Keeping Time

The Real Conflict: Sharing or Not Sharing Knowledge

2012-01-12T17:35:00.000-08:00

In “The Shock of the Old” (Libray Journal), Barbara Fister discusses the Education Advisory Board’s report Redefining the Academic Library: Managing the Migration to Digital Library Services. She says that this report does not predict the future but rather describes the present. And the present isn’t really about the shift from print to digital—it’s about sharing knowledge:

In the end, unless we really screw this up, the future will more like the past than the present. Libraries were built on the principle that the advancement of knowledge depends on a disinterested search for meaning, not profits, and that sharing is essential for that search. Libraries have always been a demonstration of the wealth of networks. Now that the networked world has caught up, libraries could serve as a model for sharing knowledge in a way that advances us all.

For the Record

2012-01-03T22:16:00.000-08:00

I’m tweeting now. Perhaps this will last longer than my Facebook phase.

In the Coming Year ...

2011-12-29T09:18:00.000-08:00

Remember to make time for time. And books.

Epicentral, Emblematic, and Exciting

2011-12-20T14:36:00.000-08:00

From “The 25 Most Beautiful College Libraries in the World” (Flavorpill):

The college library, whether ornate or modern, digital or dusty, is in many ways the epicenter of the college experience — at least for some students. It is at once a shining emblem of vast, acquirable knowledge, a place for deep discussions and meetings of the mind, and of course, a big building full of books, which, as far as we’re concerned, is exciting enough. Colleges and universities are understandably quite proud of their libraries, which can be a selling point for prospective students and donating alumni alike, and they often become the most well-designed and beautifully adorned buildings on campus. To that end, and perhaps to inspire your studies a bit, we’ve collected a few of the most beautiful college and university libraries in the world, from Portugal to France to Boston.

Included are two libraries I've spent some time in, the Bodleian and Suzzallo libraries (the latter of which is pictured above).

Entrepreneurial Library Space

2011-12-16T16:16:00.000-08:00

Over at the Ubiquitous Librarian, Brian Matthews considers an “entrepreneurial model” for study space. In the comments section, I highlight a collaborative work space that I find intriguing. The challenge is to incorporate ideas from non-library spaces into the unique or “uncommon” learning spaces that libraries provide.

Don’t Forget the Books

2011-12-07T21:30:00.000-08:00

From “We're Still in Love With Books” (The Chronicle):

Contrary to many futuristic projections—even from bibliophiles who, as a group, enjoy melancholy reveries—the recent technological revolution has only deepened the affection that many scholars have for books and libraries, and highlighted the need for the preservation, study, and cherishing of both.

From “UNBSJ Students Protest for Study Space” (CBC):

Students at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John held a protest at the campus Tuesday about a lack of quiet study space … the new $25 million Hans W. Klohn Commons is more like a computer lab and café than a library, with students clustered around tables chatting and working in groups. It also comes up short on basics, such as desk space, and even books.

Library Shenanigans

2011-12-03T08:29:00.000-08:00

A colleague sent me an article about singing in the library, and it reminded me of an earlier post here. It also reminded me of this:

For more about the prank collective Improv Everywhere that staged this, see this TED talk:

The Library as a Site of Inspiration

2011-12-01T22:13:00.000-08:00

Perhaps because of my fondness for Borges, I like thinking of the library as a site of inspiration. Today, a professor’s students installed site-specific sculptures in our library. Here is one called “Through the Looking Glass”:

Another Step Toward Universal Search: Google’s Cultural Institute

2011-11-30T20:41:00.000-08:00

From “Quietly, Google Puts History Online” (The Times):

The digitization of the [Dead Sea Scrolls] was done by Google under a new initiative aimed at demonstrating that the Internet giant’s understanding of culture extends beyond the corporate kind. The Google Cultural Institute plans to make artifacts like the scrolls — from museums, archives, universities and other collections around the world — accessible to any Internet user.

See how this initiative fits within Google’s vision of search: “The Evolution of Search” (YouTube).

Next, they need to figure out how to introduce humor into the discovery process. See “Why Our Brains Make Us Laugh” (The Boston Globe):

our brains make sense of our daily lives via a never ending series of assumptions, based on sparse, incomplete information. All these best guesses simplify our world, give us critical insights into the minds of others, and streamline our decisions. But mistakes are inevitable, and even a small faulty assumption can open the door to bigger and costlier mistakes. …

Mirth is agnostic of the content, because it’s just the reward for the discovery of a false assumption.

The Bookless Vision

2011-11-28T22:24:00.000-08:00

From “The Myth of the Bookless Library” (Inside Higher Ed):

Every now and then, someone who doesn’t do research and hasn’t been following issues relating to intellectual property, digital rights management, or academic publishing (let alone scholar's preferences) argues that we need to do something radical to get over our fetish for outdated technology, suggesting that we burn books or ban them. These visionaries assume that everything that matters is digital and free, so why bother keeping paper copies? …

In fact, going bookless is not particularly popular. Books are strongly and positively identified with libraries, and libraries that ditch them get into trouble with the communities they serve, even when they have good reasons for reducing the number of books sitting on shelves. But there's no denying that academic libraries now spend far more of their budgets renting temporary access to knowledge controlled by a few big corporations than they do on buying and cataloging paper things. …

No matter how innovative the bookless library sounds, this isn't a situation we planned. If the academic library of the future is bookless, it won’t be because of vision. It will be because of the lack of it.

Uniquely Held Materials in Public Libraries

2011-11-22T20:59:00.000-08:00

From “The Top 25 US Public Libraries’ Collective Collection, as Represented in WorldCat” (OCLC), prepared for a confernce on the National Digital Public Library:

[a] large proportion of materials (nearly 90 percent) ... are held by five or fewer of the 25 institutions. In contrast, less than 1 percent of the publications are held by all twenty-five institutions, and only 4 percent are held by more than ten. These results suggest that the individual institutional collections that make up the collective collection are, at least at the publication level, characterized by a considerable degree of uniqueness vis-à-vis their peer collections. In other words, each institutional collection supplies a significant contribution to the scope and depth of the overall collective collection. In contrast, the core set of materials that are held by all, or at least most, of the institutions is comparatively small.

What Can Be Learned from Five Million Books

2011-11-21T07:12:00.000-08:00

Here is a entertaining example of what I wrote about in my last post:

The Archive: At the Beginning of the Creative Process

2011-11-19T08:08:00.000-08:00

Tony Schwartz, over at the HBR Blog Network, outlines the stages of creative thinking. At the beginning of the process is saturation:

Once the problem or creative challenge has been defined, the next stage of creativity is a left hemisphere activity that paradoxically requires absorbing one's self in what's already known. Any creative breakthrough inevitably rests on the shoulders of all that came before it.

And inspiration, on which creativity depends (see “Why Inspiration Matters,” also available at the HBR Blog Network), depends on the availability of and access to an archive of knowledge.

I recently published an essay in which I introduced the Archival Cycle. This model can be used to represent the past, present, and future situation of librarian and arhcives within the iterative lifecyle of information—the process of creation, distribution, reception, storage, and preservation that supports the discovery, creatoin, and sharing of knowledgge. We recently created a sign for our library that represents this cycle of use:

But this cycle of use depends on the Archival Cycle, which reperesents the infrastructure that faciliatates inspiration and innovation.

Institutional Context

2011-11-12T07:49:00.000-08:00

Over at hangingtogether.org, there is a summary of a talk given by Sarah Pritchard at the last RMBS conference. Her talk was about the importance of aligning an academic library with its parent institution’s mission. (Not the “window dressing” bits but the core parts about student learning and faculty research.)

ACRL’s new Standards for Libraries in Higher Education do a nice job of helping libraries strategically plan within their institutional contexts and demonstrate their contributions to institutional effectiveness.

