Retrofit 1: Starting With Pieces

Like Sir Saul Enderby, chief of British intelligence MI6 in le Carré’s Smiley’s People, I can be “thick.” I sometimes need to plot things out, building a thought or idea step by step as if constructing a Euclidean geometric proof. Such is the case as I consider my contributions to a panel discussion/seminar slated for late June, part of the Rare Books and Manuscript Section (RBMS) preconference in Las Vegas. The preliminary description for the seminar — with the title “Retrofitting Expectations or Redefining Reality: What Does the Future of the Special Collections Professional Look Like?” — reads:

Does the popular image of the special collections librarian match what professionals now find in their jobs? Fundamental changes in librarianship and academia are impacting departments and their staffs. New economic and technological realities are reshaping the demands of the communities we serve – both patron and employer. The reality of the work we do may not resemble our visions of the profession when we started. Today’s professional needs a new understanding of expectations and opportunities in order to succeed. This moderated “fishbowl” discussion will put questions to two library administrators and two professionals in order to clarify their expectations and goals. The seminar will aim to provide strategies for building a successful career in a changing field.

Am I showing my RBMS hand by thinking out loud here, thus diminishing any impact I might have during the seminar itself? I don’t think so. There is a slight risk of showing my ignorance, thinking foolish thoughts, or getting sidetracked along the way. I’ll take the risk. I need to get my thoughts in order and out in the open (or at least partially in the open), in the hope that someone might offer an interesting or useful comment, link me to an article or blog, or correct me along the way. I don’t want to spoil our Las Vegas gathering by disclosing too much. On the other hand, this exercise might plant a few seeds and put colleagues in a prepared and productive mode (or mood) once we arrive in “Sin City.”

I’m not going to attempt to build my entire argument (or statement, or contribution) in a single post. And I might not post all the parts here, as I pick out the various pieces of this puzzle, play with them, and put them in place. I might, after all, need to maintain some sense of suspense or anticipation as to where I finally land and what the puzzle ultimately looks like.

For starters, perhaps in a pedantic or pedestrian fashion, let me grab the first thread from the seminar’s description: the popular image of the special collections librarian. Is there such a thing? Certainly there’s the stereotypical image of a librarian—a thing (and topic) I abhor and believe unrealistic. So, right at the start, let's abandon this train of thought and all images, words, etc. associated with the stereotype.

The impression of a special collections librarian is more problematic, so let me attempt to get at such an image through the back door, as it were, by looking at archivists. (I will have more to say about the archival profession as I move through the various steps of my proof. Let me at least put a placeholder here for a thought worth pursuing later, one I may or may not agree with (but have heard uttered by others more than once): archivists—at least in the North American context—engaged in a silent coup as they took over RBMS leadership during the last decade, wresting control from bibliophiles.)

Richard J. Cox, in a blog post from 2006 entitled “What Should the Fictional Archivist Look Like?,” asks:

If an archivist were going to write a novel or mystery portraying an archivist or the work of an archives, what would be the difference between what he or she would write and what a professional writer might compose? Mostly, I suppose, the archivist might work hard to avoid the stereotypical features most writers easily resort to in their portrayal. What are those characteristics? They seem to be absent-mindedness, other-worldliness, clumsiness, dustiness, musty odors, awkwardness, and other features suggesting one who is far more comfortable with dead, rather than living, people.

As to this stereotype, Cox observes: "Whatever the reasons, archivists are surrounded, buried in, layers of stereotypes, that they can hardly see their way through. But, still the question might be, what is the ideal way, if there is an ideal way that the archivist might be brought to life in a realistic fashion?"

Does Cox offer as a suitable image, something acceptable to the profession? Not really. Only hints, e.g. through the academic novels of David Lodge, but even here we have a problem as Cox adds another stereotypical image into the mix.

Everyone knows that the great university is still home to many who have no hope of making a living in any other part of the world, adding to the amusement evident in the most recent trend in university administrators’ thinking or rhetoric, to reform their institutions into the corporate model. Assuming that a business is intended to make some degree of financial profit, it is wonderful to envision our splendid group of professors contributing to the profit line. Most experienced academics know that to transform their departments into business would be a sure way of killing their programs in a relatively short time – but the rhetoric and posturing along the way would be fun....

Indeed, a thread to work with here is that so many academic archivists are frustrated academics, people who spend years preparing for a teaching career and life of quiet solitude only to discover there were no jobs or they were, despite opportunities, unemployable as academics for some reason.

