works while the managers own the power of those works. The fact is that tourists don’t come to New York City because of Bloomingdale’s, Fifth Avenue. The majority of them come because of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, the Guggenheim Museum, Broadway, and art galleries. Macy’s and Madison Avenue shops make money part of because of art. A place exists arts, the place has blooming business and flourish communities. The power of art and culture in building strong community has long been recognized. Michel Foucault was a French philosopher excavated the relationship between power and knowledge. In Foucault’s[4. Foucault, Michel. (1982). The Archaeology of Knowledge, Part 3 ] theories, materials and military are only one element of power. Power is not stable and controllable position but an energy-stream that through the whole society. One source of power is expressing the knowledge. Foucault didn’t see power as a form, but explain it as a way to using social institution to express a truth in order to infliction their purpose to the society. Which means the arts and the artists have no power but the managers and the institutions who and which owned them have the power. So non-profit or profit purpose of an art gallery should always be a question. Small gallery is a microcosm of the public information institution.

The North Jersey History and Genealogy Center, which happens to be a part of the Morristown Public Library in Morristown, New Jersey houses multitudinous records of people not just from Northern New Jersey but from all over the state as well. Many of the documents range in date from around the late 1800’s to the 1920’s, although there are a vast amount of records that go back even further than that. James Lewis, the head of the Genealogy Center says that they are lucky to have a humidity and temperature controlled vault (which uses halon gas) because very few public libraries have enough funding for such technology. Within the vault there are an assortment of documents, including many now-defunct New Jersey newspapers such as the Democratic Banner, Jerseyman, and Iron Era. They also have a digital lab, which is extremely rare for a New Jersey pubic library. However, these nuances only scratch the surface of what the NJHGC has to offer.

Many people have heard of Tammany Hall and/or Boss Tweed, especially if you have seen the movie Gangs of New York, in which the historical figure has a prominent role. At the time of this “corrupt pol’s” reign, political cartoonist Thomas Nast was skewering him in Harper’s Weekly. Nast’s other claim to fame was “inventing” the version of Santa Claus we have come to know today, with his big, bushy beard and rosy cheeks. Although Nast was not originally from Morristown, he lived there for quite some time and raised his children in the New Jersey Town. The Genealogy Center owns a copious amount of Nast’s original artwork, as well as a large, original painting by him of Horace Greeley, the newspaper magnate, whom he also was not fond of. Another notable artist that the Genealogy Center has collections of is A.B. Frost, who is famous for illustrating the Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit books by Joel Chandler Harris, although, as Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook would say, the Thomas Nast collection is clearly the “privileged” one. On the other hand, one wonders if the Nast records were consciously given precedence over the Frost ones, or if it simply comes down to what has been preserved from the beginning and what is available.

Some things are painstakingly documented, archived, and preserved. Other things are seen as not important enough to even remember. Some things haunt us forever and stay with us, which, according to Jacques Derrida, is an archive in itself. Despite the fact that the Genealogy Center is bright and welcoming, there is a dark crevice lying within its vaults.

In 1833, there was a French immigrant named Antoine Leblanc, who worked on a family farm in Morristown for only a few weeks after having just arrived in the country. Feeling that he was unappreciated and underpaid (as in not at all), he decided to kill the couple and their servant. After he was caught for his crimes he was hanged and skinned. Why did they skin him? Well obviously to make wallets, lampshades, and book covers. These corpulent keepsakes are said to still exist and one of them is housed at the NJHGC where Weird New Jersey came and did a story about it. The Genealogy Center also has Leblanc’s death mask, which arguably is not as intriguing as the wallet, yet still quite eerie. Every year a retired judge does a presentation on the story.

Since we are talking about archives, it would be unfair to leave Jacques Derrida out of the equation. In Archival Fever: A Freudian Impression, he says that the archive, “keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion, that is to say in making the law […] or in making people respect the law.” Archives and the power they hold have long been a scholarly issue and the reason one brings it up here is because the Antoine Leblanc wallet and death mask easily tie into this debate. These artifacts are a haunting reminder of an atrocious crime, as well as the atrocious way the criminal was dealt with. Thus, we are not allowed to forget the barbarity of man towards man and in turn, are subjected to an adverse view of mankind. This is a grim way of viewing archives individually or Derrida’s overall Archive as a whole and only works under certain conditions, as in when governments do not allow the people access to them. What we should take away from the Leblanc artifacts is something much less sinister; archives do not have instructions as far as what can and cannot be put into them.

Leblanc’s death mask reminds one of the skull of Hamlet’s poor Yorick. Coincidentally, the Genealogy Center is home to the Morristown Shakespeare Club minutes, which date back to 1878. The club is the second oldest in the United States and was founded by all women, which was very rare for the time. After each one of their meetings, the minutes are delivered to the archive, which deposits them in boxes and is currently in the process of digitizing them. In spite of this, the North Jersey History and Genealogy Center is a place where the printed page still takes precedence over the computer screen, which is quite refreshing.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print

Schwartz, Joan M., Terry Cook. “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.” Archival Science 2 (2002) 1-19. Print.