cataloging snowflakes & questioning authorities: RBMS conference

Well, I FINALLY made it to my first RBMS conference.

And...
It. Was. Hot. I mean that literally. I don't want to reinforce tired old stereotypes about librarians and their ilk, but there is something ridiculous about putting a bunch of curators and antiquarian booksellers — tweedy, bespectacled, wrapped in scarves, weighed down by tote bags full of books — next to a turquoise blue swimming pool ringed with palm trees at a swank resort in southern Florida otherwise populated by suntanned, bikini-clad leisure-seekers.

Yet, there we were.

Aside from the sheer physical exhaustion involved (will I ever stop trying to do EVERY SINGLE THING at a conference and remember to eat and sleep enough? It does not combine well with the heat and humidity), this was maybe the most affecting professional meeting I've attended yet. It could have more to do with the theme of this particular event than with RBMS itself; I'm not sure. The title of this year's meeting was "Opening Doors to Collaboration, Outreach and Diversity," and basically that's my whole jam.

So, I did a lot of things at RBMS. I had to break it into three posts, of which this is the first, because my notes became to voluminous. Links to the other two parts at the bottom of this post or via the #rbms16 tag.

Tuesday (June 21)

Arrived in the afternoon and checked in at the Biltmore (WHICH IS INSANE btw).

4:00 pm. Orientation & Introduction to RBMS

5:00 pm. New Members' Mixer

6:00 pm. ABAA Booksellers' Showcase Welcome Reception

Wednesday (June 22)

8:30 am. Plenary: Open the Door to a More Diverse and Collaborative Future — This really set the tone for everything to come. Compelling, moving, engaging. (I might have cried in public a little bit...) Moderated by my boss, Athena Jackson.

Paul Ortiz (U Florida) spoke of "suffering and solidarity." The conference site, the state of Florida and its history, as especially relevant to the conference theme, i.e. diversity, inclusion, multiculturalism. Florida as the site of repeated tragedy and violence: before Pulse, there was Trayvon Martin (and other incidents related to FL's weird gun laws), the legacy of colonial history, the many kinds of Latinx voices, the Cuban revolutionaries, the migrant farmers' rights movement, the radical and often violent effects of climate change on FL's coastal region (hurricanes, shoreline degradation, loss of the Everglades, the struggle of subsistence fishermen...) Ortiz is the director of the oral history project at UF, so I imagine that provides the underpinning for this great quote of his I wrote down: "Knowledge is dialogical and mutually created."

Michelle Caswell (UCLA) is a co-founder of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), a post-custodial project created to fill a void, because nobody else (no institution) was collecting this material. That's cool enough on its own, but she also presented a really compelling discussion of the issues around "community archiving" and the meaning of the work we do in cultural heritage archives. The increasing focus on assessment metrics in academic libraries involves a lot of numbers (How many patrons served? How many research papers? Number of citations? etc.) but Caswell asked: what about affective value? Then she gave an overview of the concept "symbolic annihilation" which is what happens when your race/culture/gender/group identity is not represented in the media, and thereby erased from public discourse. Community archives can work to counter this symbolic annihilation 1. ontologically ("I am here"), 2. epistemologically ("We were here"), and 3. sociologically ("I belong here.") Caswell offered the term "representational belonging" to describe the opposite of symbolic annihilation, and presented it as the goal of archival work (see photo below). Altogether, I found her to be incredibly eloquent, but still forceful, in speaking about these issues from the point of view of what might be called an "ally" although I don't know if that's exactly the right word. What I mean is she does not appear to be South Asian American or a member of another minority group; like me, she is a white, well-educated, professional woman working in academia. (And YES, women are totally marginalized and oppressed in all sorts of ways, but we are not exactly under-represented in the library professions or among the ranks of RBMS.) However, this doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't participate in the work of fostering representational belonging reflective of the diverse communities we serve. Caswell has written and argued elsewhere that social justice work is a universal human imperative, in addition to an archival one. The important thing is to try to balance the need for recognizing difference and the ability to talk across difference without collapsing or erasing difference. (At least, I think that's what she said, but I'm sure it sounded better in her words.)