For a good summary of the challenges facing higher education in general, see Anthony Grafton’s “Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?” (The New York Review of Books), Here is a bit from his discussion of Academically Adrift:

those majoring in liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA. And at a time when libraries and classrooms across the country are being reconfigured to promote trendy forms of collaborative learning, students who spent the most time studying on their own outperformed those who worked mostly with others.

What Our Libraries Reveal

2011-11-08T21:29:00.000-08:00

I recenlty published an essay, “Defending My Library” (The Curator), in which I presented my apologia for bothering to keep a personal library (and pay for the expense of moving it).

In this week’s New Yorker (“Shelf Life: Packing up My Father-in-Law’s Library”), James Wood considers the value of another’s personal library. While he acknowledges that “in any private library the totality of books is meaningful,” he wonders if “a private library [isn’t] simply a universal legacy pretending to be an individual one”:

The books somehow made [my father-in-law] smaller, not larger, as if they were whispering, “What a little thing a single human life is, with all its busy, ephemeral, pointless projects.” All ruins say this, yet we strangely persist in pretending that books are not ruins, not broken columns.

Perhaps our abandoned libraries are not merely ruins because they continue to hold the promise of speaking, if no longer to us then for and beyond us.

Books on the Side?

2011-10-21T08:54:00.000-07:00

The author of The Atlas of New Librarianship asks, are books (or collections) at the center?:

Expeditions: Books on the Side from R. David Lankes on Vimeo.

According to a Project Information Literacy study, it would seem that books are on the side. From “Booting Down” (Inside Higher Ed):

a University of Washington study, “Balancing Act: How College Students Manage Technology While in the Library during Crunch Time” … reveals that students are taking to the library as a place of refuge—and their laptops and cell phones aren’t necessarily the pesky distractions some assume them to be … students are using the library less for its traditional resources—books, journals, etc.—and more as a place to get away from the hectic world around them.

While most of us would agree that library collections are for something and that use is a central function of a library, can we really say that collections are not—from an investment and infrastructural point of view, from the perspective of the library as a work of and for time—at the center of libraries?

I’ve published a defense of my library collection here (The Curator).

A Representation of 13.7 Billion Years

2011-10-19T18:23:00.000-07:00

A timeline of the universe, available from NASA:

Where Is the Electric Eraser?

2011-10-17T17:01:00.000-07:00

Check out “Checking Out” (The Times): “On this page are images of a few items that I have pulled from the trash cans of various libraries … their passing marks an important shift in the role and functions of the library.”

The Symbolic Capital of the Library

2011-10-11T21:41:00.000-07:00

Related to a point made in my last post and to a post from earlier this year, a student protesting the removel of books from the University of Denver Penrose Library notes that losing library books was "just a small symbol of a broader cultural trend. The scribbles and sounds we interpret as 'library' would have begun to lose all meaning" (see "College students rally to save what they see as a 'real' library").

Plenty on Place

2011-10-06T18:44:00.000-07:00

From “New Forms of Reading and Publishing Take Center Stage at Ithaka Conference” (The Chronicle):

Librarians advised attendees to pay close attention to how undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members really use library resources, beginning with physical study space. Use that information "to realign the library to be a more obvious partner" in research and learning, said Susan Gibbons, now the university librarian at Yale University.

The most recent issue of Library Trends is titled “Library Design: From Past to Present.” From the introduction:

The era of the hybrid library has arrived. The marriage of the traditional library to the “library without walls” is progressing happily, it seems ... Throughout history, library buildings have adapted to society’s beliefs, precepts, and aspirations. This adaptability has also been evident in the digital age.

From the first article, “The Emergence and Challenge of the Modern Library Building: Ideal Types, Model Libraries, and Guidelines, from the Enlightenment to the Experience Economy,” through the last, “The Dark Side of Library Architecture: The Persistence of Dysfunctional Designs” (don’t miss the unfortunate sightline on page 246), this is great collection on the topic.

Finally (for now), from a fascinating study in the the latest issue of College & Reserach Libraries, “Serving Higher Education’s Highest Goals: Assessment of the Academic Library as Place”:

This empirical study affirmed our hypothesis that spaces deemed as “sacred” or “sanctified” produce affective benefits for people that extend beyond attitudes and into the realm of behavior (projected library use). Circulation statistics do not measure these benefits; students may not actually use the books on the shelves, but they “sanctify” the books—being around the books makes them feel more scholarly and connected to the institution’s educational mission. ... While students clearly value computers in libraries, paradoxically they do not like tech-heavy–looking spaces; students want new technologies presented in traditional academic surroundings.

How to Make a Book (circa 1947)

2011-10-05T12:45:00.000-07:00

From the Internet Archive:

Time Exists and Other Insights about Time

2011-09-22T06:57:00.000-07:00

Via the Long Now Blog, five of the “Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time” (Discover Magazine):

“Time exists … Time organizes the universe into an ordered series of moments.”
“The past and future are equally real … every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment.”
“Everyone experiences time differently.”
“You live in the past.”
“Your memory isn’t as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future.”

In addition, it seems “we’re all a little ‘millennial’ now.”

Libraries and Limits

2011-09-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

From the “Other Socrates” (Barnes & Noble Review), which marks the centennial of the Loeb Classical Library:

Here, then, is 1,400 years of human culture, all the texts that survive from one of the greatest civilizations human beings have ever built -- and it can all fit in a bookcase or two. To capture all the fugitive texts of the ancient world, some of which survived the Dark Ages in just a single moldering copy in some monastic library, and turn them into affordable, clear, sturdy, accurate books, is one of the greatest accomplishments of modern scholarship …

Pursuing the figure of Socrates through the Loeb Classical Library leads, then, to troubling conclusions … the three portraits are a reminder that we have no direct access to the real Socrates, whoever he was. We have only interpretations and texts, which both reveal and conceal -- just as ancient Athens has exercised such enormous sway on the imagination of the world based solely on the texts and images it left behind. Even so, the Loebs' promise of completeness is spurious -- after all, the Library can only give us what survives from 2,500 years ago, which is a tiny fraction of what the Greeks and Romans wrote. (We have eleven plays by Aristophanes, but we know he wrote forty.) The image of the Loebs on the bookshelf is an emblem of total knowledge, yet the totality is an illusion …

But the New York Public Library appears to have a complete record of the plan.

The Importance of Digital Humanities

2011-09-19T20:55:00.000-07:00

From “Big-Tent Digital Humanities: a View From the Edge, Part 2” (The Chronicle):

Digital humanities cultivates scholarly collaboration as well as individual exploration, technological innovation alongside methodological rigor. It redefines the nature of academic careers while dealing with longstanding disciplinary conversations. And it engages in complex, theoretical heavy lifting while building projects that are often based on the Internet, available to the public, and indisputably useful. …

Like the founders and builders of museums, libraries, concert halls, and critical editions in the last century, digital humanists are creating the new infrastructure of our history and culture and changing the nature of education and scholarship.

For a framework and rationale for integrating digital humanities and archives, see Matthew Kirschenbaum’s “Digital Humanities Archive Fever.”

All-Too-Common Commons

2011-09-15T17:36:00.000-07:00

From “Just don’t call it a Commons” (The Ubiquitous Librarian):

we’re not building a commons. The Library is a library; it’s not a commons. A commons is what they have over in the student resources building. The library is something beyond that. It has value-added services. Anyone on campus can build a commons, there is no real distinction there programmatically—but we’re the University Library. No one else can claim that and so through this process we are shaping and expanding what exactly the University Library is and should be. ...

