Cataloging Snowflakes
(final analysis for Practicum)
(final analysis for Practicum)
My first library science course was called Knowledge Organization, often referred to by Pratt SILS students as the “cataloging class,” which it is not. I did learn one valuable rule about cataloging, though. The professor wanted us to remember: always catalog the object in hand. The importance of this directive remained in my mind, but its significance was murky—until I began cataloging vertical files in the library of the Brooklyn Museum.
I am, in my other life, a storyteller, a writer, and a teacher. It is my nature to see storytelling possibilities in the objects of the world around me. But possibility is not the same thing as fact, and facts are the kinds of things librarians are accustomed to dealing with. Information takes many forms, from non-fiction accounts of history to statistical data and graphs, from a map of the world in 1491 to a poem about an ancient Mongolian emperor. Human civilization has a long history of documenting, imagining, and representing its experiences though writing. Text is, these days, often referred to as “content” because it is synonymous with meaning. Writing says something.
At the same time, there is another kind of meaning at work in human expression. How do we explain the reaction we have to a work of art? Why we like or dislike certain colors? How a style of fashion can seem so attractive and then so hideous from one decade to the next?
The information professional charged with describing materials does so in order to provide access to them, so that a person looking for a certain item will be able to find it. The person searching for something and the person describing the thing need to use the same descriptors for this to work. But when it comes to material that is unique (like archival manuscripts) or relies on form and aesthetics for expression (like printed ephemera) it gets more complicated. Archives have developed their own practice for providing information to researchers who can’t necessarily know that the thing they’re looking for even exists. Finding Aids provide a listing of an archives physical contents and give some context regarding the historical period or the biography of the creator, and perhaps assign subject headings. The process is impossible to standardize to the degree of any library’s bibliographic description, with their rigorous AACR2 rules and MARC encoding formats. Archivists aim for objectivity as much as possible when providing description.
Ephemera description has no standard whatsoever, since the whole category has long been overlooked by both Archives and Libraries. I suspect the marginalization of ephemera in information professions and in academic studies has to do with its very ambiguity as a category. A rigorous analysis of any topic would seem, as a logical first step, to call for a lucid definition of said topic. In the case of “ephemera,” however, a clear-cut definition is not easy to formulate. I believe this principal ambiguity is emblematic of the difficulties ephemeral materials present to the information-organizing professional and is partly responsible for the marginalization of ephemera in academic studies—although a number of other factors contribute to this sense of marginalization as well.
In lieu of a simple definition, we can try to understand what makes a definition so elusive. The Greek root of the word means ‘lasting only a day,’ but if that were really the case—and ephemera simply disappeared after they served their purpose—then there wouldn’t be anything to worry about. Yet transience or “short-term use” is often cited as a defining characteristic of ephemera; as in, "a broad range of minor (and sometimes major) everyday documents intended for one-time or short-term use," which is the definition provided by the Ephemera Society of America[1]. Maurice Rickards, author of the definitive (only) Encyclopedia of Ephemera, calls them “the minor transient documents of everyday life.” While it’s true that many genres of ephemera have a narrow range of temporal relevance (train schedules, ticket stubs, catalogs), others served record-keeping purposes (account books, birth and death notices) and were clearly not intended to be “used” and discarded. The definitions above share something besides the idea of temporary use; both use the words “minor” and “everyday” to qualify ephemeral materials. (And these come from people who like ephemera!) Like the flotsam and jetsam of history, some ephemera are about as meaningful as the junk mail people throw away without opening (or, obsessive-compulsive hoarders accumulate, stacked ceiling-high, until it collapses in on them). Aside from the subjective valuation involved in such a definition, the problem is that there are so many kinds of ephemera—hundreds, according to Rickards’ encyclopedia. Are they all equally “minor”? What do they really have in common? Timothy Young points out in the article “Evidence: Toward a Library Definition of Ephemera” that ephemera are often delineated merely in opposition to “normal” print materials: they are printed but they are not books. More importantly, because they are produced and distributed outside of the standard publishing model, “not only are outward appearances different, but something innate is skewed, uncontrollable, as well” (Young, 2003).
This innately skewed and out of control quality of ephemera provides one of the best arguments for the importance of their study. Besides providing primary source documentation or acting as objects of cultural and aesthetic interest, ephemera reflect, in many cases, something about the populations responsible for their creation. This becomes easier to see, perhaps, if we look at examples less colored by sentimentalism than Victorian valentines or vintage Americana. The Barnard College Library’s Zine Collection[2] of feminist and queer self-published materials and the Labadie Collection[3] of radical, anarchist, and labor history at the University of Michigan Library provide perfect illustrations of the kinds of “ephemeral” material that rarely finds a home in a library catalog but is clearly not intended to be “minor,” trivial, or temporary.
