library

Everything, Everywhere at Eckhart

A few years ago, my community’s library was attacked by an arsonist that destroyed most of their collection as well as caused severe damage to the main library building. It was really heartbreaking.

While the building was being renovated, the library set up a branch location in a local strip mall. It had a big banner above it “Eckhart Public Library.” Now that the library building is alive again, they have been building their collection for quite a while. I go to borrow videos. I also borrow books and videos from the inter library loan service available through their participation in the statewide Evergreen consortium.

Libraries aren’t just for books. The nearby Allen County Public Library has a makerspace. One time I used their tools to transfer a video I had made onto a DVD. They had a 3-d printer. Locally in Auburn, our library offers many digital services. One that I used last night was Kanopy.

Kanopy is a video streaming service that is optimized as a service for libraries. The library provides access to the service and the patron can stream the videos offered by the service. Months ago, I had watched “Parasite” there. Last night, I saw “Everything, Everywhere All at Once.” It was fun to see it again after seeing it in the theater when it was new. The next video that I hope to watch is Beau is Afraid with Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Ari Aster. I saw news about the Aster film when it was in the theater but never went when I had a chance.

The library is welcoming and a nice space to visit. Having an online presence makes it even more useful. They offer Wi-Fi hotspots for people to borrow. The fire happened in the middle of the summer reading program so there were more books checked out than normal so they that they could rebuild a small offering right away as they were returned.

I was concerned when they closed the temporary branch location before the new library was fully ready. However, it was providential that they did because shortly after that, the pandemic hit. The amount of money saved on not renting a facility no one could use could be folded into their renewed presence.

It breaks my heart for librarians who only want to provide the best service to their patrons are forced to spend time dealing with attacks on their professionalism and the people they serve. Even more so that a small number of people are filing complaints to harass communities that they don’t reside in. It’s shameful that people are losing out in valuable services because of a few troublemakers. According to the Washington Post’s research “The majority of the 1,000-plus book challenges analyzed by The Post were filed by just 11 people.”

Libraries are more than just books and offer lots of services. Our library here has a teen library with youth-oriented activities and resources. I’m glad that the community rallied around our library after the fire. It was definitely something that people who threaten librarians and libraries must never think of as a possibility–that libraries are an asset to a community and not a threat that needs bow to such a limited view of a library’s mission.

From a collection to an archive

In the past I’ve made some collection of comics. One was a collection of Frank & Ernest comics. Another was a collection of editorial cartoons from The Star newspaper in Auburn, Indiana.

The Frank and Ernest are organized by publication date. I would cut out a few weeks of comics and then glue them 5 comics to a page. I would start a new month at the top of the page. Once the pages covered a whole year, I would bind the pages together with my Velobind strip binding system. Comics are easy to organize chronologically because the artwork has the month and day within it. In contrast, I manually stamped the editorial cartoons each with a red date stamp to record their date of publication.

I consider these as just collections. There was no plan to organize the comics beyond sorting them by date.

I also started a collection of comics from the weekly magazine The New Yorker. The magazine includes 10 – 15 comics each issue. I have been cutting out the comics and filing them with the title page and cover in a page protector for each issue. That holds them together, so they don’t get mixed up. Recently, I had accumulated about a year and a half unprocessed. For a long time, I didn’t really have a purpose for them, I was just filing away each week’s drawings. I was getting more and more behind with no plan.

Recently I thought of turning the collection into an archive by asking the question: What are the differences between the styles of the comic’s creators? The New Yorker’s title page has an index of the artist names for each comic so that I could attribute them to the right artist. I wondered whether I could learn something from the different artists’ styles. That gave me the impetus to do more with the comics I had accumulated. I would separate the comics and organize them by each artist chronologically.

When I started processing them, I made a pipeline where I would take one of the page protectors and pencil the comics’ margin with the artist’s name and publication date. By having this basic information on the paper, if a comic falls out, it will have enough information to be put it back in place. After labeling them, I put each week in a manila envelope and made a pile of those. I would keep the pile from getting too tall by taking the bottom envelope and gluing its contents to artist pages. I took the penciled information and wrote it in ink next to the comic. The artist’s name is at the top of each page. When a page was full, I would create a new page for that artist. I only glued the comics on one side of a page which makes them easier to leaf through. After this, I would try to be efficient with a couple of filing steps before the comic is in its final position.

I keep the comics on paper instead of scanning them in. That would allow the archive to not be affected by technological change. Old digital archives can become useless because the software they need won’t work anymore. Digital archives can require substantial work by archivists to preserve. Although, at some level, the metadata will need to be in digital form, the ground floor will be something more permanent.

When I decided to turn the collection into an archive, I started thinking about what additional information would someone find useful if they were doing research? I was told that a historian would like to have full bibliographic information, so I started including page numbers with the date. Since the archive wasn’t started with that in mind, most of the older comics are missing their page number. Other useful data is to give each comic an index number so that researchers could easily find a comic in the archive after finding them in computer search. I haven’t chosen an indexing system yet.

Looking at what librarians would like to do with the comics, I thought of additional metadata that would be useful. The dimensions of the comics are easy to measure and useful. I could also pick keywords to describe each comic. I could evaluate different existing metadata standards from the Library Science courses that I took. Perhaps one of them will work well.

I should decide on the purpose of a keyword index. I would define a standardized vocabulary that I could use for keywords. An index could be kept in cataloging software. Without planning, choosing the keywords to describe each comic could become an ever-expanding job. I don’t want to give the comics keywords and then realize I need to go back and select more keywords to the old drawings. It would become an endless task! Information that I might want includes graphical details of the graphic such as drawing technique and style. Other keywords would describe the theme such as “sheep,” “pearly gates,” “therapist office,” or “royalty.” The purpose of the archive should inform my choices of what keywords to use. I can use what I have so far to suggest a more thorough list to move forward.