Beyond services and spaces, we need to offer experiences not found elsewhere on campus. … We don’t want to be just another computer lab on campus. We don’t just want to be another place to study, but rather, a place that enhances the educational process like nowhere else.

Image: The dinning commons visible from my office in the library.

Trends in Academic Libraries

2011-09-02T07:57:00.000-07:00

Highlights from ALA’s Trends in Academic Libraries, 1998-2008 (July 2011):

Circulation of collections declined 20.9% (“The decrease in reported circulation figures must be considered in relation to the significant growth in digital and electronic collections, specifically E‐Books, serial subscriptions in electronic format, and electronic reference sources and aggregation services” [14].)
Interlibrary loans grew, to other libraries 54% and from other libraries 62.9%
Collection grow: books, serial backfiles, and other paper materials, 20.2%; ebooks, 898.3% (2002-2008); microform units, 9.2%; serial subscriptions, 244.6%; audiovisual materials, 19.6%; electronic reference sources and aggregation services, 92.6%
Total expenditures grew 48.5%
Staffing overall decreased 1.6%: but librarians increased 10.1% and other professional staff increased 57.5%; other paid staff decreased 5.8% and student assistants decreased 11.9%

From the conclusion (46):

The analysis for the years 1998‐2008 found that there are more academic libraries with more buildings serving more students with a wider variety of content in new formats. …

The impact of technology and maturation of the Internet as the conduit for information delivery has not reduced the need for library space but, in many respects, has increased that need. The data indicate greater investments in collections and services. Even with increased virtual reference and information services, up 52.4 percent from 1998, use of academic libraries rose during the 1998‐2008 period.

Resource sharing continues to augment academic library collections, increasing 54 percent in 2008 from 1998. …

Expenditures for information resources represented a majority (more than 50 percent) of overall expenditures for degree‐granting levels 4‐years and above. …

Information and Ideas

2011-09-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

According to a USC study, the digital age began in 2002. In that year digital materials surpassed analog materials. Now, almost all of our recorded knowledge is in digital form. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to discover or use. See, e.g., “What Students Don’t Know” (Inside Higher Ed).

Moreover, information does not necessarily generate ideas. From “The Elusive Big Idea” (The Times):

In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us. ...

But if information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them. We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.

(The image above is a Google Doodle from last week that honored the birthday of Jorge Luis Borges, whose writing is full of information, ideas, and imagination.)

The Corkboard at the Laundromat

2011-08-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

From “When Data Disappears” (The Times):

With data, intervention needs to happen earlier, ideally at an object’s creation. And tough decisions need to be made, early on, regarding what needs to be saved. We must replace digital preservation with digital curation … [this] allows us to see preservation as active and continuing: managing change to data rather than trying to prevent it, while viewing data as a living resource for the future rather than a relic of the past.

When Weeding Goes Wrong

2011-07-26T08:18:00.000-07:00

From “On Mistakenly Shredding a Prized Collection” (The Chronicle):

An exception to today's plentiful and widely duplicated print resources is the cache of special collections that many college libraries protect, and that the best teaching libraries use to benefit student learning. … Special collections may become the defining aspects of college libraries, especially as other library resources are delivered electronically and are increasingly the same from one library to the next.

Places for the Process

2011-07-20T12:59:00.000-07:00

From “Library Spaces for the Scholarship Process” (EDUCAUSE Review), an interview with UCLA University Librarian Gary Strong:

To me, use of the new spaces is not just about the process of discovery. How can these spaces also be used in the process of sharing scholarship? Our traditional way in libraries has been to buy the finished scholarship, put it on the shelf, and serve it up. I want libraries to be much more involved in the sharing, episodically or snapshot‑wise, of the scholarship that is being created as groups get together in these new library spaces.

Catching Up

2011-07-19T12:53:00.000-07:00

I’ve been busy transitioning into a new position, so here is a backlog of posts. The main branch of the New York Public Library was dedicated 100 years ago. An article in The Atlantic, “What Big Media Can Learn From the New York Public Library,” lauds an “old and august” institution that is flourishing in the digital age:

Everywhere you look within the New York Public Library, it's clear that the institution has realized that its mission has changed. It's no longer only a place where people take out books and scholars dig through archives. The library has become a social network with physical and digital nodes.

An analysis of 120 years of census data on librarians is available over at the OUPblog. From “Librarians in the U.S. from 1880-2009”:

Starting from a very small beginning, librarians grew into a large profession after in the mid-20th Century. Like other professions related to the media: books, newspapers, magazines, recorded music and movies, the internet seems to be having an effect on the field, as it has faced a significant decline since 1990. That decline seems to have slowed substantially since 2000, as librarians adjust to and find new roles in the internet age and the extensive increase in information that it has brought about.

The Chronicle reports on how much of the web is archived, an article in the Times focuses on distant reading, and there is a defense of paper books at the Independent.

Finally, there is an article in Time about bookless libraries. From “Is a Bookless Library Still a Library?”:

From a design perspective, some architects also lament the inevitable trend toward booklessness. Steven Holl, architect of Queens Library's new branch, in New York City, says books still provide character and are a nice counterpoint to technology. "Acknowledging the digital and its speed and putting it in relation to the history and physical presence of the books makes it an exciting space," Holl says. "A book represents knowledge, and striking a balance in a library is a good thing."

The Internet Archive’s Book Bank

2011-06-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

From “Why Preserve Books? The New Physical Archive of the Internet Archive” (Internet Archive Blogs):

After the Internet Archive digitizes a book from a library in order to provide free public access to people world-wide, these books go back on the shelves of the library. We noticed an increasing number of books from these libraries moving books to “off site repositories” (1 2 3 4) to make space in central buildings for more meeting spaces and work spaces. These repositories have filled quickly and sometimes prompt the de-accessioning of books. ...

As the Internet Archive has digitized collections and placed them on our computer disks, we have found that the digital versions have more and more in common with physical versions. The computer hard disks, while holding digital data, are still physical objects. As such we archive them as they retire after their 3-5 year lifetime. Similarly, we also archive microfilm, which was a previous generation’s access format. So hard drives are just another physical format that stores information. This connection showed us that physical archiving is still an important function in a digital era. ...

Internet Archive is building a physical archive for the long term preservation of one copy of every book, record, and movie we are able to attract or acquire. Because we expect day-to-day access to these materials to occur through digital means, the our physical archive is designed for long-term preservation of materials with only occasional, collection-scale retrieval. Because of this, we can create optimized environments for physical preservation and organizational structures that facilitate appropriate access. A seed bank might be conceptually closest to what we have in mind: storing important objects in safe ways to be used for redundancy, authority, and in case of catastrophe.

The Gift of Time to Think Beyond

2011-06-15T08:01:00.000-07:00

From “Reading Revolutions: Online Digital Text and Implications for Reading in Academe” (First Monday):

Today we have immediate access to more recorded information than ever before in history. However, assuming that we desire knowledge to be housed in the human brain as well as inside technological gadgets and data store clouds, it must always be remembered that accessing information and the acquisition of knowledge are two different phenomena. Information access does not equal knowledge gained. Thanks to our information technology, the former is becoming relatively easy, while the latter continues to be difficult. It continues to take time. The power of reading, whether of print or online text, continues to lie in this power of time — time to digest words, time to read between the lines, time to reflect on ideas, and time to think beyond one’s self, one’s place, and one’s time in the pursuit of knowledge.

E-Books and Some Limits of Digital Materiality

2011-06-06T16:56:00.000-07:00

From “5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet” (Wired), “five things about e-books that might give you pause about saying good riddance to the printed page”:

An unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it.
You can’t keep your books all in one place.
Notes in the margins help you think.
E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren’t priced that way.
E-books can’t be used for interior design.