An excellent collection of essays arguing for the importance of ephemera in academic research appears in The Other Print Tradition: Essays on Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Related Ephemera (Preston & Preston, 1995). Cultural anthropologists cover a range of topics, from 18th century bawdy folk songs, to the ”kitchen-table” publishing industries of Pakistan and Egypt, to modern-day “mimeographia” or “Xeroxlore.” The last category, which includes jokes, cartoons, and other announcement posted on message boards or an employee break-room in an office setting, is now being replaced by forwarded emails and internet forums where memes proliferate and are shared on a daily basis. Such information dissemination almost always occurs while employees are supposed to be on the job, thus “functioning as a diversionary tactic for contesting extant power-relations between employers and workers” (Preston, xvii). Moreover, the entire tradition of cheap print culture is “critical to our understanding of how dominant ideologies are constructed and disseminated…contested and negotiated within everyday lived experience” (xix).
Fortunately, it appears that librarians and other scholars have begun to consider the question of ephemera more seriously since the publication of The Other Print Tradition. A number of recent articles have addressed the technical problems posed when attempting to catalog ephemera and incorporate them into library collections. The authors of “Cataloging and Digitzing Ephemera” (Copeland, Hamburger, Hamilton, & Robinson, 2006), point out the lack of standards for such an undertaking. When a single item contains folk art, printed text and graphic content, and handwritten genealogical information, which cataloging rules do you follow? In this context, the question “How does one catalog a snowflake?” is no figure of speech (Copeland, et al, p. 190). The library team described in the article actually had to come up with methods for describing hand-cut paper snowflakes in a collection of Pennsylvania German ephemera. The amount of time and resources spent on such an undertaking underscores another reason ephemera have been relegated to forgotten corners of the library: what is the information value of a snowflake? Librarians who already face, on a daily basis, a Sisyphean quantity of information to organize may find it impossible to allocate precious resources to this type of project when its benefits remain unclear. Examined in this light, the hand-cut snowflake and the riot grrrl magazine seem to have very little in common with each other besides the fact that they don’t fit in anywhere else. What if we thought about ephemeral materials as encompassing a spectrum of information values? Text-based documents might exist at one end, while documents with large quantity of graphic content or unique manuscript-like qualities might occupy the other end. Assigning items a location along this spectrum could be the first step in deciding which kinds of bibliographic tools and standards to apply. Recognizing that the variety of materials currently deemed “ephemera” may possess types of content that are not equivalent to each other—without trivializing any of those contents—could allow information professionals to match these materials to their potential users. Which, if I’m not mistaken, is the whole point.
Most "talking objects," (Kavanaugh, 2000) be they historical or not, derive their meaning from context—provenance, whose hands they passed through, the story of how they came to end up in a particular time or place. This context can be utterly personal, as the museum-goer can have a reaction to an artifact or piece of art that has more to do with their own memory than any fact typed up on a exhibit label. Human memory is a kind of metadata. This has helped me develop a definition of the difference between books and archives, between information and its forms of transmission—and contributes to my ongoing attempt to understand the relationship between form, content, and meaning. Books are talking objects in a way that artifacts are not, which is why archival and ephemeral materials fall somewhere in the middle. Books (print publications) say what they are, who made them, and contain a quantity of easily accessible information within. They don't require the metadata of human experience or memory projected on them to give them meaning. At the other end of the spectrum: a postcard, a used train ticket, a hand-written receipt—could be a piece of trash, or a priceless piece of history if Abe Lincoln was the one who used the train ticket. The degree to which an object requires rich context in order to be meaningful relates to its position on the information spectrum, and to the degree of difficulty facing the cataloger or archivist trying to describe it. That difficulty, I like to remind myself, has the potential to be so worthwhile. Somewhere in that area of potential, in possibility, is where new stories and new meanings are made.
I take some comfort from the following quote, taken from Martin (p. 80) but originally the words of the philosopher-theologian Paul Tillich: “the boundary is the best place for acquiring knowledge.”