Mark Puente (of ARL) spoke last. He began by reminding us that at least three of the victims from the Pulse nightclub shooting were undocumented immigrants. One was killed, but two survived: wounded and without medical insurance, probably without savings or any kind of financial flexibility, likely employed on a temporary basis, without sick days, without disability benefits, their income dependent on the ability to do manual labor, and now facing a long recovery in a country far from home, under complicated legal circumstances. He said, let's not forget, while we mourn this violent tragedy, the everyday violence of living life as a minority in this country.

10:45 am. Short papers panel: Collaborative Cataloging — moderated by Randal Brandt (UC Berkeley). Ugh, why is it always so depressing to talk about special collections cataloging? It's just one of those things there's never enough time or money for, and catalogers always seem to feel undervalued and overworked. I understand how difficult this work can be (although I'm not currently doing any bibliographic cataloging), and I appreciate that there is a rigorous intellectual aspect to the task of description. I wish there were more catalogers and that everybody was paid better, and I certainly wish there weren't so many inaccessible, undiscoverable items languishing in libraries and archives. But at the same time, I wonder: are special collections catalogers just hitting their inevitable MPLP-style moment of crisis? Maybe that's a false comparison to make (obviously, I'm coming from an archives-oriented perspective). But maybe there's some value in figuring out how to get more stuff described more efficiently? Because, at least, it's better than nothing?

To clarify, I don't mean that any of the presenters were depressing bummers. It was just something in the air. A lot of questions from the audience (which I assume included catalogers) seemed... worried, concerned about the potential de-professionalization suggested by these projects:

Daryl Green (University of St. Andrews) described a program that harnesses student labor to address a huge backlog of uncataloged rare books, and has been pretty successful, creating approx. 80,000 new bib. records. (Side note: St. Andrews is literally ANCIENT, so imagine your idea of a "backlog" but multiplied by like 500 years. Also: apparently the UK has a shortage of skilled, professional special collections catalogers?) A few key factors to consider here: 1. the student catalogers do receive oversight from a professional rare books librarian, 2. the records are pretty basic (i.e. not DCRM-standard), and 3. the books have already been assigned classmarks (yes, on their actual spines, fortunately/unfortunately, long ago). Without this last bit, I think the project might actually not be possible, because shelf marks are just so tricky. Also, the core-level records aren't ideal, but having at least the transcribed title and publication date/place means an experienced researcher should be able to figure out if an item is relevant to their interests or not.

Kelly Spring (UC Irvine) talked about an NEH-funded linked data pilot project to describe UCI's collection of artists' books. I don't know if this really counts as cataloging but it was definitely collaborative, in that it requires a lot of people in various departments to make this kind of thing work. (I eagerly await the day that all of our Linked Data Projects bloom into self-sufficient Linked Data Adults and finally start pulling their own weight.) Anyway, the visualizer / discovery tool can be viewed at: http://www.lib.uci.edu/sites/all/plodab/index.php. In addition to this tool, the site helpfully includes project documentation and links to GitHub code (in the "About" section.)

Audra Eagle Yun (UC Irvine) is the head of Special Collections & Archives at Irvine and I must admit I was surprised to hear "We Don't Have a Rare Books Cataloger" from her, given that I think of the whole University of California system as this huge, powerful, well-funded thing. But they experimented with having students do rare books cataloging, not unlike the St. Andrews project (above), but in this case it was part of an actual course, and initiated by a faculty member. On the one hand, that's great, because you're sort of doing outreach at the same time, and making the catalog record an actual graded assignment means the students are really going to take the task seriously. But they had to bring in an outside professional cataloger as an expert consultant, and this doesn't seem like a very sustainable or scalable approach. But I wrote down this quote that I'm super into (so I hope it accurately depicts what Yun said) about "leaning in ... to the discomfort of embracing imperfection." (I.e. the MPLP approach?)

