G. Edward Evans offers seven pieces of advice to librarians specializing in collection development, which is an area of librarianship I think I'd really enjoy, so I'm glad it was assigned. I will just discuss a couple of them in this entry.
Remember our "product" is access to information regardless of format. Given my love for all things old and especially for books, new and old, I am probably a little prone to the view that "libraries equal books," although I am trying to disabuse myself of that notion, and I'm sure I will have shed it once I've completed my MSLIS. I remember being somewhat scandalized back in 1997 when I was working as a circulation clerk at the undergraduate library at the UW and the new library administrator was busily weeding (hemorrhaging?) books to make space for a computer lab on the second floor (the first floor was reference and periodicals and the third was and remained stacks). In retrospect it makes sense to provide all those terminals for students to access increasingly digitized information, but at the time I thought it was wasteful and contrary to the mission of the library to make it contain fewer books. I think it is possible the "e-book bandwagon" Evans dismisses (p. 91) will still happen, although it is unlikely to replace physical books: Amazon's Kindle has been reasonably successful, and CEO Jeff Bezos has said he's open to the idea of facilitating library lending of Kindle editions (Levy, p. 4). Of course, since any e-book limits its readership to a reasonably affluent economic class due to the initial cost of the devices, e-books will not likely replace physical books for library users anytime soon (although some libraries might consider circulating Kindles too--due to the expense and risk, this might be more appropriate for academic libraries, for example).
Just one more little thought on this section: was anyone else a little put off by the statement, "We had to rework any order for nonprint items into a form that looked like a book or journal order" (90-91)? I can understand the motivation, and perhaps the ends justify the means, but it seems rather...deceptive.
Embrace change and be flexible. I feel fortunate in that I'm old enough to have experienced a lot of technological developments in my adult life, so I appreciate them and could recognize their significance, and also young enough that adopting them has not been too traumatic. When I began college in 1993, students were just beginning to use email; in 1996 I created my first website using my allocated space on the UW server; in 1998 I was able to take a writing course that integrated Internet technologies and reinforced basic HTML. I regret that I haven't always kept up with technological developments as quickly as they come up and have been reactive rather than proactive, but I hope to reverse that trend at the iSchool, taking to heart Evans' advice that "Being able to help your colleagues get through what may be viewed as traumatic change by some people will be a great career asset" (92).
Build relationships. This piece of advice is not about building relationships with patrons (although that's important too and is covered earlier), but with vendors. Evans encourages librarians to have a friendly and cooperative relationship with outside entities (jobbers, parent organizations, etc.), rather than the adversarial attitude that a lot of librarians seem to have, in his experience. This seems intuitive to me, although maybe it's not because librarians, who usually work for nonprofit organizations, don't have to worry about the bottom line, making profits, pleasing investors, and so on, the way that vendors have to do. My dad runs a small business and, since he's responsible for sales as well as making sure the day-to-day operations of the business function, he has to work with people in a wide variety of professions, which he does well and which I've always found an admirable quality. This certainly seems to me preferable to a de facto antagonistic attitude toward vendors displayed by the authors of Chapter 3, "Human Rights, Democracy, and Librarians," who say if we lose sight of "our main purpose" (with which, in itself, I don't disagree), "We will purchase the titles vendors tell us to (who are in turn told what to publish by their corporate HQs), accept only the Web sites our corporate controlled filters filter..." (33). I have a knee-jerk reaction to this view of corporations, which I think are in themselves neutral, noting that 1. corporations are motivated by profit, in part so they can continue to exist and serve their customers--I suppose a world full of tiny free presses motivated by ideals rather than profit would be nice, but ridiculously inefficient for whoever is doing collection development, and 2. corporations are made up of people, and you have to deal with them, and if you can have pleasant interactions with people you have to deal with, life is just a lot nicer.
Evans, G. Edward. "Reflections on Creating Information Service Collections." The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 87-97.