I didn’t start recording some of the metadata. I’m about a year behind the current publication, about 45 issues. I’m playing catchup. Some of the desirable metadata is lost, or at least impractical to recover. The order the comics appear in each issue might be interesting to analyze and is only available when I dissect an issue. Once the magazine is chopped up, that information is lost. I need to consider what is worth keeping and what is impractical.

I try to minimize is going back to older items to fill in missing data. To rewind several times would become frustrating and eventually overwhelming. It’s a matter deciding what’s practical to get vs. what is important. I need to make a good-enough archive, not try to make a perfect archive. Data entry is a substantial task and I need to estimate how much I really can take the time for.

Already, there are several artists who I can identify without needing to see the signature. Someday, it would be fun to interview some of the artists.

It was like a whole library burned down

Laurie Anderson on the album Bright Red sings that when her father died, it was like a whole library had burned down.

When a library burns, it is a loss for the whole community. The Eckhart Public Library was burned by an arsonist in 2017. It had an awesome collection of resources that were gone overnight. At first, the hope was that some of the more valuable books could be cleaned and rescued but that wasn’t practical. The books are gone, rare edition or paperback novel, popular or ignored.

When someone in my family passes on, their stories and wisdom are gone. My grandpa’s knowledge of hatcheries and business management is unavailable. His stories of being a manager at Coca-Cola during WW II and helping neighbors exceed their sugar quota are just memories now. I can’t ask him what he saw when he visited China in 1978. My nephews and nieces’ kids won’t hear his stories, sense of humor and love of snowmobiles. Others in my family have also died. Their libraries were also burned down by cancer or old age.

The past two years, so many libraries have burned. So many people suddenly gone.

On a personal level, grandchildren may never learn from their grandparents. Children are without a parent to share love and hope with. Marriages have been violently torn apart by a virus. Parents who won’t be able to see their child graduate from college, get married and start a career.

On an economic level there are skills and expertise that can’t be replaced. The future cannot benefit from over 600,000 people’s insights and knowledge; they’re gone. The cost is inestimable.

If someone was carrying a torch into a library, they would be stopped at the door. The freedom to carry a torch is not of a higher order than the need to prevent arson.

With an infectious disease, carrying a viral torch can start many fires. No one can know who is in danger, but it’s society’s prerogative to protect libraries. It is civilization’s duty to keep them safe.

Although the analogy isn’t perfect, wearing a mask and getting vaccinated are how I can avoid carrying a torch. They also help me not ignite others torches. Some libraries are more flammable than others, requiring more caution. When the winds are strong, it may take more effort to protect libraries than on a calm day.

I don’t want any more libraries to burn. Libertarian logic is incompatible with public health. It ignores how past disease outbreaks are defeated. Polio and smallpox were conquered because the needs of the community exceeded personal preference.

Some restrictions can be an affront to personal liberty but there is no right to carry a torch into a library.

IUPUI Capstone

This weekend I went down to IUPUI for the first time.

I’ve been taking LIS classes for a long time, but since they were all online, I didn’t have a need to head down there.

This semester I was had an internship at the Auburn library’s William H. Willinnar Genealogy Center. One of the requirements of the internship is to participate in the Capstone program at the end of the semester.

I got my presentation ready in time for the event and headed down. It was a good experience. I would have liked to have seen what other people had presented, but I didn’t have anyone to spot for me and watch my display so I couldn’t wander off.

I did my best to use some artistic expertise in putting together the display of “Growing a collection through donations and loans.” I had some cream colored cardstock that I put the information on. It took a while to decide what to say and get all of the parts designed and printed up.

I have a bunch of colored paper from the past and I had some that was a nice light green that I put offset from the main text. With the black background of the display, the green really set off the design and made it attractive. I also managed to use color in the text effectively I think. At first I wanted to have a spectrum of colors, but I ended up just using red, blue, green and black which was a lot easier to look at and less busy.

When I got there I felt really inadequate and out of place. Before everything started, I was talking to another Library Science intern who was also there and that helped me feel like I belonged.

One of the people who was taking pictures for the event took several pictures of me talking to people and of the display. Of the people in my room, my material was the most colorful. I’ve been told by family that I’m pretty photogenic, so I hope the photos come out well. Maybe they’ll be up on the Capstone website soon.

I really like the director of the Capstone program. He is really energetic and really funny, in a good way.  I hope I didn’t look like I was laughing at him because I thought he was charming and genuinely entertaining. I couldn’t help but smile while I was watching him in the room where us 4 LIS students were presenting. He showed me his interest in steampunk and his drawings which were a cool surprise.

When I got home, I felt really energized by the experience. I think part of it was being on campus and being around a new group of people.

I had dinner after the presentations with the instructor of the internship, Kym, the department chair, Andrea, and her partner. For some reason, he seemed really familiar to me, but I couldn’t place where. From the conversation we had at dinner, I still couldn’t figure out if I had met him somewhere before and I was too shy to ask.

I’d like to go down to IUPUI more often this semester. I think participating in the university experience in person will enhance my enthusiasm and creativity. Being around other students in person is a lot different then having conversations with them on the course websites.

During the event, I met the professor, Kyle, who is leading my independent study class on privacy. That was nice too. In the past we’d only spoken on the phone or thru email.

For me Capstone wasn’t a high pressure event. However, for all of the other students in the SOIC department, the computer scientists, human computer interaction students, and design students, the Capstone had to succeed or they wouldn’t graduate. For me, it was more an opportunity to promote the library and information science department and try something completely different.

I hope to go to Capstone in the spring as an audience member instead of as a participant. Mathew (the director of Capstone) said there’ll be around 100 Capstones in May. Awesome!