Loving/Hating Library Art/Nostalgia

I was browsing through Rhizome.org and came across the Public Library of American Public Library Deaccession. And then I saw the website for the Proteus Gowanus gallery and reading room. And then this Reanimation Library. It’s always good to be on the lookout for when library stuff intersects with art or popular culture. Partially for nice “your-job-is-cool” affirmations and partially to police co-opters and poseurs out of a sense critical ownership of the profession.

Projects like these get me really excited and I think they are totally endearing. But as much as I like to envision myself as a character in some French new wave film, most days I feel more like that shoe store lady in the ZZ Top video for Legs (pre-makeover). Things like the Reanimation Library and this Proteus Gowanus thing seem to intentionally divorce themselves from the realities of library work. Through the romantic haze, one forgets that your average branch library is really not very cute, but rather gross.

Reanimation also invokes Ranganathan, which in the context of its mission, is appropriate. But something about the Ranganathan pin , especially when paired with the self-described “mysterious” logo pin, wants me to pull out the Edward Said. (But I am loving the hot dog.) The more I think of it, this Victorian conjuring and the focus on library as theme further fills me with a sense of dread over the death of the profession. The focus on deaccessioning, weeding, and recontextualizing allow the actual library space to be effectively, deconstructed, and suggest that a classic library experience is better attained by a visit to a museum, gallery, or arty website.

Ironic Appraisal

The Society of American Archivists announced yesterday that “the cost of retaining, administering, and maintaining access to the 1993-2006 archives of the A&A List is substantially higher than is warranted by the evidential or informational value of the archives” and so they will be disposing the entirety of the listserv archives from 1993-2006. Zuh?

I understand that a great number (probably a majority) of the posts on the Archives and Archivists List may be off-topic, outdated, or spam-like, but isn’t the whole idea of being an archivist based on the recognition that individual documents and pieces of information gain value from being presented in the context of their original creation? And don’t we, you know, like to save stuff?

Maintaining the archives of the A&A list will allow future researchers of our profession to see how archivists used early listserv technology, not to mention what we think about such hot-button topics as certification, the Patriot Act, and a whole series of appointed Archivists of the United States, not to mention an irreplaceable documentation of changes in best practices in all areas of archival administration.

Not surprisingly, this announcement has stirred up a flood of indignant posts on the current version of the A&A listserv (to clarify, the listserv changed servers and administrators in October 2006 – posts made since the change will not be affected by the current decision). Some members are trolling through the archives of the old listserv and downloading their favorite posts. Others are threatening to print the whole thing out and put it in a giant acid-free box.

Yesterday this story got picked up by BoingBoing.net, via a post by Rick Prelinger on his blog. If nothing else, this decision paints a totally embarrassing picture of the archives community for non-archives folks.

Hopefully the leadership of SAA will reconsider their decision and maintain the listserv archives – if nothing else, in an off-line format that could be accessed on-site as part of the institutional archives of SAA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. If not, have fun searching the soon-to-be destroyed information until March 31^st.

document lives in “The Lives of Others”

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s (Oscar winning!) The Lives of Others is the international movie to go see with grannies, boring friends and professional acquaintances now. This is both for the Hollywood-approved tale of honor and morality in commie East Berlin and for the key role that textual objects and archival documents play.

The film’s protagonist, Georg Dreyman, is a playwright who’s successful with his audiences as well as his critics, prized by the GDR theater establishment, popular in cool East Berliner artist circles, and inspired by his oversexed yet nurturing girlfriend/muse Christa-Marie (played by the striking Martina Gedeck, whose style is amazing, despite the overwhelming misogyny lumped on her character). But in the last gasps of mid-80’s Stasi artistic repression, he’s put under surveillance, just as he happens to get interested in writing anti-Eastern missives for Spiegel. The rising Stasi who’s put on the wiretap duty is the schlumpy Capt. Gerd Wiesler, who out of his own loneliness and growing dissent, decides to fudge his reports, thus leaving a false record of Georg’s behavior.

The cop operation is deterred by Wiesler’s misreporting, so they set out to determine the writer of the essay with an exciting round of forensic typography (believe me, those scenes are bananas!). In the end, Wiesler gets demoted for his namby-pambyness in the investigation, and Georg is saved from persecution and goes on to become capitalist-successful after the wall falls. It’s only in the denouemont that Georg, in a quest to come to terms with his past, visits the Stasi archives and reads the records of his surveillance, finally learning what Wiesler did. It can only be described as extreme archival redemption!

The real-life fate of Stasi documents doesn’t seem to be so easy.

One day at a time!

 

Booktruck wishes Marc Jacobs the best for his stint in rehab. Why? Because he described his  Fall 2004 RTW Collection as “librarian chic”,  thus giving props to classic librarian style. (Which means, in the fashion trickle-down, he’s directly responsible for recent options for cute yet professional work clothes.) And because he’s hinted at doing a cheapie line soon, maybe one that we can afford on our salaries.

I’ve got to have these shoes!