Levy, Steven. "The Future of Reading." Newsweek, November 26, 2007. Page 4 of the online version, retrieved June 25, 2009. http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983
Updated July 9, 2009.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
The Portable MLIS Chapter 1: "Stepping Back and Looking Forward"
In "Stepping Back and Looking Forward: Reflections on the Foundations of Libraries and Librarianship," Richard E. Rubin summarizes the missions of libraries throughout history, culminating in the modern mission of the American public library, and discusses four foundational values of libraries today:
In a future post I will return to the subject I promised to cover in my first post on this blog, the interplay of preservation and innovation. Here I will just say that we moderns tend to view periods such as fifth-century Athens and the Golden Age of Roman literature as ages of innovation, as opposed to our view of periods such as early medieval western Europe (from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Carolingians) as focused on preservation of the ideas of earlier, more intellectually fecund eras, or more pejoratively as periods of stagnation. There is some truth to this view, but it is overly simplistic to someone with an interest in late antiquity. So I have a quibble with Rubin's headline "Think Again" for the age of the great Muslim and Byzantine libraries of the Near East (p. 6): for one thing, it suggests there was no original thought happening in the monasteries of western Europe, which is not the case; for another, it suggests that preservation is not a thoughtful process, which, while it may not have been for your average sleepy, nearsighted monk desultorily copying manuscripts, certainly is so in a more schematic sense. Simply deciding what to preserve, for example: there is my old favorite Cassiodorus' Institutiones, an annotated bibliography of works to include in his ideal library; see also the medieval obsession with etymologies, bestiaries, and other encyclopedic accumulations of knowledge. (End rant by inveterate history geek.)
And indeed, in the section "Belief in the Value of the Past: Preservation," Rubin acknowledges that preservation is an active, thoughtful process in which librarians "[n]ot merely...store contents, but...represent, organize, and maintain those contents in such a way that people have access to the materials of the past" (12). Representation entails not merely the material book or other source, but the creation of "digital repositories that make information and artifacts available to those who would never be able to consult them in the past" (13). (See my earlier post about the new connections between texts made possible by digital media; not to mention that even the most educated ancient reader with the most prodigious memory would have had much more finite access to texts and might not even have been aware of texts that existed in his or her time that are now part of our modern canon, because the transmission of texts was so cumbersome.) Likewise, the creators of catalogs and digital repositories organize information in as intuitive and user-friendly a way as possible, which involves no small amount of thought and consideration of user needs and thought processes. Maintenance of resources might not be as laborious as it was in the days when texts had to be copied so they would not be lost, but the technology in which those texts subsist is ever-evolving, so that digital technologies which we imagine to impute some sort of permanence may be obsolete in much less time than it takes paper to disintegrate, and even books that pass through dozens of hands each year require constant repair and replacement (to which I can attest from the humble beginnings of my library career in book repair).
One way in which the mission of preservation of today's libraries differs from that of earlier eras is that today we consider it worthwhile to preserve as much information as possible, and have the resources to do so. Due to the finite availability of materials and scribes, as well as the time-consuming process of copying books, librarians before the advent of printing could only preserve so many texts, and countless others were lost to fire, pillage, and other accidents of time (much to the chagrin of classicists who would love to have all the plays of Euripides, or all the books of Livy). So there was inherent to the system the sort of prioritization that is not necessary today, a process informed by value systems of librarians (i.e. for the period that interests me, a religious system, not that all texts preserved were religious). Not that every library preserves every piece of information in existence today, but the combined capacity of libraries more nearly approaches the ability to do so, and librarians themselves think it is a worthy goal to do so. In this manner libraries provide users as much as possible with "unimpeded access" to as much information and as many viewpoints as possible, leaving it up to the user rather than the librarian to select which expressions and viewpoints to consider (10). So the function of the library to preserve, as it has always done, now more than ever underlies the value of intellectual freedom (and certainly the other core values as well).
I should not make this entry much longer; however, while I haven't engaged all the content of this chapter, I do wish to note that as a parent of a toddler, I'm sure I will become increasingly interested in intellectual freedom as it relates to minors, particularly the question, "Who is ultimately responsible for what a young person is reading or seeing--the librarian or the parent?" (11). To what degree do we entrust to librarians the duty of acting in loco parentis? And does this depend on whether the librarian is at a school or public library? I am inclined to think, as a parent, that librarians have a responsibility in this regard similar to that of teachers, which might lead them to inhibit my daughter's (and other children's) intellectual freedom more than Rubin would like (and perhaps if there were a paragraph break before "The struggles to protect Intellectual Freedom" on p. 11 I would be assuaged). No doubt I have another sixteen years as a parent and my entire career as a librarian to puzzle this one out.