If Cox leaves us with hints (skewering administrators along the way), Rachel Alexander provides more, at least in terms of stereotypes. In her “Literature review on the image archives and archivists project in popular culture,” Alexander provides another string of images, including: "middle-aged to elderly..., wearing glasses, and dressing sloppily or primly.... a 'fossilized anachronism who should have been put out to pasture long before....'" More images follow, none of them complimentary. I'll spare you the details. I’m sure readers can point to other articles, blogs, books, films, etc. with popular portrayals of archivists and librarians (who are often lumped together in those depictions). Unfortunately, I am still left with the original question in the seminar description: Does the popular image of the special collections librarian match what professionals now find in their jobs?

I think this is the wrong preliminary question to ask. We should scrap or ignore the popular image. We delude ourselves by thinking about or even briefly considering prevalent impressions. It is navel-gazing at its worst. If we got into this segment of the profession because of some quixotic idea of the scholar-bookman and no one in our graduate educational experience disabused us of our fanciful notions, then our professors are to blame for continuing the stereotype; we’re to blame for swallowing it hook, line, and sinker; and our administrators are to blame by leading us by the nose through poorly written or deceptive job postings (assuming such things exist).

Instead, we should deal with the real image, or at least the one we talk about in terms of professional competencies. It is here that we need to begin, to take a long, hard look in the mirror, and see if we like the reflection. With any luck, and perhaps with a bit of skill and guidance from others wiser than ourselves, we’ll see (or are in the process of seeing) “a professional who gradually achieves such general proficiency over the course of his/her career” and “a sense of community and common identity among special collections professionals” that at the same time helps “others to understand our work.”

An End of Semester Contemplation

“They died in their homes, not from an assassin’s bullet, and in their 60s, not in their prime. When C. S. Lewis collapsed in his Oxford bedroom, the presidential motorcade was leaving Love Field. When Aldous Huxley requested a final shot of LSD, a TV set in the next room had just blared the news that the president had been shot. And then the coincidence of two of modernity’s keenest critics dying on the same November day was lost in a storm of headlines and public grief.” — Ross Douthat, “Puddleglum And The Savage,” New York Times, 11/23/13

Thanks to a dear colleague for sending me a copy of Douthat’s piece in the New York Times. I missed this when it came out in the paper, but commend it to you now. A number of things happened between the publication of Douthat’s piece and today, notably the passing of Nelson Mandela, that are worth comment. But before doing so, let me return to Douthat’s piece; it sets up a string of thoughts percolating in my head (perking, but not necessarily clear, as you’ll see further on in this missive).

Douthat identifies Lewis and Huxley as “two of modernity’s keenest critics.” This raises the question: what were their critiques? Douthat answers the question:

Huxley and Lewis did not share a worldview — one was a seeker drawn to spiritualism, Eastern religion and psychedelics; the other was (and remains) the most famous Christian apologist in the modern English-speaking world. But they shared a critique of contemporary civilization, and offered a similar warning about where its logic might end up taking us.

For Huxley, this critique took full shape in “Brave New World,” his famous portrait of a dystopia in which the goals of pleasure and stability have crowded out every other human good, burying discontent under antidepressants, genetic engineering and virtual-reality escapes.

For Lewis, the critique was distilled in “The Abolition of Man,” which imagined a society of “men without chests,” purged of any motivation higher than appetite, with no “chatter of truth and mercy and beauty” to disturb or destabilize.

In effect, both Huxley and Lewis looked at a utilitarian’s paradise — a world where all material needs are met, pleasure is maximized and pain eliminated — and pointed out what we might be giving up to get there: the entire vertical dimension in human life, the quest for the sublime and the transcendent, for romance and honor, beauty and truth. (emphasis mine)

Douthat makes other observations about the relationship of Huxley, Lewis, and Kennedy over the arc of history, but what I want to focus on is the critique of a “utilitarian’s paradise,” “what we might be giving up to get there,” and how this might touch on Mandela’s passing (or, for that matter, the Pope being named “Person of the Year.”) These things seem appropriate items for an end of semester contemplation.

I note this in part because recently I have had a distinct sense that my own work is being robbed of those vertical dimensions. This is not to fault anyone with whom I work. It is simply a statement of condition, one that has been building for decades and symptomatic of much in higher education (and other realms of work). My job—or how others perceive my job—now seems much more tied to managing, counting, or commodifying the items under my care. A sense of transcendence is being lost. (I commented—or at least hinted at this—in my last post.) For all the wonders that surround me in my work, I do not have a strong sense from colleagues or others that a library or archive is a place appreciated as a locus for mystery and wonder, i.e. transcendent or sublime.