[1] http://www.ephemerasociety.org/whatisephemera.html
[2] http://www.barnard.edu/library/zines/about.htm
[3] http://www.lib.umich.edu/labadie-collection
Bibliography
(annotated)
- Art Libraries Society of North America, Artist Files Working Group. (2008). Artist files revealed: Documentation and access. Retrieved from http://www.artistfilesrevealed.com/tiki/tiki-index.php or http://www.arlisna.org/pubs/onlinepubs/index.html
This is less an article than a series of best practices recommendations from the ARLIS/NA Artist Files special interest group. The document claims that artist files are extremely important to art researchers, but often inaccessible and under-described in library collections. The authors establish and argue for the importance of a web-based directory of institutions with artist file holdings. They offer both "minimal" and "expanded" MARC coding templates for catalogers. Although my file collection is on institutions rather than individual artists, the coding recommendations are certainly applicable and appear to be identical to BM library's MARC template.
- Barnhill, G. (2008). Why not ephemera? The emergence of ephemera in libraries. RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 9(1), 127-135.
Written by an American Antiquarian Society director and president of the Ephemera Society of America, this article tries to prove the case for ephemera as an informational medium. The author cites examples of publications and research projects that utilized ephemera as primary source documents to reveal new historical insights. Barnhill admits that ephemera is difficult and time-consuming (thus costly) to catalog, but reiterates its unique value and importance nonetheless.
- Copeland, A., Hamburger, S., Hamilton, J., & Robinson, K.J. (2006). Cataloging and digitizing ephemera: One team’s experience with Pennsylvania German broadsides and Fraktur. Library Resources & Technical Services, 50(3), 186-198.
This lengthy article describes the challenges of ephemera cataloging in detail, using a special project at Penn State University as an example. It was validating for me to read about their travails, trying to decipher antiquated German print and cursive text. In some ways, their project was a little tangential to mine, but I got the title for this blog from them. "How does one catalog a snowflake?" they ask (p.90). It is not a rhetorical question, but a real one—the item in hand being a cut-paper snowflake, which is evidence of a particular cultural heritage, but is not "informational" in any of the traditional ways of thinking. A couple of things that I like about their project: creating both MARC bibliographic records and EAD finding aids for the collection ensure access and easy discovery. Digitizing the collection furthers this goal as well, although it was undertaken in this case more for the sake of preservation of the delicate Pennsylvania German collection. For the most part, preservation is not an issue for my vertical files, but I believe the graphic nature of many items makes them ideal for digitization.
- Jones, B. M. (2004). Hidden collections, scholarly barriers: Creating access to unprocessed special collections materials in America’s research libraries. RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 5(2), 88-105.
- Jones, B. M. & Panitch, J. M. (2004). Exposing hidden collections: Introduction. RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 5(2), 84-87.
Both of these Jones-authored pieces appeared in the same issue of RBM (which became my go-to source for scholarly discussions of a variety of topics of interest to me). The introduction and article, and indeed much of this issue, was a call to arms and also a plan of action for addressing unprocessed, backlogged, and "hidden" materials piling up in American research libraries. This was mostly in response to an ARL (Association of Research Libraries) survey conducted in 1998 that revealed a serious problem. The cataloging backlogs were, tellingly, higher for manuscript and artifact materials than for traditional printed matter (p. 90).
- Kavanagh, G. (2000). Dream spaces: Memory and the museum. London & New York: Leicester University Press.
Selections from this book were discussed in my Museum & Library Education & Outreach class. Although it has a broader, cultural-studies-level focus, this reading managed to ignite the first sparks of contact with the actual work I am doing at the museum as a cataloger. Chapter 12, in particular, entitled "Collections of objects, or memories?" addresses anthropomorphism and the idea of "talking objects." While I find some of this argument overstated, and the psychological aspects somewhat out of my scope, several ideas struck me. Most "talking objects," historical or not, derive their meaning from context—provenance, whose hands they passed through, the story of how they came to end up in a particular time or place. This context can be utterly personal, as the museum-goer can have a reaction to an artifact or piece of art that has more to do with their own memory than any fact typed up on a exhibit label. Human memory is a kind of metadata. This has helped me develop a definition of the difference between books and archives, between information and its forms of transmission—and contributes to my ongoing attempt to understand the relationship between form, content, and meaning.
- Lawrence, D. (2009). New York Art Resources Consortium: A Model for collaboration. Art Documentation, 28(2), 61-63.
- Martin, R.S. (2007). Intersecting missions, converging practice. RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 8(1), 80-88.
- Preston, C.L., & Preston, M.J. (1995). The other print tradition: essays on chapbooks, broadsides, and related ephemera. New York: Garland.
- Rickards, M. (2000). Encyclopedia of ephemera: a guide to the fragmentary documents of everyday life for the collector, curator, and historian. New York: Routledge.
- Wythe, D. (2007). New technologies and the convergence of libraries, archives, and museums. RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 8(1), 51-55.
- Young, T.G. (2003). Evidence: Toward a library definition of ephemera. RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 4(1), 11-26.