Rubin, Richard E. "Stepping Back and Looking Forward: Reflections on the Foundations of Libraries and Librarianship." The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 3-14.
- Intellectual freedom
- Service and the public good
- Education
- The value of the past: Preservation
In a future post I will return to the subject I promised to cover in my first post on this blog, the interplay of preservation and innovation. Here I will just say that we moderns tend to view periods such as fifth-century Athens and the Golden Age of Roman literature as ages of innovation, as opposed to our view of periods such as early medieval western Europe (from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Carolingians) as focused on preservation of the ideas of earlier, more intellectually fecund eras, or more pejoratively as periods of stagnation. There is some truth to this view, but it is overly simplistic to someone with an interest in late antiquity. So I have a quibble with Rubin's headline "Think Again" for the age of the great Muslim and Byzantine libraries of the Near East (p. 6): for one thing, it suggests there was no original thought happening in the monasteries of western Europe, which is not the case; for another, it suggests that preservation is not a thoughtful process, which, while it may not have been for your average sleepy, nearsighted monk desultorily copying manuscripts, certainly is so in a more schematic sense. Simply deciding what to preserve, for example: there is my old favorite Cassiodorus' Institutiones, an annotated bibliography of works to include in his ideal library; see also the medieval obsession with etymologies, bestiaries, and other encyclopedic accumulations of knowledge. (End rant by inveterate history geek.)
And indeed, in the section "Belief in the Value of the Past: Preservation," Rubin acknowledges that preservation is an active, thoughtful process in which librarians "[n]ot merely...store contents, but...represent, organize, and maintain those contents in such a way that people have access to the materials of the past" (12). Representation entails not merely the material book or other source, but the creation of "digital repositories that make information and artifacts available to those who would never be able to consult them in the past" (13). (See my earlier post about the new connections between texts made possible by digital media; not to mention that even the most educated ancient reader with the most prodigious memory would have had much more finite access to texts and might not even have been aware of texts that existed in his or her time that are now part of our modern canon, because the transmission of texts was so cumbersome.) Likewise, the creators of catalogs and digital repositories organize information in as intuitive and user-friendly a way as possible, which involves no small amount of thought and consideration of user needs and thought processes. Maintenance of resources might not be as laborious as it was in the days when texts had to be copied so they would not be lost, but the technology in which those texts subsist is ever-evolving, so that digital technologies which we imagine to impute some sort of permanence may be obsolete in much less time than it takes paper to disintegrate, and even books that pass through dozens of hands each year require constant repair and replacement (to which I can attest from the humble beginnings of my library career in book repair).
One way in which the mission of preservation of today's libraries differs from that of earlier eras is that today we consider it worthwhile to preserve as much information as possible, and have the resources to do so. Due to the finite availability of materials and scribes, as well as the time-consuming process of copying books, librarians before the advent of printing could only preserve so many texts, and countless others were lost to fire, pillage, and other accidents of time (much to the chagrin of classicists who would love to have all the plays of Euripides, or all the books of Livy). So there was inherent to the system the sort of prioritization that is not necessary today, a process informed by value systems of librarians (i.e. for the period that interests me, a religious system, not that all texts preserved were religious). Not that every library preserves every piece of information in existence today, but the combined capacity of libraries more nearly approaches the ability to do so, and librarians themselves think it is a worthy goal to do so. In this manner libraries provide users as much as possible with "unimpeded access" to as much information and as many viewpoints as possible, leaving it up to the user rather than the librarian to select which expressions and viewpoints to consider (10). So the function of the library to preserve, as it has always done, now more than ever underlies the value of intellectual freedom (and certainly the other core values as well).
