new york society library

Founded in 1754 (!!!) this is a delightful little private library that I got to visit today with a group from work (yay!).  Architectural details and lovely collection highlights aside (I'm talking incunables like the Nuremberg Chronicle), it was really great to have some shop talk with professionals who also struggle with resources and changing parameters of cultural/community relevancy, and a complex relationship with the obligations of a long history...  (Etc.)

http://www.nysoclib.org/about/peluso-family-exhibition-gallery

http://www.nysoclib.org/blog/vault-john-h-caswell's-collection-civil-war-envelopes

Civil War-era printed envelope featuring BABE LINCOLN, what?

where are your papers?

The recent article about Zosa Szajkowski has been rolling around in my brain for weeks, and my friend (P.) did the work of articulating why in her email, quoted below:

Thank you very much for passing along the Zosa Szajkowski article. I have long been interested in the intersection of archives, recordkeeping, and identity within cultures that are dissident to parent states – you need the record to function in society so it’s who you are, yet it’s not who you are. Where are your papers?

As for whether Szajkowski was a hero or a criminal I think it’s pretty clear that he was both. But no matter what his work was meaningful and yours is, also...

(Thank you, my fine archivist friend.)

Proper citation:

Leff, Lisa Moses.  (2012).  Rescue or theft? Zosa Szajkowski and the salvaging of French Jewish history after World War II.  Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society, Vol. 18 (No. 2), 1-39.

Update: an online version of this article then appeared in Tablet Magazine.  My favorite quote from Leff:

"The ambiguity that sits at the heart of the story of Zosa Szajkowski also points us to an aspect of the very nature of archives. On the one hand, the creators of archives rescue the past for us. They gather together and preserve records from the past, making it possible for historians to study them. On the other hand, there is also violence in the project of archiving. The very process of making an archive re-contextualizes documents and—in subtle or not-so-subtle ways—changes their meaning. Rather than the work of the powerful, some archives, at least, are actually the work of the powerless. If our understanding of archives in general is broadened to include all those who shaped their histories, these institutions look less and less like a coherent monument and more and more like a salvage heap."

the frick

Gilt-Brass Table Clock with Astronomical 
and Calendrical Dials (Munich, 1554)

Went to see the clock show with T., hoping he might explain to me how a) clocks work, and also possibly b) how time works.  Not sure if I figured anything out, but it was all quite beautiful, as usual...

I was, for some reason, especially struck by the distinction made (in the exhibit introduction) between a) time-finding, b) time-measuring, and c) time-keeping devices.  In technological terms, this is the evolution from sundials, to water clocks, to mechanical clocks or watches with pendulums, springs, escapements, etc.  There is some kind of analogy here, I think, to the progress of map-making and cartographic data and to the whole idea of information standardization...  It's always good to remember how much of what we think the world "is" and how it "works" is simply a matter of convention.

oh morgan, how i love thee

It's like my own personal archives week/"stay-cation" with these midweek holidays.  PLUS, P.'s in town, so someone will nerd out with me.  The Morgan Library is one of my favorite places in the world... and she had never been!

We saw the Proust exhibit (100th anniversary of Swann's Way), and Drawing Surrealism.

There was also something called "Treasures from the Vault" in the beautiful original library: letters from Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, JRR Tolkien, MICHAELANGELO's father, manuscript copies of Beethoven's symphonies in his own handwriting... and a crazy bedazzled bible.

first collection!

My first collection, fully processed, arranged, and encoded, as REAL archivist:

Guide to the Shirley T. Joseph Papers, 1972-1998

intellectual freedom, minors, and the ALA

Intellectual Freedom: At Every Age
(essay for LIS 651-02)

Parents and teachers have a responsibility to prepare the young to meet the diversity of experiences in life to which they will be exposed, as they have a responsibility to help them learn to think critically for themselves. These are affirmative responsibilities, not to be discharged simply by preventing them from reading works for which they are not yet prepared.

                                    — Proposition 4, Freedom to Read Statement

A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views.