Laura Aydelotte (U Penn) presented The Provence Online Project (aka POP) which uses Flickr to share images of bookplates, inscriptions, and other ownership marks in early modern books. Then, the magic of crowd-sourcing!

12:30 pm. New Members' Box Lunch Meet Up

1:45 pm. Seminar: Experience with Diversity Initiatives: IMLS-RBS Fellows Speak — featured cohorts from the first year of my RBS fellowship: Yuh-Fen Benda (Vanderbilt), Sarah Allison (NM State U), Jamillah Gabriel (Purdue). Moderated by Julie Grob (U of Houston). I didn't take notes, apparently, probably because I don't think the fellows said anything really unexpected. What can you say when you've been given a bunch of money to get to do something cool? They sounded appreciative, and otherwise simply described their experiences with RBS and RBMS. (I don't think that the conversation actually approached a real examination of the "necessity of diversity initiatives within librarianship" but I guess that is a difficult public conversation.)

4:00 pm. Linked Data Consumption for the Rare Materials Librarian: An Introduction and How-to — caught my eye partly because my former library school instructor / former Brooklyn-area drinking buddy Amber Billey (now at Columbia) was presenting. Also: Brian Geiger (UC Riverside), Allison Jai O'Dell (UF Gainesville), moderator Amy Tims (American Antiquarian Society).

One of the things that I love about Billey, which is also one of her gifts as a teacher, is that there seems to be no separation between her personality and her professional persona. She's a super-nerd about library stuff, who would be doing volunteer work for libraries in her free time and probably reading and writing about libraries even if she didn't work at one. Enthusiasm like that is important from the instructor of a metadata course (especially one scheduled at 6 pm on a weeknight). Also, from my current point of view as a fellow professional, I appreciate that she's so frank about her personal and political positions, given where we are right now (I mean not just RBMS but also The World) regarding diversity, authority, privilege, neutrality. {See, for example, some projects she's been involved with: The Digital Transgender Archive (or DTA), Homosaurus (an international linked data thesaurus of LGBT index terms), and this recent paper: Billey, Amber; Drabinski, Emily; and Roberto, K.R., "What's Gender Got to Do With It? A Critique of RDA Rule 9.7" in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Vol. 52, Iss. 4, 2014.} So anyway, her take on Linked Data:

MARC is great! It's perfect for what it is. But 'what it is' is a closed system, a gated community, an arcane, ivory tower. It doesn't 'talk to' the internet; it's not part of the web.
Linked Open Data IS made of the same stuff as the web. It doesn't need to be translated or crosswalked.
In the future, bibliographic entities will exist as URIs instead of MARC records
Future bibliographic description will be more focused on context and explaining the relationships between entities (and less time will be spent on spelling things correctly and formulating authority terms).
LOD has some radical potential for changing our relationships with outside (for-profit) vendors. If librarians can mint URIs, and bibliographic description "lives" on the web itself, we don't need the vendors to build discovery layers or tools for extracting MARC data from the special silos we put it in. (See also: BIBFRAME; library consortia and inter-institutional projects of the recent past, like: RLIN, Z39.50 protocol.)

Brian Geiger talked about the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), which is still in beta, but my notes consist solely of the web address.

Everything else I wrote down is incomplete (they were moving too quickly for me to capture all the points they covered) and I wrote a note to myself to 'see the presentation slides when available' but I have no idea if that's even a thing. (Additional note to myself: I still haven't read Charles Ammi Cutter's 1876 "Rules for a Dictionary Catalog" which Billey also talked about back in class, so maybe I should actually check it out...)

6:00 pm. IMLS-RBS Fellows Reception

7:15 pm. Restaurant Night — ended up at Whisk with a fellow (former) fellow and a whole slew of lovely ladies, and it was DELISH. (Although I think I accidentally ate bacon.)