I should not make this entry much longer; however, while I haven't engaged all the content of this chapter, I do wish to note that as a parent of a toddler, I'm sure I will become increasingly interested in intellectual freedom as it relates to minors, particularly the question, "Who is ultimately responsible for what a young person is reading or seeing--the librarian or the parent?" (11). To what degree do we entrust to librarians the duty of acting in loco parentis? And does this depend on whether the librarian is at a school or public library? I am inclined to think, as a parent, that librarians have a responsibility in this regard similar to that of teachers, which might lead them to inhibit my daughter's (and other children's) intellectual freedom more than Rubin would like (and perhaps if there were a paragraph break before "The struggles to protect Intellectual Freedom" on p. 11 I would be assuaged). No doubt I have another sixteen years as a parent and my entire career as a librarian to puzzle this one out.
Rubin, Richard E. "Stepping Back and Looking Forward: Reflections on the Foundations of Libraries and Librarianship." The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 3-14.
Friday, April 10, 2009
About Vivarium: etymology and vivaria past and present, plus reflections on living knowledge
Vivarium in Latin literally means "a place for life," and is usually used to describe artificial microsystems like aquariums and terrariums created by people for the purpose of observation and research (see the wiki article). Cassiodorus' Vivarium on the Ionian Sea was named after the fishponds on his estate. In honor of the ancient Vivarium and its library, Saint John's University and the College of Saint Benedict have named their online digital collection Vivarium as well. (Saint John's is notable for its abbey, the setting of Kathleen Norris' The Cloister Walk, as well as its Liturgical Press and the St. John's Bible, a modern illuminated Bible whose exhibit I visited at the Library of Congress a couple of years ago.)
Naturally there is immense appeal to the image of the vivarium for the librarian. In addition to the importance of Cassiodorus' Vivarium itself to the mission of preserving classical texts for subsequent readers, there is the beauty of imagining collections of knowledge as living things. We treat information often as knowledge that was created or discovered before us and that will survive us, and the mission of preserving it as the mission to keep texts alive (I use the word "text" in a less limited sense than the verbal sense, although it is mostly with words that I am myself occupied), not only in a physical sense (i.e. these very pages) but in a less literal sense: texts only have meaning and value insofar as they are available too, and in fact read by, readers, and succeeding generations of them, we hope. Different readers will have different ways of reading texts--a modern reader of Homer will understand the Iliad differently, and find a different sort of value in it, than an ancient listener, to say nothing of the way that, say, the Bible is read and interpreted even now, and has been, by different readers in different communities in different religions. So the vivarium keeps texts alive not only by keeping them in existence and available and read, but by making it possible for those texts to be ever-reborn in different readings by different readers. (It is no different for art, music, and other sorts of collectible media; only the vehicle is different.) In that sense, even though the mission of the vivarium is preservation, the media it preserves are constantly changing.
Also constantly changing, especially in our times, is the vehicle of preservation. History has seen a slow change in the preservation of knowledge, from oral traditions (still strong in some cultures) to written forms of preservation, including cuneiform, wax and stone tablets, writing in ink on papyrus and paper, either on scrolls or bound in codices, then printing, and finally in our times in recordings of various sorts, film, and digital media. So even though the canon for, say, a classicist or patristics scholar is relatively finite, contained in a series of Oxford texts or the Patrologia or whatever, the medium for storing those canons is always being updated, although always with reference to the ancient manuscripts, such as they exist. So someone like me who is obsessed with ancient texts must nevertheless be proficient in using modern technologies to access them--which comes with the benefit of ease of use, searchability, and other advantages formerly unavailable. Searchability, hyperlinking, etc. also make the texts more alive by making them refer/speak to/with each other in much more tangible ways than previously--glosses on texts and juxtaposition of one text with another are instantaneous, perhaps taking some of the joy of research and making connections away from the reader but also increasing the possibility of new connections that were unseen before because they were difficult to make and because the reader had to be a repository unto himself (or herself, but we are talking generally about male readers in the long previous centuries I mean here) in order to be able to make them.