Marginal Marginalia

2011-06-01T08:24:00.000-07:00

Below, pulled from the general collection last week, is one of Myron Eells’s reactions within a copy of J. P. MacLean’s A Manual of the Antiquity of Man (Boston: Universalist Publishing House, 1877). (There are more substantial interactions with the text elsewhere.)

“The Sagacity to Find Serendipity”

2011-05-26T13:12:00.000-07:00

From “Serendipity in the Archive” (The Chronicle):

In the humanities, a prime site for serendipitous discovery is an archive. This semester, I have introduced my graduate students in English to the concept of serendipity in archival research. ...

My students now understand that most rare archival material, and materials in private collections, will never be scanned and digitized. And even if much of this material is digitized, its virtual presence is no substitute for the tactile and sensory experience of being in an archive.

Most important, however, the students got a taste of the thrill of discovery that one can experience only in an archive, where good sleuthing and the expert guidance of a willing archivist fosters serendipity. Archival researchers, those whom Richard Altick named "scholar adventurers," still labor in the rarified spaces where only pencils and bare laptops—their carrying bags shuttered in lockers outside—are allowed. Here, acid-free boxes suddenly emerge from closed stacks at the flourish of a call sheet, and first editions recline on velvet book cradles.

On Site but Out of Sight

2011-05-19T17:30:00.000-07:00

Inside Higher Ed has an article, “A Hole Lot of Books,” about the new Joe and Rika Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago. Although the new facility has no bookshelves, the university librarian stresses the importance of having books onsite:

Reality shows that you cannot do your research well having materials off-site ... The cost of what you would give up in terms of research, studying, and teaching outweighs the cost of the building.

And the university “thoroughly considered” which works would be out of sight:

They include serial works that have already been digitized, special collections that were not able to be browsed in the first place, and large collections of state documents. Plus, there will still be more than 4 million books in the Regenstein library to be browsed in stacks ... the combination of extensive browsable stacks with high-density, on-site storage as an ideal solution.

In a post at the Wired Underwire blog, “Robots Retrieve Books in University of Chicago’s New, Futuristic Library,” the university librarian says that “research at the university has shown that the more people look to digital resources, the more they consult physical materials as well.”

Here is how the library’s storage and retrieval system works:

Place Matters

2011-05-12T08:58:00.000-07:00

An article in The Chronicle, “Learning Today: the Lasting Value of Place,” identifies the following benefits of place-based education:

Peer-learning environments (including those outside the classroom)
Exposure to diversity
Research opportunities (“From laboratories to historical archives, place-based higher-education environments feature significant research infrastructures that give students opportunities to apply and enrich their classroom learning.”)
Campus and community engagement
Chance encounters (“that come with membership in a diverse intellectual community”)

For an interesting example of place-based education, see “Long Reads” (Inside Higher Ed): “To get students more engaged in texts, some professors hold marathon sessions where students read the books out loud.”

And of course the digital dimension shouldn’t be forgotten. See, for example, “The Humanities, Done Digitally”: “Scholarly work across the humanities, as in all academic fields, is increasingly being done digitally.”

The Revelatory Power of Books

2011-04-28T20:22:00.000-07:00

At the Northwest Archivists annual meeting last week, I gave a presentation called “The Apocalypse of the Book.” Here is the description submitted to the program committee:

We have all heard about the end of the book. As books migrate en masse into digital repositories or offsite depositories, it is important to remember that new revelations—apocalypses—can be found in old books, which are both records and artifacts. With a focus on teaching and research, this presentation will highlight some of the ends for which archival books can be used.

Here are the slides that accompanied the talk:

At the other Penrose Library (the one I work at is named after a younger cousin), there is “No Room for Books.” According to Inside Higher Ed, the University of Denver plans “to permanently move four-fifths of the Penrose Library’s holdings to an off-campus storage facility.” Rather than housing “legacy collections” on site, the library will maintain a “teaching collection.”

In the article’s comments section, one student writes:

The University of Denver's library has some incredibly beautiful, incredibly old, incredibly useful books--regardless of whether they've been checked out or not. The ambiance of a library is supposed to be stacks and stacks of books that allow students to get lost in subjects outside of their own area of study. No one will be drawn to the library without books. We will study elsewhere. We already have places to "hang out". Leave our books in peace.

About the So-Called Information Age

2011-04-18T19:53:00.000-07:00

Robert Darnton’s “5 Myths About the ‘Information Age’” (The Chronicle):

"The book is dead."
"We have entered the information age."
"All information is now available online."
"Libraries are obsolete." [Another myth is challenged here: “Libraries never were warehouses of books.”]
"The future is digital."

The Rest of the Records

2011-04-15T12:49:00.000-07:00

Kenneth Price of the Walt Whitman Archive talks about his discovery of Whitman documents in the national archives:

These types of archival discoveries can be both exciting and enlightening. A few years ago I found a cache of business correspondence in Princeton from the writer Charles Williams, which revealed much about his publishing and literary careers. (I presented a paper and published a chapter on the material.)

Between the Past and the Apocalypse

2011-04-06T07:46:00.000-07:00

From “Behind the Wizard’s Wand: Making the Harry Potter Films” (The Times), a review of “Harry Potter: The Exhibition” (which I saw last November in Seattle):

The Harry Potter films and books are suffused with a reverence for the past. They almost seem to be about the past. And in the exhibition, we feel its weight. ...

Ms. Rowling looks forward and backward simultaneously. The heroic figures are the hybrids, the orphaned, the outcast, the eccentrics, the true inheritors of a great and long tradition. The villains are the pure-blooded absolutists who threaten to overturn it all.

This places the Potter tales right at the center of the 20th-century fantasy tradition that grew out of the work of two British writers around World War II: [C. S.] Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. It also gives the series an almost touching nostalgia for a world about to be destroyed.

Two Questions

2011-04-05T16:52:00.000-07:00

First (again): What is a library? See Barbara Fister’s “What Is a Library? An Attempt at Common Sense” (Library Journal).

Second: What has Blondie to do with Gutenberg? See this:

Maintaining the Many Roles of Academic Libraries

2011-04-04T16:50:00.000-07:00

The Chronicle reports on a new Ithaka survey, “Ithaka S+R Library Survey 2010: Insights from U.S. Library Directors,” which was previewed at last week’s ACRL conference.

Key findings of the report include:

“Library directors at all types of institutions see supporting teaching and learning as one of their primary missions ...”
“Library directors believe that it is strategically important that their libraries be seen by users as the principal starting point in the discovery process ...”
“The library’s role as a buyer of materials remains of primary importance ...”

The archive role remains important, too (see pages 12-15).

I was on a panel at ACRL that focused on primary source literacy and included a discussion of using an archives as a learning laboratory. Slides from my part of the presentation are below.

Visualization of Virtual Libraries

2011-03-28T07:40:00.000-07:00

In “Plotting a Library,” The Chronicle looks at Places & Spaces: Mapping Science: “a multidisciplinary physical and online art project, running since 2005, that seeks to create a complete picture of ‘human activity and scientific progress on a global scale.’” This year’s theme is the digital library.

Library Time

2011-03-25T07:43:00.000-07:00

So a clock in our library recently went missing. We may have found an explanation:

Speaking of our library, the current issue of our alumni magazine includes a photo feature called “24 Hours at the Penrose Library.” (Also in this issue is a nice piece by book artist Mare Blocker, who talks about how going to a special collections library “changed the pathway” of her life.)

Pileup and Preservation

2011-03-24T07:42:00.000-07:00

An op-ed piece in The New York Times, “The Digital Pileup,” recommends a digital conservation effort. An article in D-Lib Magazine, “Discovering the Information Needs of Humanists When Planning an Institutional Repository,” highlights solutions that an institutional repository can offer.

Waiting for Google

2011-03-23T13:00:00.000-07:00

The latest iteration of the Google Books Settlement has been rejected. See the ruling and possible results.

Update: HathiTrust responds.

New Library Facilities

2011-03-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

From “Learning Terrace To Embed Library throughout Drexel Campus” (American Libraries):

[The Library Learning Terrace] won’t have any books or computers, but it will provide wireless internet access and electrical outlets for laptops and mobile devices; flexible seating options to allow up to 75 students to work individually or collaboratively; and a space for tutors, faculty consultations, and study groups. It will also include an outdoor space for use in good weather.

See also “From Modernist to Modern,” (Inside Higher Ed):

At one well-attended presentation [at the Society for College and University Planning's North Atlantic regional meeting], officials from Lafayette College and the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth discussed their efforts to transform massive (and in many ways outdated) Modernist libraries at the heart of their campuses into modern, technologically advanced, sustainable centers for learning.

The Archival Turn

2011-03-14T08:11:00.000-07:00

Recent scholarly interest in archives—“not only as sites for research or as a theoretical concept, but also as fascinating objects of study themselves”—is part of a larger movement within the humanities. See “From the Desk of Roland Barthes” (West 86th):

The last decade or so has seen what we might call a “technical turn” in the humanities. Inspired largely by science studies, humanists have started to think seriously about the technics of knowledge, its material conditions, infrastructures, and mediations. ...

These days ... stuff is all over the place. ...

Knowledge emerges out of arrangements and rearrangements of paper. Formats and protocols matter. Matter matters.

The Compulsory Lie of Clock Time

2011-03-12T21:38:00.000-08:00

Ready to save some time? See “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” (The New York Times).

As for keeping time, catch a glimpse of what goes on in the French National Library's Tower of the Times in “A Memory of Webs Past” (IEEE Spectrum).

Brains in Libraries

2011-03-11T07:56:00.000-08:00

John Medina, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine and director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University, was on our campus this week speaking to a number of groups about brain science and education. The challenge, he says, is that we know very little about how the brain works. What we do know is that the brain is suited for sovling problems in an outdoor setting while in motion: “If you want to design a setting that is the exact opposite of how the brain is designed to work,” he said, “you’d design a classroom.”

A number of Medina’s brain rules are releveant for thinking about the library as place. Consider rule number 4: “We don’t pay attention to boring things”: “What we pay attention to is profoundly influenced by memory. Our previous experience predicts where we should pay attention. Culture matters too. ...”

Or consider rule number 9: “Stimulate more of the senses”: “Those in multisensory environments always do better than those in unisensory environments.”

Or rule number 12: “We are powerful and natural explorers”: “The desire to explore never leaves us despite the classrooms and cubicles we are stuffed into.”

New Standards for Academic Libraries

2011-03-10T10:27:00.000-08:00

An ACRL Task Force is updating the 2004 Standards for Libraries in Higher Education. A draft is available for review and feedback.

Missing from the nine principles—Institutional Effectiveness, Professional Values, Educational Role, Discovery, Collections, Space, Management/Administration, Personnel, External Relations (it is not clear if there is a logical order here)—is preservation. Here is the feedback I posted:

Preservation is a core role and contribution of libraries. Academic libraries in particular do a number of things to ensure long-term access to the scholarly and cultural record. Performance indicators could include (1) collecting and curating local materials in a variety of formats to advance the teaching, research, and administrative needs of an institution and (2) partnering with others (e.g., library consortia) to ensure long-term access to widely replicated content. Outcomes could include (1) unique educational and research opportunities for students and faculty and (2) support of administrative operations and projects.

Checkout Limits

2011-03-09T17:03:00.000-08:00

How many times can you check out a book?

Time for History

2011-03-03T21:44:00.000-08:00

If you have some time, explore Jeremy Norman’s From Cave Paintings to the Internet: Chronological and Thematic Studies on the History of Information and Media.

Book Futures and Fantasies

2011-03-01T08:33:00.000-08:00

From A&L Daily (26 Feb 2011):

Sure, the future of publishing looks grim. But not entirely. New literary objects are taking root in the digital world... more [Paul Duguid in The Times Literary Supplement] ... more [Virginia Hefferman in The New York Times Magazine].

In the first of these articles, Duguid reviews John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture (about trade publishing), Irving Louis Horowitz's Publishing as a Vocation (about scholarly publishing), and Jacques Bonnet’s The Phantoms on the Bookshelves (about a “bibliomaniac”). Duguid concludes:

Though the form may change, the book chain itself is likely to continue to endure. For ultimately, it is a communication chain, and it is hard to believe our garrulous species will cease trying to communicate. We cannot communicate without a medium, and as new media develop, new authors will push at their edges to experiment in the sort of unplanned possibilities that make the best books. You cannot have art, as William Morris argued, without resistance in the material. Books have provided splendid resistance. But as long as there is a medium, there will always be resistance, and, with luck, art. So while we codex-bound bibliophiles may look with gloom on the future, new cultural forms worthy of the name “book” will develop in the digital world.

A few weeks ago in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik offered a typology for all the “books explaining why books no longer matter”:

call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.

In something of a never-better moment, Gopnik suggests that the Hogwarts library would have disappeared if the Harry Potter series had appeared after the launch of Google. But see, below, Hedwig delivering a parchment letter. Below that is the Book of Pythia from the 21^st-century version of Battlestar Galactica. (Both from exhibitions in Seattle, November 2010.)

A Broader Vision for a National Digital Library

2011-02-28T07:24:00.000-08:00

In “It's Time for a National Digital-Library System” (The Chronicle), David Rothman makes the case for establishing something greater than a repository of digitized books. His “national system” would include:

A wide variety of books and other items ... everything such as textbooks, carefully vetted scholarly papers, user-contributed photographs, local oral histories, and multimedia job-training materials, as well as other directly practical content ... let the content be both formal and informal, dynamic and static, popular and academic, cultural and directly practical ...

Accessibility, mixed with realism ... The ability of the public to contribute items ranging from informal neighborhood guides to videos of news events ...

Interactivity and long-term trustworthiness ...

Meanwhile, “Social Media Lure Academics Frustrated by Journals” (The Chronicle):

Librarians ought to be especially concerned by what's coming out in these discussions of social-media use, Mr. Nicholas said, because "nobody is talking about librarians' being involved at all in this." The academic use of such tools may leave libraries out in the cold, he said. "There's a lot of soul-searching that needs to be done on the part of librarians, because this is their constituency."

Text v. Paratext

2011-02-25T08:28:00.000-08:00

Image: Detail from a Geneva Bible (London, 1607)

Challenging the Limits of the Scholarly Record

2011-02-24T12:48:00.000-08:00

From “Free 'Video Book' From MIT Press Challenges Limits of Scholarship” (The Chronicle):

The [Learning From YouTube] book was peer-reviewed and comes with an ISBN number, but beyond that it has little in common with the books we're used to seeing. Users get to it by visiting a Web site that consists of about 250 "texteos," pages that combine text and video. The videos, many of them produced by Ms. Juhasz's students, encourage readers to reflect on YouTube by learning inside it. The closest thing to chapters are "YouTours," which guide viewers through related pages. That format also makes the book a test of staying power: Since much of the content isn't owned by Ms. Juhasz, its owners could take it down, leaving holes in her book.

Other People’s Books

2011-02-24T08:08:00.000-08:00

There were two recent and interesting articles in The New York Times on the value of association copies: one focuses on marginalia, the other on a part of Jefferson’s “retirement library” that was discovered in the Washington University library.

(I’m looking forward to the appearance of the book that is referenced in the first article and from which this post’s title is taken.)