                                                — Article V, Library Bill of Rights

            Although I was generally familiar with the idea that librarians take a liberal view on intellectual freedom and the right to information, I hadn’t thought much about what that meant until I attended the American Library Association’s Annual Conference & Exhibition this year.  I was lucky to have my travel to New Orleans, conference registration, and lodging paid for with a scholarship.  As a student, I had no particular agenda to accomplish, and the only session I knew I wanted to attend was the opening ceremony.  The keynote speaker for ALA 2011 was Dan Savage, an author most well-known for his outspoken political opinions, gay rights advocacy, and his long-running syndicated sex advice column, Savage Love.  His writing style is humorous, witty, sharply critical, and astonishingly frank.  Although he’s a best-selling author and editor, his iconoclastic streak and controversial views wouldn’t seem to make him the most obvious choice to represent the ALA at its largest professional gathering.  Beginning in the fall of 2010, however, Savage had taken on a new venture, one that perhaps endeared him to the library community more.  The It Gets Better Project, as it’s called, is a web-based outreach effort intended for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) youth.  It may in fact be more radical than anything else Savage has done, but combining an innovative use of technology and social media with a commitment to the free dissemination of information is like a librarian dream come true.  The project had come up in a number of my courses, related to discussions of digital archiving, community archives and cultural heritage collections, and born-digital media preservation. 

            I had always liked Savage’s work and was looking forward to hearing him speak, but I knew he wasn’t likely to address the topics I was particularly interested in--technical details like metadata and the intellectual organization of such a collection.  I recognized the social significance of It Gets Better, but until I heard Savage speak about the project I hadn’t considered that information policy has special ramifications for minors. 

            A series of highly publicized suicides by gay teens was Savage’s call to action.  He saw a simple lack of information at the root of the crisis.  Maybe these teenagers were bullied and harassed by their peers or condemned by their families, but if they could just be armed with the knowledge that life does get better (eventually), maybe they could find the will to survive.  The question was how to reach them, and YouTube provided an easy answer.  The technology was easy to access and already familiar to kids growing up in an era of ubiquitous personal computing and instant Internet access.  Savage and his partner recorded a very personal video describing the difficulties they had faced as gay teenagers and the rewarding lives they had gone on to make for themselves, ending with a heartfelt plea to kids in similar situations to just stay alive long enough to make it to that better life.  They uploaded it to the Web and asked a few friends to contribute their own stories.  Within two weeks they hit the maximum number of videos allowed by YouTube and had to migrate the content to their own website.  There are now tens of thousands of videos representing celebrities, politicians, professional athletes, business leaders, and average adults from all walks of life.  The message of the project has grown to encompass any adolescent suffering from bullying or harassment at school, regardless of sexual orientation.  But the situation for LGBT youth remains most serious:  they are four times more likely to attempt suicide than heterosexual teenagers, and eight times more likely if their families are “highly rejecting.”[1]  Some estimate that 40% of homeless teenagers are LGBT youth kicked out after coming out to their own families.[2]  For kids who are living in hostile environments 24-hours-a-day, there may be no safe haven between home and school, no one they can talk to.  Savage described the important role the Chicago Public Library played in his own adolescent life, when was too afraid to be seen with “gay books,” so he would quietly take them from one section of the library, read them, and surreptitiously leave them elsewhere in the stacks.  The It Gets Better Project is entirely about bypassing hostile, adult gatekeepers and guaranteeing minors their own rights to vital information.  Savage pointed out in his speech that this is the same subversive and essential task that librarians are charged with carrying out every day in a number of ways.

            His narrative provides a powerful argument for the importance of defending the right of minors to freely access information.  Many people who are comfortable with the idea that freedom of speech (as established by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) means some offensive forms of expression must be tolerated are less comfortable when the rights of children are involved in the conversation.  Censorship is generally understood to be un-American, but we also accept parental advisory labels and the movie rating system, legislate education requirements for children, and deny minors the right to vote.  Pretty much everyone agrees that there is a lot of stuff on the Internet that would be terribly inappropriate for children to stumble across, but we are also likely to condemn China’s practice of blocking access to websites that might disagree with government policy.  When we start talking about children there is a tendency to get alarmed more easily, and the fact that minors are not equal to adults in the eyes of the law appears to set a precedent for the idea that they might not receive the full protection of the U.S. Constitution.  The fact is that judicial interpretations of constitutional law are not entirely clear on this matter and have continued to evolve.  (For one example, we now consider women and people of color to possess the full rights of U.S. citizens.)

            The Library Bill of Rights (first adopted by the ALA Council in 1939, amended and reaffirmed continuously thereafter) takes a more unequivocal stance.  All information is valuable, no opinions or points of view should be censored, and no one should be denied access, regardless of age.  The ALA expands upon these basic ideas in a series of “interpretations” including one addressing “Free Access to Libraries for Minors” (adopted 1972, amended 1981, 1991, 2004). This states that minors’ rights are “unquestionably” protected by the First Amendment.  Additionally, parents are the only ones who should be responsible for advising, guiding, and restricting their children’s access to inappropriate materials--this is not the librarian’s role. 