A couple of months back, a former co-worker sent me a link to Like.com , a search engine that allows you to find items by likeness. What an ingenius idea, one that I think we’ve all wished for at one time or another, but didn’t imagine could ever exist. When you see a woman wearing the perfect black peep-toe stilettos, you can’t ask her where she got them (she’d probably lie anyway). Like.com allows you to search for “peep toe stilettos” and will return thousands of hits, pictures plus pricing information, from tons of vendors. The site seems to plan on building its fan-base with fashionistas, but the idea obviously has a much wider application. So next time you see a picture of Ciara at Quincy Jones’ pre-Grammy party and wonder where you can find a (cheaper) version of her ridiculously hot chunky YSL platforms, go to the site and search by that description. You can also browse through celebrity profiles, pre-selected by the site, where you can find out where to purchase a handbag similiar to the one Alicia Keys wore to the Black Ball or the precious heart-drop earrings Drew Barrymore wore to the Golden Globes. The site returns items from both low and high-end vendors and you can sort by shop, by color, price, etc. You can also register an account and save items you plan on purchasing or would like to add to your wish list.

Behind the scenes at Users and Uses

I caught Deanna Marcum’s squirrelly talk at the De Lange Conference
last week, wherein she touched upon the upcoming Users and Uses Meeting of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. There’s a lot to digest about the group, its makeup, and its mission, as well as tons to contemplate on what their decisions will mean for everyone in the library world. (Ref folks, info literacy folks, archivists, I’m talking to you!) There’s also a lot to sound off about, but very little information to come out of the group. Insider Karen Coyle has several blog posts up with her notes and insights, and is contributing to the futurelib wiki. Yay for this step towards transparency. It’s long overdue.

Is her body too bootylicious for ya?

Thousands of libraries across the country are currently not circulating the most recent issue of Sports Illustrated with Beyoncè on the cover. Not because they are trying to shield their patrons from her hideous lace-front and “House of Damnitswrong” bikini, but because SI (published by Time Warner, Inc) refused to send the issue to many of its subscribers, primarly schools and public libraries. Their reasoning? They had received many complaints in the past from parents and teachers about the issue and decided to self-censor.  They have since realized this huge gaffe and are sending the issue to anyone who wants it. My question is, why after “years of complaints” did they decide to censor this particular issue?  And who at Time could’ve possibly thought this was a good idea?  The last thing we need are publishers determining what is too “controversial” for our delicate patrons.

keeping up, respectfully

I started on a quick post about the Computerworld article Top Five technologies you need to know about in 07, and pointing out that it wasn’t as much one of those snappy articles that tells you what you need, but that, despite its imperitive title, it is an accessible intro to emerging trends in web use and development, which is useful for those of us that facilitate public and workplace computing, natch.

But then I felt the need to disclose that it came across Signal vs Noise,  the blog from a commercial software developer (the developer of Ruby on Rails, mentioned in the article,) and to say, snarkily, how much I appreciated Basecamp’s role in eliminating seriously tedious meetings. Which lead to rethinking this all, because I’ve begun to bristle at declarations of old/wrong ways of doing things, and new/right ways of doing things.

While I’m behind the thinking in The Cluetrain Manifesto (as much as anyone can be behind a catchphrase-intensive market phenomenon book and still respect themselves), I really resent the way that it’s caught on, rhetorically, as a way to designate who’s on board with an agenda, and who’s not. Because, especially in libraries, you can’t just write off people who have different priorities, and you can’t promote anything using just arrogance and know-it-allness. It writes off collective memory, and it’s annoying. It’s not just a generation gap in the workplace issue. Archivists get maligned all the time for “not having a clue”, but all the sneering and bad rhetoric won’t lead to fixing that. Rather, there’s going to have to be some consensus on what a group wants, and what they need. I don’t think it’s as arbitrary as faux-business jargon. Moreover, libraries just don’t work the same way that businesses do - the getting left behind is a perpetual, arguable state. And it’s not like innovators in our world can just set out on their own- job hopping is an unsure option if you’re looking to make effective changes.

I’ve been thinking and talking alot about project management lately, and how libraries can’t make things get done in the same way as businesses, and that they shouldn’t just adapt to a business model, but need to figure out project management on our own terms and for our own purposes. I don’t want to work for a corporation, and I don’t want to work like I work for one. But I want to do work that has an impact, and I want to be able to work hard, get effective direction, and get recognized for it.

The Futility of All Ambition

Some cheery thoughts on the preservation of books in the year 802,701 A.D., courtesy of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1898):

“I went out of that gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the Philosophical Transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics.”

[From chapter eight -- read the whole thing here.]

Newly Registered

Would you be crazy to crank up “The Osage Bank Robbery,” episode of “The Lone Ranger” (December 17, 1937); “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” Bob Newhart (1960); “The Wailers Burnin’,” The Wailers (1973); and “Graceland,” Paul Simon (1986) on your IPod? Possibly, but you might also be paying homage to the 2006 National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. This year’s list brings the total to 225 recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” and that will be preserved forever and ever and ever.