2017 A Year to Record

READING: Wikimedian in residence at the MET reflects on 6 months of work and over 300k image uploads to the Commons.

Interesting things:

“A strength of the edit-a-thon and the Wikimedia projects at the Met generally has been the ability to bring together interdisciplinary collaboration, with the museum’s Digital, Education, and Libraries departments all contributing in true encyclopedic fashion. One highlight result from the Thomas J. Watson Library edit-a-thon was Hiawatha and Minehaha, a pair of busts by Edmonia Lewis, the article developed by artist Heather Hart of the Black Lunch Table project. You can read a Met librarian’s account of the edit-a-thon at a blog post in the Met Libraries’ In Circulation by William Blueher.”

Wiki Project - Sum of All Paintings on WikiData - yes, i’ve been looking for this project :)

Wiki Project Fashion

READING: “NC is a no-go: bathrooms, libraries, and the limits of welcoming” by Chris Bourg

Inspiring blog post on why bathroom bills matter, minority frustration in the library profession, and how actions with good intentions can still cause harm...some quotes -

“Traveling to states with bathroom bills is not safe for me, and it is also not safe for any of our transgender, non-binary folks, genderqueer, gender-fluid and gender non-conforming colleagues.”

“... we [librarians] need to move beyond the notion of being welcoming and we need to consider real fundamental, cultural and structural changes that would foster inclusion and justice.“

“...this is also what we in libraries do when we declare ourselves ‘welcoming’ to librarians and archivists of color. We welcome ‘them’ to our spaces, and to our profession, without really doing the work to actually make our profession and our cultures inclusive, and without doing the work to undo the decades of exclusion and discrimination that are the history and legacy of our profession and of most of our institutions.”

A place to start:

White, Deborah Gray. "Mining the Forgotten: Manuscript Sources for Black Women's History." The Journal of American History 74, no. 1 (1987): 237-42.

Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo (2004) Black women historians from the late 19th century to the dawning of the civil rights movement. J Afr Am Hist 89(3):241–261

Watched the documentary today, basically cried my way through it. The photos are so good, and the interviews and work by John Maloof seem to be done with a lot of respect. The care taken with the collection and the genuine attempts to get to know the artist are very touching.

WOW: World of Wearable Art at Peabody Essex Museum

Free videos on DACS

A couple of Black History month / Black Lives Matter reading lists and reading goals.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s reading list via NYPL - https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/10/23/ta-nehisi-coates-reading-list

MIT Libraries Black Lives Matter - https://www.pinterest.com/mitlibraries/black-lives-matter/

Currently reading Fantasies of the Library edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin

Some notes / things of interest

Nobody can get enough of Aby Warburg’s “law of the good neighbor”! It is much more intriguing to not follow a conventional classification system. (Though it is harder to actually find things - though it wouldn’t really matter if each item was given an exact space on a shelf - but then shelf reading would be actually the worst.)

At the Prelinger Library - “The associative subject flow itself is designed to facilitate serendipty, and serendipity is enhanced by the practice of creative juxtaposition of materials within subject sections. Gov docs are shelved near the modern monographs that interpret them, and satirical histories are shelved next to serious ones. Subject-matter fiction is interspersed amongst non-fiction, and trade literature can sometimes stand for a whole topic.” p. 4

The browsing experience of physical bookshelves - and even of the web - is so absorbing, but our digital archives and libraries still struggle to serve browsers and wanderers. p. 4

http://www.futureofthebook.org/

“Some of these teenaged visitors have never really held an ‘old’ book before. I’ve heard teenagers scream w/ enthusiasm that they are being ‘allowed’ to touch and hold an ‘old’ book. And smell it. They become extremely tactile and extremely involved during their explorations of the library. This is the most illuminating part of having a lot of young people in our library’s community. It has shown us that 3-D objects, rather than having been de-valued in the digital age are if anything being re-valued.” p. 8

Dewey decimal system above. Impossible to arrange books objectively.

“Since it is usually possible to assign one book to multiple categories at once, any chosen library system [...] will reflect particular assumptions, while operating through a combination of various classifactory modes.”

I’m keeping track of books read on LibraryThing. Not doing the 75 book challenge this year, but I think I might hit 75 anyway if I keep this up! I am pretty much hooked on reading.

Book 1: Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman by Lindy West

Book 2: Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride by Lucy Knisley

Book 3: The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri

Book 4: Baggywrinkles: A Lubber's Guide to Life at Sea by Lucy Bellwood

Book 5: Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

Book 6: The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Darnton 

Book 7: Fantasies of the Library edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin