Household Opera

Calling all technogeek book historians

One of the good things about this weekend's conference was discovering common interests with fellow presenters. During one of those common-interest-finding conversations, I had an idea: "Wouldn't it be neat," I said, "if there were some kind of working group for people who work on both the history of the book and what's happening with digitization and new media?" "Will you start it?" said my interlocutor, who, like me, is interested in both of those things [hi, J., if you're reading this!]. And, really, the more I think about it, the more I think it ought to exist, if it doesn't already. Because there are just too many interesting parallels (information overload past and present; how eighteenth-century periodicals were the blogs of their day; early modern remix culture; etc. etc.) to pass up.

So, in the spirit of "'someone should...' means 'I will'," I'm going to look into starting such a group. I've already started thinking of people who've done relevant research, and organizations that I should check out — SHARP and the Institute for the Future of the Book, to start with, and maybe ACH, and I probably know at least a few people who might be interested. The question is, what might such a group want to accomplish? And how might it organize?

I'm going to be pondering all of this in my copious spare time. In the meantime, Reader, if you're interested, or if you know of other people already doing something along these lines, leave me a comment or send me an e-mail.

Conferencing, day 2

The main conference day is finished, and my paper went well — various people told me afterwards that they'd liked it. I think it benefited from being on a really good panel on a day of interesting and lively talks. I'm impressed that the conference organizers made everything go like clockwork, with good food appearing at the right moments and moderators keeping panels from running over (always a hard thing to do, if other conferences I've been to are any indication). Because we were a small group, and because most of us are still students, the whole thing had an appealingly low-key vibe, almost an "unconference" feel. And I've definitely met people I want to keep in touch with after we all disperse tomorrow.

Anyway, I'll post a link to my paper once it's available online, which it will be soon. I'm now crashing hard. Catch you all later...

[Postscript: This was always one of my favorite buildings when I lived here. I used to walk by it just to look at it and imagine living there. I walked by it again this evening, and it's as beautiful as ever. Thank heaven for Flickr, because Googling "that one yellow house on Division Street" wouldn't have gotten me anywhere.]

Ann Arbor variations

(Title of this post stolen shamelessly from a Frank O'Hara poem, in case you're wondering. He got an MFA here in between sojourns in New York.)

So here I am in Ann Arbor for day 1 of the conference I'm attending; the papers are all being delivered tomorrow and Sunday morning, so today was mostly about meeting the conference organizers and some of my fellow presenters. We had a lively dinner and happy hour, and now I'm contemplating getting out my paper and going over it again. But first, blogging.

In some ways it's very strange to be here, because the University of Michigan was where I went for my literature Ph.D., and I haven't been back since I left in 2004. In fact, my very first visit to Ann Arbor took place more or less exactly eleven years ago — which made me feel positively ancient when I realized how long it had been. When I got into town, I squeezed in a couple of hours of visits with people from the English department before I had to run off.

I found myself thinking the kinds of thoughts that everyone probably thinks on revisiting places where they once lived: first, detached amusement at how little has changed (a reshuffling of a few shops and restaurants, and most of the people I knew have moved on, but the town itself is much as I remember it). Then, a wave of nostalgia (expressed by uncontrollable babbling to fellow conferees: "And I used to walk this way every morning! And this is the street I used to live on! And this place sells fantastic scones!*"). Then, a strange sense of every place being overlaid with seven years' worth of memory and associations, like geological strata, to the point where I half expected to run into my younger self rounding every corner.**

I'd be lying if I said I didn't sometimes miss the person I used to be when I lived here — or, more accurately, the people I knew and hung out with when I used to live here. But all three of the old friends and mentors I saw again today said the same thing: "You look good. You look happy." And they're right. The person I used to be is still in there, but grown calmer and more confident and much less melancholy, and leaving the old life here had a lot to do with that. I suspect that this weekend is going to make me think a lot about how to find the through-lines from then to now. Getting back in touch with a lot of people I've lost touch with, for a start.

All right, enough navel-gazing for one night. (That was a lot of navel-gazing, I realize. I could blame it on having just come from happy hour, but really, it's the nostalgia talking.) Tomorrow, actual conference-related posting.

* And fantastic bread, and cheese, and brownies. If I have any time at all on Sunday, some of that bread is going home to Philadelphia with me. Too bad their delicious sherry olives wouldn't survive the plane trip without leaking.

** That overlay of associations on places is something I want to write about, someday. Not sure how yet, but it ties into other spatially-themed obsessions of mine. Perhaps it'll end up as research with some sort of poem cycle or memoir-thingy on the side.

Greetings from New York

For the past several weeks I've been using my Fridays (which, in my work schedule, are the start of the weekend) to work on my project for the special collections class I'm taking. It's a faux exhibit (i.e. we have to turn in an introduction and set of labels for an imaginary exhibit we'd like to put together), and mine is on the Gotham Book Mart.

Today, I'm on an all-too-brief daytrip to New York to look at some of the GBM's archives in the New York Public Library, and in front of me are two letters from Gertrude Stein (whose handwriting I can't always decipher), and another from Wallace Stevens. And there's so much more, my head practically exploded when the librarian handed me the shelflist.

I just had to mention that, because how often can one say "In front of me are two letters from Gertrude Stein"? Now, back to the archival folders, in a race against time before the library closes and I go off to dinner with friends followed by the bus back to Philly. Catch you all later!

Public speaking engagement!

I've just had a paper proposal accepted at the Questioning Authority 2008 conference, upcoming in March at the University of Michigan. The conference is organized around the theme of the authority of digital information; I'm going to be talking about authority control and LibraryThing.  Very exciting. Now I have to get cracking on actually writing up the talk and deciding which of the umpteen things I want to say can best fit into the time allotted. More, probably, as the conference weekend draws nearer.

Close reading and the librarian

I've been thinking, in a work-related context, about close reading, and how librarians might help students learn to do it. The standard "bibliographic instruction" model — class meets in library, librarian shows students how to find what they need — tends to be geared toward paper research. Close reading is a skill that isn't usually covered, because there's no well-defined set of library tools for it. Close reading also takes time, which is a luxury if you only see the students for one 50-minute session.

And yet there are plenty of courses that make use of close reading, and I always want my library teaching sessions to seem like a real part of the class rather than a disconnected "field trip" with no relationship to anything else the students are doing. So the question came up recently: how can a library visit reinforce what the students are learning about how to engage closely with a text?

There are one or two nifty resources I can demonstrate (I'm showing one upcoming class the OED) to encourage that kind of engagement. But I think Dr. Crazy is right about teaching close reading*: you have to model it and get the students to practice it. And where that fits into bibliographic instruction as we know it, I'm still figuring out. But I think it's worth pursuing, because I always found that students responded much better to short exercises that get them actively reading than to extended lectures. Now the question is how to carry that over into the teaching I do as a librarian.

Perhaps one way might be to approach the question of evaluating sources (is this web site appropriate to cite in a term paper? is this encyclopedia worth the paper it's printed on?) as a close-reading question. Or maybe what we need is a whole other kind of library instruction that's more directly part of the class. If I come up with any answers, I'll no doubt blog about them.

* Incidentally, I Googled "teaching close reading" and got an appreciable number of hits from academic blogs. One of my Drexel professors this term likes the idea of using blogs and wikis as a way for librarians and faculty to communicate; I think librarian/faculty group blogs could be a really neat way to hold a campus-wide conversation about, say, teaching writing. Or introducing undergraduates to science research. Or what have you.

ALA Midwinter wrapup

Well, there went my resolution to blog at intervals over the weekend, but really, I was mostly there for a handful of discussion groups, the chance to schmooze with people in areas I'd like to work in, and the exhibits. (NYRB Editions, you are my favorite booth at every conference.) ALA Midwinter is mostly for people who are on committees, and while I'm planning on doing more of that, I'm not on any committees yet. So it was a fairly low-key experience.