Somewhat tangentially, but still relevant to this thread of thought, consider what Time gave as reasons for naming the Pope “Person of the Year”:

For pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets, for committing the world's largest faith to confronting its deepest needs and for balancing judgment with mercy…. What makes this pope so important is the speed with which he has captured the imaginations of millions who had given up on hoping for the church at all. People weary of the endless parsing of sexual ethics, the buck-passing infighting over lines of authority when all the while (to borrow from Milton), ‘the hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed.’ In a matter of months, Francis has elevated the healing mission of the church—the church as servant and comforter of hurting people in an often harsh world—above the doctrinal police work so important to his recent predecessors. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were professors of theology. Francis is a former janitor, nightclub bouncer, chemical technician and literature teacher.

I’m related to (and sometimes part of) the professorial class, so I cringe a bit at those last words. What may be one tiny thread connecting my own work with the Pope’s is a sense of “hands-on.” I like to get my hands on “the stuff.” It is one of the best ways I know for getting an intimate knowledge and feel for a collection. It is a sublime and transcendent mode of communication and one that is less available to me these days. Granted, this is not like feeding or clothing the poor. Higher education is still, in the eyes of a majority of the world’s population, a luxury. I need to keep reminding myself of this as I work through boxes, folders, or volumes of what the world might consider ephemera.

I don’t know if this makes sense; it still feels muddled to me. Mandela’s passing—or at least how his life and passing is interpreted by others—confuses that matter even more (at least in my mind). Consider, for example, the ending of President Obama’s eulogy:

We will never see the likes of Nelson Mandela again. But let me say to the young people of Africa, and young people around the world—you can make his life’s work your own…. He speaks to what is best inside us. After this great liberator is laid to rest; when we have returned to our cities and villages, and rejoined our daily routines, let us search then for his strength—for his largeness of spirit—somewhere inside ourselves. And when the night grows dark, when injustice weighs heavy on our hearts, or our best laid plans seem beyond our reach—think of Madiba, and the words that brought him comfort within the four walls of a cell:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

What a great soul it was. We will miss him deeply.

His, was, indeed a great soul, a transcendent soul. But was he, really, the master of his fate and captain of his soul? Or did a little child lead him?

Primary Sourcery

Just a quick note to let you know about a new blog called "Primary Sourcery" produced by the folks in the Archives and Special Collections department of the University of Minnesota Libraries. The introductory post (and link) may be found here. I invite you to subscribe or otherwise follow along as we offer weekly postings on things of interest here at the Elmer L. Andersen Library.  I'm looking forward to seeing these posts from my friends here in the library and discovering new things about the amazing collections under our stewardship. No doubt you'll hear from me now and then as I join with my colleagues in posting something of interest.  I hope you enjoy what we have to share!

Iowa Floods

Just a quick note on the weather and its effects on special collections operations. Yesterday morning I saw a note in an Iowa paper about state archives being moved from the lower levels of buildings to escape the oncoming flood waters. This afternoon I spotted a note in the U of Iowa blog that stated: "Some Special Collections materials stored in the Main Library’s lower level are in the process of being moved as a precaution against a rising water level. This shift in location may make some collections difficult or impossible to retrieve through the duration of the flood."

I have family in the Iowa City area and Mason City, both of which have been hit by floods (I'm wondering how the Music Man Museum is holding up in Mason City as I write this). My sister-in-law lives near the Coralville reservoir and according to the folks from the government that monitor water levels, the reservoir was at 105% of capacity as of yesterday morning, with all that water headed towards Iowa City and the university.

So this promps a general question: how many of us have stuff stored in lower levels of buildings where there's a history or potential threat of flooding? I just have too many bad memories on this front: getting caught in flood waters when the Chicago River came pouring into some of my basement space (in an earlier job), the water main break that hit the Chicago Historical Society, the North Dakota floods that hit the universities up there in the late 1990s. . . the list can go on.

So here's a shout out to Sid and the other folks at U of I libraries, archives, and special collections: hang in there! Here's hoping and praying for a little less rain and the lowering of water levels in your neck of the woods.

Red Baron Hotwheels and Accessories

I've been pondering what I posted last week and I'm not sure I'm comfortable with my conclusion. I wrote:

Maybe that's what we should do with all the cool stuff we have in special collections -- create the containers for the toys and allow our players to spill the stuff out on the floor and let them dream new things into existence.

Its the "creating containers" part of that post that's still bugging me -- what's the difference between creating a container and building a tree-house? Not much. Its creepy. So I need a different image.

But I kind of like the toy theme (special collection items as toys), so let me play around a bit. Lynne Thomas wrote in comment to my last post:

At least we have the old, cool materials to entice them . . . but I wonder if that comes across as creepy? Where is the line between friendly and creepy?