Naturally there is immense appeal to the image of the vivarium for the librarian. In addition to the importance of Cassiodorus' Vivarium itself to the mission of preserving classical texts for subsequent readers, there is the beauty of imagining collections of knowledge as living things. We treat information often as knowledge that was created or discovered before us and that will survive us, and the mission of preserving it as the mission to keep texts alive (I use the word "text" in a less limited sense than the verbal sense, although it is mostly with words that I am myself occupied), not only in a physical sense (i.e. these very pages) but in a less literal sense: texts only have meaning and value insofar as they are available too, and in fact read by, readers, and succeeding generations of them, we hope. Different readers will have different ways of reading texts--a modern reader of Homer will understand the Iliad differently, and find a different sort of value in it, than an ancient listener, to say nothing of the way that, say, the Bible is read and interpreted even now, and has been, by different readers in different communities in different religions. So the vivarium keeps texts alive not only by keeping them in existence and available and read, but by making it possible for those texts to be ever-reborn in different readings by different readers. (It is no different for art, music, and other sorts of collectible media; only the vehicle is different.) In that sense, even though the mission of the vivarium is preservation, the media it preserves are constantly changing.
Also constantly changing, especially in our times, is the vehicle of preservation. History has seen a slow change in the preservation of knowledge, from oral traditions (still strong in some cultures) to written forms of preservation, including cuneiform, wax and stone tablets, writing in ink on papyrus and paper, either on scrolls or bound in codices, then printing, and finally in our times in recordings of various sorts, film, and digital media. So even though the canon for, say, a classicist or patristics scholar is relatively finite, contained in a series of Oxford texts or the Patrologia or whatever, the medium for storing those canons is always being updated, although always with reference to the ancient manuscripts, such as they exist. So someone like me who is obsessed with ancient texts must nevertheless be proficient in using modern technologies to access them--which comes with the benefit of ease of use, searchability, and other advantages formerly unavailable. Searchability, hyperlinking, etc. also make the texts more alive by making them refer/speak to/with each other in much more tangible ways than previously--glosses on texts and juxtaposition of one text with another are instantaneous, perhaps taking some of the joy of research and making connections away from the reader but also increasing the possibility of new connections that were unseen before because they were difficult to make and because the reader had to be a repository unto himself (or herself, but we are talking generally about male readers in the long previous centuries I mean here) in order to be able to make them.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
About Vivarium
In this introductory post I want to sketch out a few themes on which I will expand in future posts. For now I will just briefly explain what this blog is, why it is called Vivarium, and what directions I anticipate it taking over the course of the next two years and beyond, although I can't even begin to predict where I will go from here--such is the joy of life and especially of new beginnings.
I am beginning the masters program in library and information science at Syracuse University this summer as a distance student. (Due to program requirements and my upstate New York connections, my program will include occasional residencies.) My previous academic background is in classics and English as an undergraduate, and religious studies as a graduate student, with a particular interest in patristics, especially that slippery period called late antiquity, from the decline of the Roman empire to the early Middle Ages. This blog takes its name from the monastery founded by Cassiodorus late in his life on his estate in southern Italy. One of the missions of his monastery and the object of his writings was to found a library for the preservation of classical learning, both sacred and secular. I am interested in the interplay of preservation and innovation, as well as the transition from classical Roman culture to full-fledged Christendom, both of which the idea of Vivarium captures (and other concepts as well).
As my interests and background suggest, I am passionately attached to all things old, and of course this includes rare books, even the form of the book-as-codex itself, which may become obsolete within my lifetime. It is probably a healthy challenge for me to enter a program (not to mention a field) that is very technology-oriented. I hope I will be able to look back as well as forward, learning to handle old information in new ways.
More to come.
I am beginning the masters program in library and information science at Syracuse University this summer as a distance student. (Due to program requirements and my upstate New York connections, my program will include occasional residencies.) My previous academic background is in classics and English as an undergraduate, and religious studies as a graduate student, with a particular interest in patristics, especially that slippery period called late antiquity, from the decline of the Roman empire to the early Middle Ages. This blog takes its name from the monastery founded by Cassiodorus late in his life on his estate in southern Italy. One of the missions of his monastery and the object of his writings was to found a library for the preservation of classical learning, both sacred and secular. I am interested in the interplay of preservation and innovation, as well as the transition from classical Roman culture to full-fledged Christendom, both of which the idea of Vivarium captures (and other concepts as well).
As my interests and background suggest, I am passionately attached to all things old, and of course this includes rare books, even the form of the book-as-codex itself, which may become obsolete within my lifetime. It is probably a healthy challenge for me to enter a program (not to mention a field) that is very technology-oriented. I hope I will be able to look back as well as forward, learning to handle old information in new ways.
More to come.
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