I did go to some nice receptions, and squeezed in a visit to the Rosenbach Museum and Library, where I finally saw their current Maurice Sendak exhibit and went on a tour with several other attendees. Not that I couldn't go there any weekend, but I might not have taken the tour if left to my own devices. Our docent showed us one of John Tenniel's sketches for Alice in Wonderland (the Walrus and the Carpenter accompanied by oysters), and pointed out the reconstruction of Marianne Moore's Greenwich Village apartment.

Random observation: while rushing through one of the hotels, I passed a whole group of people knitting, and spotted another knitter or two at work during various sessions. The sweater project is at an awkward stage, but I wished I'd brought it along. Striking up a conversation with complete strangers is so much easier when all of you have in-progress knitting in your hands.

ALA Midwinter, day 1

I'm sitting in the Convention Center in downtown Philly waiting for the next job-seeker orientation event to start up. Most of what I'm doing today is job-seeker workshops, getting my resume reviewed, and checking out the recruiters; tomorrow and Sunday I'm going to a bunch of Literature in English Section events, the MLA International Bibliography discussion group, a session on next generation catalogs, and a bunch of receptions. I'm also hoping to have time to drop into the OCLC bloggers' salon Sunday night. If any of you reading this are also here for ALA and want to say hello, send me an e-mail!

It's nice to be at a conference that's practically in my backyard, although getting to 8 a.m. sessions is a bit more time-consuming when you're not in a hotel right near the convention center. But it still beats air travel by a factor of infinity.

E-books and chained books

Lately I've been hearing about one of the disadvantages of commercial e-books (specifically, the kind sold by vendors like NetLibrary or Ebrary): you can't lend them from one library to another. Dead-tree-based books can be ILL'd and shared among library consortia, but you can't ship an e-book when it comes with restrictions about which users at which campuses can use it.

I was thinking about this, and it occurred to me that restricting the use of an e-book only to users from a given institution (and placing restrictions on copying and printing, as NetLibrary does) pretty much negates the benefits of putting the content online in the first place. Apart from making the text searchable, the great advantage of online access is that multiple people can access the same content from multiple places at the same time. Instead of 25 people waiting to get the library's one copy of an in-demand title, they can all get to it.

Take away that, hedge the content in with restrictions, keep the content from circulating among libraries the way books have done since they invented ILL, and you're left with something rather less convenient than reading a paper book. You can't stick it in your bag and carry it around with you from one place to another*, you can't loan it to someone else, and you're most likely stuck reading it on an eye-tiring screen. It's not just like a return to the print model; it's like a return to the early modern chained books model, where books were attached to desks and shelves by a heavy chain to prevent people from stealing them. And who wants to go back to the days of book-chaining?**

And people wonder why e-books haven't caught on. I don't really see publishers changing their ways any time soon, though I do have hopes for the Open Library project; their public-domain books are downloadable, printable, free, and open to anyone from anywhere.

None of these are startlingly new observations, I know, at least not to anyone who deals with library collections. But they've been on my mind of late.

* Although colleges and universities are using proxy servers and the like to allow for off-campus access. Which helps. But it's hard for a lot of users to figure out, and sometimes you just want to print the damn chapter so you can read it at your leisure on the subway or while eating dinner or wherever.
** Now I'm trying to think of a way to work in medieval girdle books as an analogue to portable reading devices, but the analogy will only go so far.

Cataloging Jefferson's library

Over at LibraryThing, someone suggested cataloging the libraries of famous people, and the project quickly snowballed into a collective effort to catalog Thomas Jefferson's book collection. Anyone on LT can join in and claim a section of the catalog. I'm doing Pastorals, Odes, and Elegies, and have been deep in 18th-century editions of Theocritus and Ovid this afternoon. Great fun. It's the kind of thing you probably have to be either a librarian or a hard-core history geek (or both) to enjoy, but the great thing about LT is that it attracts precisely that kind of crowd.

Anyway, knowing that at least a few friends from UVa still visit this blog from time to time, I especially wanted to point them to the TJ-cataloging project. Mr. Jefferson's library lives!