Month: September 2018

I was particularly pleased with this week’s readings, specially since we don’t have a strong link with public libraries in Mexico.

In Battles’s text, one of the things that caught my attention was how Panizzi, through the design of the library catalog, aimed to develop a more independent reader. I was wondering how that spirit has changed throughout the years, specially since we are used to receive information that is tailored to us depending on our online behavior. In that sense, it was no surprise to see this initiative by the Brooklyn Public Library.

After reading the strategic plan of the library and the expansion of the capabilities public libraries have across the country (Mattern), I started wondering about labor, budgets and what it means to be a librarian nowadays.

It seems to me that the role of libraries is to work as bastions of Democracy and truth, at the same time, they are being challenged with limited budgets in a time were they need to incorporate new technologies and people who know how to work with them.

• Are academic programs tackling the needs of public libraries?
• Has the role of library foundations and group of trustees become more important?
• Is the collecting of data going to affect the distribution of books and activities that are available for the public?

The BPL’s 2018 Strategic Plan lays out a comprehensive “epistemological framework” (Mattern), detailing its current and future plans for promoting learning (by providing communities with necessary resources and opportunities) and for stewarding knowledge (by fostering connections and communication between patrons, communities, librarians, branches, and other boroughs). However, BPL’s professed intention to serve “all Brooklyn residents” does not seem to square with its plans (Strategic Plan, 41-42) to construct new facilities in two of Brooklyn’s wealthiest neighborhoods (according to this map visualizing census data) nor the already completed renovation of existing facilities in wealthier neighborhoods (Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Kensington). Recognizing that there are other renovations planned, I wonder whether the temporal prioritization of certain neighborhoods or branches over others can be attributed to the BPL’s interest in cultivating a community-specific approach (Strategic Plan, 65) – or if there is a hierarchy of publics nested within the greater public of Brooklyn as a whole. Is “public” here merely “a vehicle for publicity” (Battles, 68)? To what extent are BPL’s branches (including their updates) “contextually-designed” (Mattern), and where do the boundaries of its contexts lie? 

Matthew Battles’ sweeping history of the library, which in turn is also the history of the organization and consumption of knowledge, provides a fascinating survey of the roles libraries had served as custodians of wisdom, status symbols, objects of conspicuous consumption, and, more recently, a space of gathering for purposes of community, literacy, and access to information.

As public libraries today become more and more what Mattern calls “a network of integrated, mutually reinforcing, evolving infrastructures — in particular, architectural, technological, social, epistemological and ethical infrastructures,” the university libraries seem to retain the elite, research-oriented quality that had characterized most libraries before the proliferation of mass-produced books. Big cities like NYC aside, most public libraries nowadays do not have very much scholarly literature at all, let alone access to academic databases. I can’t help but think that this university/public divide is very problematic as it makes independent scholarship without university affiliation much more difficult (and expensive), while the public libraries are being stretched thin to serve the community’s needs for baseline English as well as digital literacy.

The readings this week outline the structure and organization of the archives, primarily focusing on what documents might make it to the archive and which one’s fall through the selective non-uniform sieve of the archivist (An Archivist). Unlike a library catalog that categorizes by subject, the archival records are organized first by the source (who wrote it) and second by what details the record contains, including biographical and contextual information about the source and contents of the record. However, as straightforward as the Archives @ PAMA post made archival organization out to be, the other readings point to a practice of archiving that is anything but. Though records tend to follow the descriptive patterns laid out in the PAMA post, there is no universal archival cataloging process used by all archivists in the cultivation of their records.

In the examples given regarding how records reach the archive, I wonder about the how the original source might organize their own records before giving them up. Though some of the fonds might be collected by someone other than the source (am I using the word fonds correctly?), I wonder about sources that deliberately do their own DIY personal archive work before they hand their records over to someone else. For example, I am fond of writing long letters to friends, and have been considering asking them for copies so I can have a record of things I wrote years ago. Not sure what I’ll end up doing with it all, but I consider it the cultivation of my own little archive. How much can archivists account for the source’s own awareness of their documents’ possibility of being archived, and how that awareness shapes the records they produce/create/destroy/decide not to make?

The archive invokes oppositional questions. Is it about power, control of narrative, history, access, memory? All entail the question of “who” – whose power, whose control, whose absence from the record. Yet, isn’t it also “under siege” (Manoff, 13)? Should we protect it from fetishization or from quiet elimination? Derrida shows us that the apparent psychological drive to record also involves its own kind of production. Technological advances and corporate interests vie with the material demands of archive-keeping. The Peel Archive pages remind us of archivists’ work to render less obscure even the workings of the archive. We see the physical space required, the impossibility of digitizing everything, that choices have to be made by. Should those choices be automated or remain subject to human biases and error? Even those who wouldn’t describe themselves as post-modernists recognize the lack of certain objectivity of historical record. No wonder the archive is a subject of contention.

The pervasiveness of data in digital age obscures how easily it can be obliterated from record, information obsolescence is as much a problem as information saturation. It is fitting we are investigating this concept in an interdisciplinary class, these questions invoke the meaning of the boundaries between them.