Good question and it reminds me of something related. Not to mix the toy image with television, but . . . are members of the Addams Family friendly or creepy? Remember the lyrics to the opening song?

They're creepy and they're kooky,
Mysterious and spooky,
They're all together ooky,
The Addams Family.

Their house is a museum
Where people come to see 'em
They really are a scream
The Addams Family.

(Neat)
(Sweet)
(Petite)

So get a witches shawl on
A broomstick you can crawl on
We're gonna pay a call on
The Addams Family.

How about the Munsters? (Both shows debuted within a week of each other, in 1964, according to IMDB.)

Maybe the image I'm thinking of is more along the lines of an accessory. (Not the kind of accessory that Sid Phillips, that nasty kid next door, had in mind in "Toy Story" -- or maybe so -- its an interesting cross-over with Pugsley Addams (or Uncle Fester) -- but I digress. At the same time, note this little bit of trivia from the IMDB site: "Sid Phillips is said to be inspired by a former Pixar employee of the same last name who was known to disassemble toys and use the parts to build bizarre creations." Isn't that what we do with mash-ups? But back to the toys for a moment.

When my brother and I were kids we collected Hot Wheels cars. Now, Hot Wheels cars begged to be accessorized. First we had the cars (which we ran down old carpet tubes or across the floor). But then we needed to buy the special track for the cars. And the clamp and starting gate to attach the track to a table or chair (for the necessary height so that gravity could power the car down the track). And then there were the special curves that attached to the track. And then there were the double curves so you can run the cars in an oval or figure-eight. But to do that you needed something called a "supercharger" because once you closed the system, i.e. didn't have a long length of track to just run out on using gravity, you needed some way to keep the car running around and around the closed loop of track. And of course, you needed somewhere to store your cars. The accessorizing from Mattel went on and on (and on; they learned a lot from Barbie).

Anyway, to get us back to the point, maybe what we're about is accessorizing our special collections and rarities. We're expanding the field of play, or allowing our "toys" to do more than they were maybe initially designed for. We're not building new containers. We're not creeping people out with our treehouses. We're just adding tracks and curves and superchargers so we (and our players) can have more fun. We're just taking all our cool stuff "to infinity, and beyond."

Creepy Treehouses

Barbara Fister had an interesting post the other day on the ACRLog. The topic was a new tech term she'd come across--"creepy treehouse." She defined the term this way:

A creepy treehouse is a place built by scheming adults to lure in kids. Kids tend to sense there’s something creepy about that treehouse and avoid it. Hence, a new definition: “Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.”

It’s an interesting take on that vaguely unsettled response we sometimes get from students when we try to be too cool, try too hard to seem fun and playful, when we make familiar toys unpalatably “educational.” Setting up an outpost in an attractive playspace with an ulterior motive is just . . . creepy.

That got me to wondering. . . what sites have I created (along with my colleagues) that might fit the creepy treehouse model? At the same time, in the same post, Barbara also brings in the notion of play.

[W]e learn by playing, and at its best, our learning is play. . . . Maybe the library itself is a place for that form of play, once students get clued into the fact they can join the conversation. Then we won’t have to build a creepy treehouse to entice them in.

The nub of the issue, as I read Barbara's post, was kind of a combination of "where do we play?" and a "Field of Dreams" notion of "if you build it, they will come." What created the "creepy treehouse" reaction was when the built environment got pushed to the student, as in the example Barbara gave of Blackboard Sync pushing readings and assignments into Facebook space. Happily, in my quick review of web sites I'm responsible for, I didn't find any examples of content being pushed out to students, into spaces that are their own. But I'm still wondering. . .

So what's a good model, instead of the creepy treehouse? For me, I'm thinking Tinkertoys, or Legos, or Lincoln Logs, or Erector Sets--all the toys my brother and I had as kids that provided hours of fun, hours of play and creativity. (We never had a treehouse, but loved to climb in trees.) We built things (and destroyed things) and had fun doing it, all because we could open the box (or the large can), spill the pieces onto the floor, look at all the possibilities, and dream something into existence. Maybe that's what we should do with all the cool stuff we have in special collections--create the containers for the toys and allow our players to spill the stuff out on the floor and let them dream new things into existence. And maybe we shouldn't worry about the stuff getting mixed up now and then. Every once in a while my brother and I would launch pieces of Lincoln Logs into our Lego creations to see how they stood up. Maybe we should allow that same sense of playfulness--and testing--in our own spaces. We might even has some fun in the process.