librarians and cats: a million dollar prospect

Iowa librarians get $1.25 million advance for a cat bio. The book, tentatively titled Dewey, a Small Town, a Library and the World’s Most Beloved Cat, tells the story of Dewey, a cat who lived in their library for 19 years. Makes me think that the bio of the surly homeless dudes who live in my library isn’t such a bad idea.

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.

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)

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.”

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.]

Who really cares about this “scrotum” business?

As an uppity librarian, I harbor similar contempt towards my colleagues who only really read YA novels ( “Read a book written for someone who’s over 12!”) as I did as an uppity riot grrrl towards my peers who only really read books written by Sister Spit members. (”Couldn’t you at least read George Eliot?!”)

But honestly, there’s no resisting the YA novel written by a Sister Spit alum. And so I was delighted to see in an airport bookstore yesterday, between French Women Don’t Get Fat and The No Asshole Rule, Michelle Tea’s trade paperback YA novel, Rose of No Man’s Land. (Published by HBJ, with a blurb from People, seriously.) So delighted, that I bought it and read it in an hour. It’s timely and angry- in the first three pages, Michelle Tea riffs on sexual abuse, the war in Iraq, class consciousness, reality tv and cancer culture, all in perfect pitch girl prose. In a way, it’s her most inspiring work to date. Destined to become a classic of teen queer experimental narrative, it made me hopeful for YA in a whole new way, and wonder “where have I been”?

The End

Recently a friend loaned me a copy of Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2006). I should fully disclose that, while I really love reading science fiction, I mostly make my sci-fi reading decisions based on neat covers that I like, so I haven’t delved that far into the Vinge back-list. And apparently I should, because he has some rather devoted fans out there.

Although I had some plot-based problems with this book, there is more than enough technology and library-related goings on to make even the most anti-sci-fi librarian take note. The story takes place in the year 2025, primarily in San Diego. In this future world, our Web 2.0 has blossomed into an all-encompassing connected environment that people access by “wearing” – which involves a combination of technologically-implanted clothes and contact lenses that allow you to access the ever-present web of information at all times. When someone is “wearing” they can activate different visual overlays on the physical environment around them, project a 3-D version of themselves anywhere on Earth, and sort through megabytes of data, opinions, and information at the drop of a hat.

Naturally, in a world such as this, the younger generation doesn’t have much use for physical books. In fact, using their “wearable” net is so ingrained in their idea of learning, research, and communication, that books or journals that haven’t been digitized may as well never have existed.

Since this takes place in San Diego, Vinge nicely sets much of the library end of the plot at the Giesel Library on the UCSD campus. Here we have a semi-well-intentioned, but evilish project in which a big company is basically shredding all the books in the library as part of a fast-track digitization scheme. See, by shredding the books and comparing the scanned and shredded bits with other shredded copies, computers put together all the pieces into a totally searchable, integrated, digital product. The only problem is that the books are destroyed (gasp!). They are saving the shreds, though, in case future researchers want to take a look at them. (Shreddy Archives!)

Beyond the shredding project, Vinge explores the possibility of layering very detailed virtual reality skins over the gutted library (so users can experience the act of doing research as if they were in some Terry-Pratchett-like world – physical “virtual” books are delivered to them in a sort of Medieval D&D setting with changing content depending on their research interests), and the climactic scene of the book involves a library riot between competing fan groups that want control of the virtual way in which the library is presented.
 
There’s a lot more to it, but I think this should give you the general idea. In reading some reviews online, the consensus seems to be that this is not one of Vinge’s best books, but if you are a librarian or information-enthusiast who is interested in some not-so-distant-future technology ideas, I say: check it out.