            The “Free Access to Libraries for Minors” statement emphasizes that lack of information can be more harmful than accessing ‘wrong’ information.  The It Gets Better Project illustrates this as well.  In practice, of course, nothing is ever so black and white. There are ongoing challenges and revisions to the scope and intent of the U.S. Constitution, and librarians everywhere must balance their professional ideals with the needs and desires of their user communities.  Collection Development means excluding some materials and choosing others.  Readers’ Advisory is supposed to be a neutral sort of recommendation service, but it necessitates some subjective interpretation of the material in question.  Is it ok to assign “reading levels” (Kindergarten, Grades 3-4, etc.) to children’s books?  Probably.  Is it censorship to not include The Story of O in a middle school library?  Probably not.  This balancing act is an essential part of life in a democratic society.  Re-evaluating, re-establishing, and expanding the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all citizens is another hallmark of democratic life.  Children are people, too, and if they are mature and capable enough to  deliberately seek out specific information, it should not be denied to them. 

            The ALA’s Freedom to Read statement (adopted 1953, amended 1972, 1991, 2000, 2004) is somewhat grandiose, but I think it is appropriately so.  It ends on the following note:  “We believe rather that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.”

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[1]  http://www.itgetsbetter.org/pages/about-it-gets-better-project/

[2]  http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/inside-scoop/dan-savage-keynotes-ala-conference-message-positive-subversion

cataloging snowflakes: literature review

Cataloging Snowflakes
(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 18^th 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.” 

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[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.

Brooklyn Museum Library's own Deirdre Lawrence writes this report on NYARC, the art museum library consortium that pools the resources of BM, MoMA, and the Frick.  I already ♥ NYARC and Arcade, so this article was kind of preaching to the converted.  Something I didn't know already, though, was the result of an OCLC study done in 2007 that showed a high quantity of unique materials represented by the NYARC catalog (p. 62).  Meaning, pretty much nobody else in the world would be able to find them if they weren't cataloged in Arcade!

• Martin, R.S.  (2007).  Intersecting missions, converging practice.  RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 8(1), 80-88.

This relatively short article, introducing an issue of RBM devoted to the idea of converging practice, had a great effect on me.  Being written by the director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (or IMLS), the government agency funding my internship and responsible for allocating tons of grant money to museums and libraries, basically means that any professional in these fields should probably pay attention to what he has to say.  I found Martin's explanation of the history of these institutions illuminating (p. 81), and it validated my instinct that some of the divisions drawn between Libraries, Archives, and Museums are arbitrary or administrative.  He also addresses the idea of "talking things" and the documentary potential of various kinds of objects.  Most interesting is his assessment of the way that digital technologies erase the divides between our professions.

• 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.

Preston and Rickards are both quoted in the essay above, but it is difficult to say anything general or concise about either of their works (both of which are book-length) here.

• 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.

In the same issue of RBM, discussing digital convergence, appears an article by Brooklyn Museum's Deb Wythe.  She was the museum's archivist until becoming the head of a new digital imaging program that encompassed the collections of the entire institution, not just Libraries & Archives.  She analyzes some of the differences between the various cultural heritage professions and addresses the challenges of intra-institutional collaboration.  One point of note:  "Libraries and archives may have the technology and standards, but museums have the presentation skills" (p. 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.

This article is a bit older, but I find its discussion of the issues underlying ephemera description and more compelling than most.  Young covers the difficulties of assigning cataloging standards to ephemera and the reasons why this category has, historically, fallen outside the scope of both library and archives collections—while displaying characteristics of both.  What he does very well, though, is make the case for ephemera's importance as a form of information in light of its socio-economic affiliations with under-represented cultural groups. 

day sixteen.

"Virginia Steele Scott Gallery" to "Washington Women's Art Center."

The last "official" day of the internship, so it's the last time we all have lunch together in the cafe.  I really want to see the final presentations of other practicum students in the afternoon, but I am SO close to finishing the entire alphabet!  I can't stand that it's not done—even after staying all afternoon, I only got through W5.  I will be back next week, to finish the task.

Here's what one of my bibliographic records looks like in Brookmuse (or Arcade):

http://arcade.nyarc.org/record=b1081847~S2

If you go to the MARC view, you can see my little initials on every record I've made, at the end of the 852 field:

That's me!  xAC.

Hours worked:  9:30-5:30pm.
Records created:  41. 
442 total so far!