More than a Symbol

2011-02-15T07:44:00.000-08:00

During the protests in Egypt, Alexandria youth protected the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The Wall Street Journal reports on the role of the “hypermodern successor to the ancient library of Alexandria” in “A Symbol for the New Egypt.”

Beneath the Tip of the Iceberg

2011-02-14T07:46:00.000-08:00

From “Dumped On by Data: Scientists Say a Deluge Is Drowning Research” (The Chronicle):

In 10 new articles, also published in Science, researchers in fields as diverse as paleontology and neuroscience say the lack of data libraries, insufficient support from federal research agencies, and the lack of academic credit for sharing data sets have created a situation in which money is wasted and information that could reveal better cancer treatments or the causes of climate change goes by the wayside.

(The title of this post alludes to this quote in the article: “When I see a figure in a paper, it's just the tip of the iceberg to me. I want to see it in a different form in order to do a different kind of analysis.”)

The Edison Record

2011-02-11T12:10:00.000-08:00

Google reminds us that today is Thomas Edison’s birthday, which reminds me of cylinder recordings. From the UCSB Library’s excellent “Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project” website:

Cylinder recordings, the first commercially produced sound recordings, are a snapshot of musical and popular culture in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. They have long held the fascination of collectors and have presented challenges for playback and preservation by archives and collectors alike.

(The first sound recordings were phonautograms. Wax cylinder recordings had a much longer life.)

Cleopatra Behind and Beyond the Sources

2011-02-08T22:11:00.000-08:00

I recently read Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra: A Life, which raises interesting questions about the use of sources. (I’m currently teaching a class on primary sources, so I’m especially interested in this facet of the book.) Schiff opens the book with a discussion of the historiographical challenges:

No papyri from Alexandria survive. Almost nothing of the ancient city survives aboveground. We have, perhaps and at most, one written word of Cleopatra’s (6).

And the sources that have survived are problematic:

Classical authors were indifferent to statistics and occasionally even to logic; their accounts contradict one another and themselves (6).

The book presents an interesting reconstruction of a life (Cleopatra has been given many lives and will be given many more), and before the topic of reception is revisited in the last chapter the consequences for the historical record seem inevitable: Because of her epic failures, Cleopatra was destined to be both erased and mythologized.

Image: Cleopatra's Needle (New York), Alexandria, Brooklyn Museum, Flickr Commons.

New Signs

2011-02-08T09:36:00.000-08:00

New signs appeared in the library today:

Libraries and Influence

2011-02-04T12:35:00.000-08:00

It would be interesting to bring Mark Edmundson’s “Narcissus Regards a Book” (The Chronicle) into the patron-driven acquisition discussion. Here is an excerpt:

Narcissus looks into the book review and finds it good. Narcissus peers into Amazon's top 100 and, lo, he feels the love. Nothing insults him; nothing pulls him away from that gorgeous smooth watery image below. ...

Is it possible that in the world now there are people who might suffer not from an anxiety that they might be influenced but rather from an anxiety that they might never be? Perhaps not everyone loves himself with complete conviction and full abandon. Maybe there remain those who look into the shimmering flattering glass of current culture and do not quite like what they see. Maybe life isn't working for them as well as it is supposed to be for all in this immeasurably rich and unprecedentedly free country.

Reading in pursuit of influence—that, I think, is the desired thing.

Primary Materials and Truth Claims in the Sciences

2011-02-02T07:10:00.000-08:00

In a class I’m teaching we’re had some good discussions of the New Yorker article “The Truth Wears Off,” which looks at how such factors as regression to the mean, selective reporting, and publication bias can produce a “decline effect” in scientific findings. The article concludes with this:

The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

One of the researchers discussed in the article recommends more transparency in the scientific process by “the establishment of an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their planned investigations and document all their results.”

The Chronicle recently spoke with Sayeed Choudhury of the Data Conservatory about the greater transparency and documentation mandated by NSF’s new data management plan requirements.

Marking Personal Time

2011-01-28T07:46:00.000-08:00

In “Tales of Lives Richly Lived, but True?,” The New York Times reports on an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum called “The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives.” (See also the Slide Show.) From the Morgan’s online exhibition page:

How do we tell the stories of our lives? For centuries, people have turned to diaries to mark time, sort out creative problems, help them through crises, comfort them in solitude or pain, or capture memories for the future.

Revisiting the Library in 2050

2011-01-27T08:00:00.000-08:00

I recently read a criticism of a book that claimed it would require a book just as large to correct the author’s mistakes. I felt a similar response to “Academic Library Autopsy Report, 2050” (The Chronicle), which was initially published with the title “Death by Irony: How Librarians Killed the Academic Library.” Fortunately, someone took the time to respond to it point by point: “The Library's End? A Long Way Off” (The Chronicle).

So, for example, this statement:

Fully digitized collections of nearly every book in the world rendered physical book collections unnecessary.

is answered with this:

In 2050, students, faculty, and researchers get their content from a variety of electronic resources ... But working with rare books, archives, and artifacts remains an essential component of pedagogy and research in many disciplines.

For a view of libraries in 2010, see OCLC’s Perceptions of Libraries, 2010: Context and Community.

Forging Ahead

2011-01-26T07:32:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week the National Archives reported that a researcher had changed a date on a Lincoln manuscript.

Over at his Northwest History blog, Larry Cebula searches Google Books and discusses how this forgery has impacted the historical record.

Think Local

2011-01-21T08:57:00.000-08:00

In his presentation “How eBooks Impact Libraries” (or, “How Libraries Are Screwed” [part I and part II]), Eli Neiburger points out that since the codex is an outmoded technology so too is the cirucluating collection. Neiburger recalls the original purpose of libraries, which was not to subsidize access to commercial content for a community but rather to store and organize the content of a community. Libraries have a future if they return to a focus on preserving and providing access to what is most important to a local community—if they become places for unique content and experiences.

The image above is from part II: “Libraries were created to protect and ensure access to things like this for the communities that produced them, not to subsidize access to the hottest new clay tablets from Babylon. It’s these unique things that don’t exist anywhere else and that matter more to our own community than anyone else that have the future for libraries.”

WikiSources

2011-01-14T07:44:00.000-08:00

In a New Yorker profile, Julian Assange describes WikiLeaks as “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis.” According to the article, WikiLeaks “receives about thirty submissions a day, and typically posts the ones it deems credible in their raw, unedited state, with commentary alongside.” Assange says:

I want to set up a new standard: “scientific journalism.” If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.

WikiLeaks sources (cables?), however, are “scrubbed” “to insure that no digital traces embedded in them can identify their source.” This raises interesting questions about authenticity, which is fundamentally a matter of trust—trust in the people, processes, and institutions that transmit a source. For more on the topic of trust and the role of institutions, see section 2.3 of the digital forensics report I posted about last month.

Update: More on WikiLeaks, from “Dealing With Assange and the Secrets He Spilled” (The New York Times):

I think the impact of WikiLeaks on the culture has probably been overblown. Long before WikiLeaks was born, the Internet transformed the landscape of journalism, creating a wide-open and global market with easier access to audiences and sources, a quicker metabolism, a new infrastructure for sharing and vetting information and a diminished respect for notions of privacy and secrecy. Assange has claimed credit on several occasions for creating something he calls “scientific journalism,” meaning that readers are given the raw material to judge for themselves whether the journalistic write-ups are trustworthy. But newspapers have been publishing texts of documents almost as long as newspapers have existed — and ever since the Internet eliminated space restrictions, we have done so copiously.

Digital Mortality

2011-01-13T07:21:00.000-08:00

From “Cyberspace When You’re Dead” (The New York Times):

increasingly we’re not leaving a record of life by culling and stowing away physical journals or shoeboxes of letters and photographs for heirs or the future. Instead, we are, collectively, busy producing fresh masses of life-affirming digital stuff ...

