Ask a Male Librarian, Deux

So, okay, male librarians are the smartest, most tactful, most socially savvy, trustworthy and generally special-est people around. And in the spirit of Sassy’s “Dear Boy“column, we get one of them to answer your questions every so often. This installment features our archivist pal Mark Matienzo, who holds it down at archivesblogs, thesecretmirror, and most recently, the food blog, Feeding the Hungry Ghost. Topics include pantyhose, bad breath, and cultivating your blog persona…

making museum standards, making communication make sense

I spent the morning at a neighboring museum’s board meeting, where part of the discussion centered on the American Association of Museums’ Standards and Best Practices document, which proscribes accreditation guidelines for collection control, one of which states that backlog can’t exceed 20% of the collection. While it’s yet to be determined if this is an effective way to eliminate backlog, it’ll be interesting to see if this impacts the way that the museum community does accessions and processing, and if it has any echoes in libraries or archives.

Librarian.net has a post today about outreach and context in new social technology, which pretty much puts together a lot of what I’ve been trying to figure out how to say. (It goes without saying that we have heaps of respect and admiration for Jessamyn.)

What is it about Twitter that’s such a lightning rod? Maybe it’s that it is by far, the most unadulterated social tool to come out- Danah Boyd put this in perspective last month- it’s Myspace bulletins without the calculated effort of profiles. There’s virtually no context building in it, and really not much incentive in lurking. So to take it up, you either have to be pulled in by people who are important to you, or you have to decide that the people or stuff going on on it is important enough to devote energy to. Unless it’s the norm for you, it’s useless.

(I think about my Mom’s reaction to IM: “Am I supposed to make new friends who use this?”)
Which is all really prickly for librarians, who need to balance what context makes information relevant with what’s effective in actually delivering information. And in terms of actually learning from this, facilitating open discussion needs to be a key part of building dynamic professional communities.

Released from the Vault

Since I know basically nothing about fashion and wear the same five things every week (thank god I work alone in a basement), I probably shouldn’t be posting about this, but Laura Ashley – a designer that seems to specialize in lacy kind of country gingham clothing, as well as poofy bedspreads and window treatments – has literally dipped into their design archive and released an all-things-old-are-here-again line in select stores and online this spring.

I think this is a nice idea, although I would personally look like an idiot in anything that was bright yellow, gingham printed, halter-topped, or all of the above.

sunday tidbits

One of my favorite feeds is the NYT Obits. Yesterday’s crop included that of Elizabeth Kals Reilley, librarian, scholar, and collector of horticulture. Read this and tell me her legacy isn’t ridiculously glamorous, exciting, and inspiring. And yes, she held an actual MLS.

I was familiar with Good magazine through Gawker’s borderline-obsessive coverage, but hadn’t actually seen it until someone (with outside income?) left it around the library breakroom. The winter issue had this piece on the ARChive of Contemporary Music, which mentioned that the impetus for its founding was the fact that no established archive would take his massive and valuable record collection. (He’s since entered negotiations with Columbia.)

ArchivesNext had this post last week that asked why archives weren’t part of popular culture. Maybe it should start with more archives (and not just EMP and Bowling Green and a handful of other designated Pop sites) learning to understand and handle products of contemporary culture. Besides, it’s also an emerging workforce issue, because I have firsthand data that says that a large fraction of the white girls flocking to library school these days have current or prior experience as “record nerd girlfriends”, “movie nerd girlfriends”, and even “comic nerd girlfriends” and thus have been lectured extensively on proper care and handling of such materials.

radio roundup

 

I never get to listen to On the Media, since my NPR affiliate doesn’t carry it, but I was able to pick it up driving through East Texas yesterday afternoon. This week’s show has a good segment on the email-trail issues in the Gonzalez scandal that touches on issues of government agency email and the questions of long-term record keeping. There’s also an interview with scholar Anna Nelson on the history and legacy of the Presidental Records Act.

This morning’s ATC had one of those trademark NPR “sexy archives” segments, on the cache of flirty correspondence between Marlene Dietrich and Ernest Hemingway stashed at the JFK Library. However, the segment didn’t touch on a  slightly more salacious archival allegation involving Ms. Dietrich and the Kennedy family that surfaced when the the diaries of Kenneth Tynan were made public.

the literary papers game

 

If you have any illusions of democracy and the sanctity of scholarship in the world of high profile literary manuscript collections, prepare to have them shattered by last Sunday’s NYT Book Review profile of Glenn Horowitz, alpha dog rare book and manuscripts dealer. Several repository heads and curators are interviewed in the article, including NYU’s Marvin Taylor, who comes right out and says “He inflated the market so much…it’s doing a disservice to scholarship.”

I’m bugged by the fact that the hype, fetishism, pursuit of prestige and big cash depicted in the article is fairly dead on, but also by firsthand experience dealing with the ramifications of this, as it sifts down through institutions, to repository staff, to researchers and students, and intellectual culture at large, and misshapes the public view of what constitutes “cultural materials”. So we end up with everyone’s granny knowing that Norman Mailer sold his papers to the HRC for millions of dollars, and  grad students thinking they have to hop on a plane to go about serious research, never making the connection to what archives in our own communities are doing. It smacks of cultural hegemony, intellectual activity as separate from everyday life,  and undue veneration of the same old, mostly white, mostly male giant-figure authors. As you’ll also notice in the profile, Horowitz has stray bits of valuable literary stuff lying around his apartment, making it clear that papers going on the market reach scholars only by luck.

It’s really hard for me to think of this perceived divide between special collections of the literary/high culture variety (those who collect, gasp! the objects of literature!) and everyone else in the archives/records business (those who deal with the papers of chemistry professors, churches, or garden clubs) as anything else besides a professional hazard. Imposed importance makes for real barriers on communication about very similar functions and minimally different materials. My friends who work with million dollar manuscripts have the same insights as those who work with less than glamorous collections. Moreso, it further alienates us from other branches of the library world, and I’m gonna say this again, is a nice distraction from the fact that most archivists and manuscripts librarians are really underpaid.

I recently read Janna Malamud Smith’s My Father is a Book,  a biography of her father, novelist Bernard Malamud. Smith was motivated to write the book in part by dealing with the sale of her father’s papers, a deal which Horowitz brokered. It’s a really moving and incisive study on Malamud as represented by his papers. If you’re interested in documentation, this is an interesting exercise in context, meaning, and authenticity.

Interior Decoration in the Archives

What do we have here? Why it is obviously the Director of Archives at the New York Museum of Natural History as envisioned in the comic Demonslayer (Vol. 2, Number 2). I guess when you get to be a director, you can put any picture you want behind your desk. Full review available here.

roundup: national archives, grumpy librarians, ILL fees and kids at conferences

Times op-ed urges the President to give NARA the funds to process its backlog and hire more reference archivists to serve users.

Chronicle of Higher Ed: Naive academic realizes that ILL costs money; Association for Jewish Studies makes a point to provide childcare for its national conference. (Whatever, we miss Lingua Franca)

Salon: Carol Lay, who does the cartoon WayLay, made fun of librarians two weeks ago in regards to “scrotum”. Angry responses led to a take back in this week’s strip. Now librarians “smell good”. Ooookaaay. (Again, we’re only reading Salon for Heather Havrilesky)

who knew?

Jeanne of Spellbound Blog did the great service last week of alerting us that Society of American Archivists’ hotly debated Archives list has an RSS feed. Thanks for telling us, SAA!

When the word came out about SAA’s decision for long-term storage of the list, my first reaction was that of long-held resentment of the Archives list, past, present and future. SAA was shooting the wrong horse, because it’s not the legacy Archives list that needs to get dumped, it’s the present listserv mechanism that needs to die. There’s a lot of talk out about how a clogged inbox arrests productivity, and high traffic listservs make such a constant reality.

Iraqi archives on NPR

If you were on spring break, sleeping off SXSW or otherwise indisposed Friday morning, listen to the Morning Edition segment by Lourdes Garcia-Navarro on the role of libraries and booksellers in Iraq’s current intellectual life. Baghdad’s rare book hangout on al-Mantabi street was carbombed yeat again this week, killing 100 people. The piece also touches on the plight of the National Library and Archives, and its head, Saad Eskander, whose heartbreaking public diary has landed him in the spotlight. In the NPR interview, Eskander offers that the women staffers of the library have been integral in building the operation as a peaceful and dynamic enterprise. “Now we have a woman’s society in the National Library.”