Reading Derrida, I was surprised reading such a clearly media theoretical approach. Besides that the picture of Freud sitting at a laptop writing an Email to C.G. Jung made me smile, I think (and MacLuhan would be also in line with that) his observations are right that psychoanalysis would have been something completely different if Freud would have written emails.

And with that the archivization would have been different too. He writes, “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content” (p. 17). Along these lines it is clear, that if the archives infrastructure is laid out for paper, manuscripts and books, it would have to print all the emails out on paper to be able to store them. But what happens to the message then? I think with this development the archive becomes not only a place where records are stored, as mentioned in one text in the readings for today, but also has to maintain technologies to keep them readable in their original form. It soon will become an archive of technical devices, which incorporates not only archivists but technicians, programmers, and restorers of new media. That made me think of the Museum ZKM in Karlsruhe which is in the same building as my university and their problems in showing media art from the 70s or 80s because it is an immense work to get the technical devices on which they were made and shown working again.

I am struck by the connection many of this week’s readings point out between archives and humans involved in their conception and maintenance. Derrida invokes the history of the term archive, pointing to their original Greek definition as the residences of “superior magistrates”. This involves both a physical location to house legal documents, and the guardianship of “the law” as signified through those documents by a group of privileged people. This initial conception of the term makes the archivist as equally important as the collected documents; the modern and increasingly digital world of the archive cedes more power to the collection than its human arbiters.

In the Jessa Lingel piece and the Peel Archives piece, the world of the archivist comes across as arcane and esoteric, riddled with untruths partially colored by mis-characterizations of archival science and practice. The Peel Archives piece establishes the quandary of the archivist to create a comprehensive collection with the caveat of not being able to keep “everything”. It is fitting that Lingel uses a reference to Matisse’s The Treachery of Images before critiquing the over-abundance of outdated, gendered, analyses of archival work and the lack of distinct separation between library/archive.

What I find most baffling (to the point of amusement) reading Derrida is what appears to be a complete refusal of epidemiology in favor of metaphor. Thankfully, Carolyn Steedman notes this oversight, calling attention to the missed opportunity in characterizing (or perhaps more appropriate, in diagnosing) “archive fever.” Notwithstanding Derrida’s critical engagement with psychoanalysis, his ontological framing of the archive fails to take into consideration another obvious archive: Freud’s collection of antiquities.* In her book, Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects, Lana Lin demonstrates the efforts in archival practice are very much like the archives themselves: requiring persistent labor and maintenance.** Both Jessica Lingel’s and Region of Peel Archives blogs acknowledge the very human forces behind the objects, places, and processes we often take for granted when walking into a library or museum – or, similarly, when entering the virtual spaces that allow us to access memories of meaning.

*Maybe he does write about the Freudian archive. I should admit that I haven’t read much Derrida. I would rather read him through someone like Patricia Clough.

**Does this brush against your recent work, Shannon?

There is a consensus across all readings that archival collections are not neural historical records, but shaped — both willingly and accidentally — by archivists, technology, infrastructure, culture, and political ideology. This extends beyond what is archived to what is recorded in formats that lend themselves to archiving in the first place.

In the world of machine learning — underwriting its supposed omnipotence — “everything is a vector”, meaning that any information can supposedly be encoded in numerical, tabular form which can be computed with. Work in this field frequently uses, or “mines“ digital archives. Even if everything in those repositories were vectors, they would only point at records, not data itself. The data processing pipeline doesn’t draw from the source, but only connects to the tap. It misses out on the realia, things that hold meaning but were never even archivable in the first place. Data scientists should chat with archivists more.

The archive can be a site of profound knowledge production, leading one through a maze of the past in hopes of configuring a narrative of clarity. But as one falls into this information rabbit hole, one may realize this monument of “historically just knowledge” is built upon reconstructions through perspectives of subjective interpreters. But what constitutes one importance from another? It’s like the old idiom, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and in the case of the archive, archival holdings begin to unravel through this distinction. I’ve seen this subjective organization first hand in the Special Collections Library at AMNH, sifting through decades of interpreter’s perceptions of hierarchical importance’s. But I am yet another interpreter in the course of blurred histories. Will there ever be a light at the end of this tunnel? And is it the archivist’s contemporary responsibility to bring clarity to these histories?

In “The Black Stack,” Bratton writes that “the real nightmare, worse than the one in which the big machine wants to kill you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant, or as not even a discreet thing to know” (Bratton, 2014). I found this fear of the rapidly changing digital world to be intriguing because an issue that came up in all of this week’s readings is the question of who knowledge infrastructures serve and who it sees as irrelevant and ignores. The pieces by Star and, Hess and Ostrom address the fact that all infrastructures, material or immaterial, online or offline are “subject to social dilemmas” and therefore those who are marginalised or outside the prescribed norm continue to be so (Hess and Ostrom 3, 2007). When it comes to digital or technological development, there often seems to be a disregard for the social issues already present and the potential consequences of the development (the example I have in mind is Amazon Go). In terms of changing, replacing, or improving infrastructure, I am curious about the question brought up by Star, “When is an infrastructure finished and how do we know that?” (Star 379, 1999).