But the tools we use privilege the moment, not the long term; they also tend to make everything feel roughly equal in importance and offer us little incentive to comb back through our digital scribblings and sort out what might have lasting meaning from what probably doesn’t. The results are pretty much the opposite of a scrapbook carefully edited to serve as a memory object but could end up serving that function by default.

History and Heritage

2011-01-12T07:46:00.000-08:00

From Gordon Wood’s “No Thanks for the Memories,” a review of Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History (The New York Review of Books):

some intellectuals have come to believe that historical scholarship over the past generation has more than fulfilled its role of destroying memory, and they have reacted with alarm. ... Memory, or what [David] Lowenthal calls “heritage,” may be, like the Tea Party’s use of the Founding, a worthless sham, its credos fallacious, even perverse; but, wrote Lowenthal, “heritage, no less than history, is essential to knowing and acting.” It fosters community, identity, and continuity, and in the end makes possible history itself. “By means of it we tell ourselves who we are, where we came from, and to what we belong.”

Book Futures: The Cloud and Cold Storage

2011-01-10T07:45:00.000-08:00

From a new report from OCLC Research, Cloud-sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-digitized Library Environment:

The objective of the project was to examine the feasibility of outsourcing management of low-use print books held in academic libraries to shared service providers, including large-scale print and digital repositories (8).

From the conclusion:

Our year-long study of the mass-digitized book corpus in the HathiTrust Digital Library and parallel investigation of potential shared print service providers has confirmed that there is an opportunity for significant library space savings and cost avoidance if management operations for digitized books are deliberately and systematically outsourced or externalized to shared service providers (64).

“You don't buy paintings to blend in with the sofa!”

2011-01-08T14:19:00.000-08:00

This, from “Selling a Book by Its Cover” (The New York Times), reminds me of a scene in Hannah and Her Sisters:

Book lovers, you can exhale. The printed, bound book has been given a stay of execution by an unlikely source: the design community. In this Kindle-and-iPad age, architects, builders and designers are still making spaces with shelves — lots and lots of shelves — and turning to companies like Mr. Wines’s Juniper Books for help filling them.

The associated slideshow, “Books as a Way to Grace a Room,” is nice.

Among the Ruins

2011-01-07T07:39:00.000-08:00

“Detroit in Ruins” (The Guardian) has some “extraordinary photographs documenting the dramatic decline of a major American city.” Among the ruins are schools, churches, and libraries (Melvil Dewey called these the three great engines of education).

I was in Beloit, Wisconsin, recently and across the river from my hotel were traces of that city’s industrial past.

Vertical Technology

2011-01-06T07:13:00.001-08:00

From “Origin of Vertical Files” (Library History Buff Blog):

Research by the Early Office Museum makes a strong case that the first vertical file cabinets were produced by Library Bureau, the library and office supply company founded by Melvil Dewey. The earliest advertisement for a vertical file cabinet was found by the Museum in a 1900 Library Bureau catalog. Information in this catalog indicates that vertical files utilized the same technology pioneered in library card catalog cabinets which were also produced by Library Bureau.

Digital Preservation Gains and Losses in 2010

2011-01-04T07:39:00.001-08:00

See “The Top 10 Digital Preservation Developments of 2010” (Library of Congress) and “Where does the data go when the host dies?” (The Long Now Blog).

To Conclude Another Year

2010-12-31T17:42:00.000-08:00

Gallery: Digitizing the past and present at the Library of Congress (Boing Boing).

Google Words

2010-12-22T07:31:00.000-08:00

Last week The Chronicle reported on a paper published in Science, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” which analyzed some 360 billion English words in the five million books digitized by Google (“about 4% of all books ever printed”). From the abstract:

Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of "culturomics", focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. "Culturomics" extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

Geoffrey Nunberg writes:

Whatever misgivings scholars may have about the larger enterprise, the data will be a lot of fun to play around with. And for some—especially students, I imagine—it will be a kind of gateway drug that leads to more-serious involvement in quantitative research.

Access to the data is available from Ngrams.GoogleLabs.com,

Speaking of data visualization, there is also Google fusion tables.

Digital Forensics

2010-12-15T16:32:00.000-08:00

CLIR has released a report called Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections. From the introduction:

The purpose of this report is twofold: first, to introduce the field of digital forensics to professionals in the cultural heritage sector; and second, to explore some particular points of convergence between the interests of those charged with collecting and maintaining borndigital cultural heritage materials and those charged with collecting and maintaining legal evidence. ...

There are deep historical connections between the emergence of archival science and the Roman law of antiquity, founded on concepts such as chain of custody. (The forensics of modern evidentiary standards is etymologically rooted in the forensics of verbal disputation—“forensics” comes from the Latin forensis, “before the forum.”)

The OED on Information

2010-12-13T08:31:00.000-08:00

From “The Information Palace” (NYRblog):

The earliest citation comes from the Rolls of Parliament for 1386: “Thanne were such proclamacions made ... bi suggestion & informacion of suche that wolde nought her falsnesse had be knowen to owre lige Lorde.” For centuries thereafter, informations were filed, or recorded, or laid, against people.

From then to now the word takes a twisty path, and the OED‘s lexicographers hold our hand around every corner. Information can be “a teaching; an instruction.” It can be “divine influence or direction; inspiration, esp. through the Holy spirit.” It can be “that of which one is apprised or told; intelligence, news.”

Ever lurking behind the arras is the ancient Latin precursor: the verb informare—to give form to; to shape; to mold. Information is the act of infusion with form. ...

Cartographic Realty Versus Reality

2010-12-03T17:07:00.000-08:00

I’ve been researching the role of books in the history of the Pacific Northwest (the first byproduct of that work is here), so I enjoyed reading in the December issue of Fine Books & Collections an article about the search for the Northwest Passage. From “Wishful Thinking”:

Perhaps the strangest and most imaginative maps showing a Northwest Passage were those based on the apocryphal 1640 voyage of the Spanish admiral Bartholemew de Fonte. In a letter published in a 1708 edition of the British magazine The Monthly Miscellany or Memoirs for the Curious, de Fonte claimed to have sailed up the Pacific coast of the Americas. Somewhere north of Vancouver Island he found a strait that led to a great inland sea where he met a merchant ship from Boston. Although it is now believed that the magazine’s editor wrote the piece, the great English proponent of the passage, Arthur Dobbs, took the article to be genuine and gave it credibility when he included the de Fonte expedition in his An account of the countries adjoining to Hudson’s Bay in the north-west part of America (1744).

The de Fonte ‘discovery’ remained a cartographic realty for more than half a century and entrapped some of the brightest and most prominent mapmakers …

The Most Important Components of Information Management: Attention and Judgment

2010-12-02T08:41:00.000-08:00

From Ann Blair’s “Information Overload, Then and Now” (The Chronicle):

Complaints about "too many books" echo across the centuries, from when books were papyrus rolls, parchment manuscripts, or hand printed. …

Early negative responses include Ecclesiastes 12:12 ("Of making books there is no end," probably from the fourth or third century BC) and Seneca's "distringit librorum multitudo" ("the abundance of books is distraction," first century AD). But we also find enthusiasm for accumulation—of papyri at the Library of Alexandria (founded in the early third century BC) or of the 20,000 "facts" that Pliny the Elder accumulated in Historia naturalis (completed in AD 77). Though we no longer care especially about ancient precedent, we hear the same doom and praise today.

Blair discusses the long history of text management practices—reusable wax tablets, florilegia, alphabetical indices, text divisions, commonplaces, bibliographies, compendia, periodicals, books reviews, dictionaries, and encyclopedias—and wonders what is at risk as academic scholarship moves to electronic media. She identifies three areas of concern:

Storing: “computers preserve only what has been upgraded to match their ever-changing specifications. Documents without anyone interested in using them and upgrading them to new platforms may become inaccessible.”
Sorting: “search engines can track the keywords chosen by individual users and writers, but we still need library catalogers and indexers who can identify relevant category terms that do not appear explicitly in the text and who can group related topics under consistent subject headings.”
Selecting and summarizing: “making and using shortcuts skillfully and responsibly requires judgment.”

Blair concludes:

we need to proceed carefully in the transition to electronic media, lest we lose crucial methods of working that rely on and foster thoughtful decision making. Like generations before us, we need all the tools for gathering and assessing information that we can muster—some inherited from the past, others new to the present. Many of our technologies will no doubt rapidly seem obsolete, but, we can hope, not human attention and judgment, which should continue to be the central components of thoughtful information management.

Fishy Records

2010-11-30T07:44:00.001-08:00

The authors of “Coding Early Naturalists' Accounts into Long-Term Fish Community Changes in the Adriatic Sea (1800–2000)” (PLoS ONE) highlight the value of historical qualitative sources for fishery science.

All This, and Libraries Too

2010-11-24T10:25:00.000-08:00

From “On Gratitude in Academe” (The Chronicle):

Libraries and librarians: Our colleagues who are information professionals provide us with the scholarly resources we need for our research and teaching, and they do so with minimal recognition and considerable pressure to adapt to rapidly changing technologies. While the Internet has been a boon to scholarly research, the physical library is—more than stadiums, more than student centers—the heart of the academic enterprise: It's a place for solitary reflection as well as serendipitous encounters in the context of intellectual seriousness. Nothing can replace libraries as places, even if they are no longer primarily based on the circulation of printed materials.

On the historical dimension of our national day of gratitude, see “Peace, Love and Puritanism” (The New York Times):

Are our present-day values and practices aligned with the historical record, or have they been remade by our consumer culture? Is anything authentic in our own celebrations of Thanksgiving?

For Friday

2010-11-19T17:07:00.000-08:00

Good hats, jolly fellows, and speechifiers—some great book reviews over at Common-place (11:1.5).

Now I’m off, leaving my computer to itself …

Data: The Next Big Idea in the Humanities

2010-11-17T13:12:00.000-08:00

See “Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches” (The New York Times).

An interesting exemplar of a digital humanities project is “Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History,” an exploration of the history of reading through historical materials in Harvard’s libraries.

Diary Riddle

2010-11-13T10:42:00.000-08:00

Last week I picked up for our collection the diary of Northwest historian W. D. Lyman. The first volume opens with this: “The year 1884 dawns chill and dark upon the world.” In the last two entries, from 1920, Lyman records that has become professor emeritus, that his pension is in place, and that he feels rotten. Lastly, he writes: “This period of my history marks another stage of my life. It may have some fine opportunities.” He died two days later.

The future of his history is now in our archives, waiting for a new kind of life (although not of the sort He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named got through his fifty-year-old diary).

The Real Purpose of a Library

2010-11-12T07:39:00.000-08:00

From “Problematizing Patron-Driven Acquisitions” (Library Journal):

a library is more than a shopping site built to satisfy immediate patron needs. A well-chosen collection is a cartography of knowledge that helps guide the novice researcher toward books that they would never think to ask for. … Umberto Eco, who argued for library coffee shops decades before they became trendy, said at the opening of a new library in Milan that "the whole idea of a library is based on a misunderstanding: that the reader goes into the library to find a book whose title he knows." Its real purpose, he said, "is to discover books of whose existence the reader has no idea."

There is also the importance of developing collections for patrons yet unborn.

Archival Epistemology

2010-11-11T07:51:00.000-08:00

From a Chronicle report on the latest Project Information Literacy Progress Report:

Ms. Head said the findings show that college students approach research as a hunt for the right answer instead of a process of evaluating different arguments and coming up with their own interpretation. “Not being aware of the diverse resources that exist or the different ways knowledge is created and shared is dangerous,” she said.

The emphasis above is mine. Next semester I’m teaching a seminar on primary sources that will include a focus on the epistemological question of how we know what we know. In The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (University of Pennsylvania, 2007), Matthew Brown uses the helpful phrase “epistemology of the archive,” by which he means “a study of not only what we know from the evidential record … but also how we know what we know” (203).

Volunteers Are Waiting for Your Call

2010-11-10T07:56:00.000-08:00

Cornell is making some progress toward funding arXiv, an open-access repository, through an NPR-style support model.

From Cultural Institution to Service

2010-11-09T07:25:00.000-08:00

I have posted previously about the Welch Medical Library. Here is a striking statement about it, which comes from a report on the Charleston Conference:

We're a service …We're no longer an institution of cultural memory.

Teaching Transcendence

2010-11-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

I like refereeing to libraries and archives as transportive and transcendent places—places that enable broader experiences of time, space, and reality. I don’t usually use such language in classes, so I was surprised but satisfied to read in an evaluation of a session I taught last week (on using historical manuscripts) the comments of a student who wrote that she had learned “that there is a place [at our institution] that connects the past with the present and somehow this connection makes us feel part of something greater.”

Novel?

2010-11-04T21:39:00.000-07:00

For a class I'm working with, I recently read James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (this link is to an interesting Google Books copy of the first edition).

Confessions is a book about a book preserved in a grave. The unearthed book consists of a pamphlet augmented by some manuscript pages. To these the published book adds an editor’s introduction, which draws from records and oral testimonies, and a conclusion, which includes the text of a letter that appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. The mixture of sources and questions about the functions of and interrelationships between each (e.g., oral accounts being influenced by circulation of the pamphlet or its memorial or allegorical contents) create a number of archival and interpretive layers that surround the story at the center of the book.

From the concluding paragraph:

Were the relation at all consistent with reason, it corresponds so minutely with traditionary facts that it could scarcely have missed to have been received as authentic; but in this day and with the present generation it will not go down …

Image: The reputed site of an 18^th-century suicide's grave, Scotland (from Wikimedia Commons).

Records 2.0

2010-11-03T06:04:00.000-07:00

NARA considers web 2.0 and social media tools: “Are these Records?”

From “Guidance on Managing Records in Web 2.0/Social Media Platforms”:

principles for analyzing, scheduling, and managing records are based on content and are independent of the medium; where and how an agency creates, uses, or stores information does not affect how agencies identify Federal records.

Undiscoverable and in Demand

2010-11-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

OCLC has released Taking Our Pulse, a report of its 2009 survey of archives and special collections.

The good news: “Special collections and archives are increasingly seen as elements of distinction that serve to differentiate an academic or research library from its peers.”

The bad news: “much rare and unique material remains undiscoverable [e.g., “Half of archival collections have no online presence”], and monetary resources are shrinking [“75% of general library budgets have been reduced”] at the same time that user demand [“insatiable”] is growing.”

“The top three 'most challenging issues' in managing special collections were space, born-digital materials, and digitization.” (See executive summary, 9ff.)

A webinar on the report is available here.

“A Remarkable Footnote”

2010-10-26T17:20:00.000-07:00

A film of Market Street, San Francisco, one week before the 1906 earthquake:

Research Futures

2010-10-19T22:00:00.000-07:00

The Chronicle reports on the Association of Research Libraries 2030 scenarios. The scenarios imagine four different future research environments driven by (1) “research entrepreneurs,” (2) recycling of “ubiquitous but low-value” information, (3) big data and disciplines, and (4) the Middle East and Asia. In all of these scenarios, the user’s guide points out, libraries have the opportunity to participate fully in the research lifecycle, “to create, describe, curate, control access, and authenticate information” (38).