Special Collections Reference

Too late, and too tired to write a proper summary. I will say that the LSU campus was beautiful, and I appreciated the time that I had to explore a bit. My favorite session was the Pecha Kucha teaching presentations. Perhaps the restrictions led to more focused presentations, or perhaps it was refreshing that even a less than stellar presentation would only last 6:40. In any case, I came away inspired to try some new approaches at Houghton.

Lunch at The Chimes was quite good, and we stopped in for some good coffee at a local coffee shop, which  is perhaps the first time I’ve been asked, when ordering an espresso drink, to choose between mild and dark roast. Nice. (I chose dark) Unfortunately, I went to Mike the Tiger’s habitat before he was awake, and so missed the pleasure of meeting him, though I lived vicariously through the #rbms11 twitter feed.

The highlight of the day was the reception at the Rural Life Museum. There was much good conversation, drink, and food, surrounded by hanging quilts and other artifacts of material rural culture of the south. Tomorrow is sadly the last day of RBMS, and I will be heading to New Orleans and ALA on the chartered bus. I’m preparing to be mildly overwhelmed by the size of the conference to come.

My first RBMS has begun in splendid fashion. After a first evening of meeting many people at the opening reception (eating and drinking while filtering among rare book dealers) and the new members mixer (eating and drinking at a local bar), the pre conference got off true start today.

The highlight of the first plenary was Greg Gibson’s stories of the changing landscape of collecting influenced by the internet and auction houses. The questions afterward really helped focus and delve into the meat of the issues.

The first break-out session I attended, called Yes We Scan!, modeled three different responses to the issue of patron initiated scans, along the spectrum outlined in Scan & Deliver, the OCLC report on patron scanning. The Getty, University of Chicago, and San Diego State represented the outside, middle, and inside tracks. Each gave good presentations about their unique patron scanning needs and responses. None perhaps go quite so far as Houghton does in producing metadata and depositing the images for future use, but none perhaps have the resources and staff time to devote to it that Houghton does. One does wonder what would happen if we were to open up patron BookEye scanning in the reading room… perhaps some sort of chaos would ensue.

The Case Study on Collecting in the 21st Century was an overpacked house in a room whose air-conditioning seems to have given out.
John Sherlock of UC Davis told of the unique issues that attempting to collect pamphlets and ephemera of the far right bring to a library, including financial staff balking at cutting a check to the Klu Klux Klan, and the Montana Militia refusing to trust the banks, and instead being content to trust the postal service and their money orders. It makes one wonder what other controversial or extremely anti-rational literature is not being collected by serious research libraries. Scientology? Harold Camping’s Rapture publications? (Adam When?) The list could go on, and as a colleague from Texas A&M asked, do we really want to support these organizations with our money?

Another presenter in that session, Sandra Ludig Brooke, from Princeton’s Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, spoke about the unique issues, mostly to do with preservation and access, for Art in video. The quagmire of license restrictions placed on edition and non-edition videos seems staggering. The somewhat humerous highlight of this was the final video, Jonas Jones’ 1972 “Duet,” which featured two figures howling at each other quite loudly. It brought a hotel worker from the hallway running in to see what the racket was. Ah, art.

Finally, the second plenary was concerned with Regional Collections, and their importance. I admit to some flagging of energy level by this time, and since for the most part this was outside of my expertise, I actually did better with monitoring the Twitter feed #rbms11 to see other attendees notes.

I have been trying, despite the spotty wireless in the Hilton, to read and contribute in a small way to the twitter backchannel. I hope that tomorrow will bring better internet at LSU. It is somewhat overwhelming, but I appreciate the glimpses into other concurrent sessions that I am not able to attend. (I’m intrigued, for instance, to see the Yale security video)

The day finished quite nicely with a trip to Parrain’s for dinner with the Aeon contingent (Thanks, Christian!). I was somehow seated on an all Texas table, and met many nice people from a couple of different libraries. I reminisced about Houghton before my time there, talked Old English, and ate some tasty cole slaw and fish. A fine time, despite the deluge that awaited our departure.

Pictures may be found in a Picasa album online.

If you haven’t yet seen it, please take a look at the Reference Shelf page of this blog. I’ve been working, quite sporadically, to populate the page with links to digital versions of reference books useful to rare book and special collections librarians. I’ve also done some listing of the contents of each volume to make it somewhat easier to find citations that bring you to those works.

My excitement of the title of this post is I now have links to all volumes of Sabin (thank you, Internet Archive!). When I had first been looking for them last year, I found all but volume 21. That one is also online now, and either it was an addition since I last looked, or had somehow been missed. It could well have been the latter. I hope you find it useful.

Two great new tools to further education in rare books and manuscripts are now available online for all.

The first concerns Books of Hours, and is hosted by Harvard College Library, the joint work of professor of Art Jeffrey Hamburger and librarian of Houghton Library, William Stoneman. It assumes no prior knowledge of this genre, and especially helpfully, reviews the structure of these books, which I admit is something I’m something less than an expert on. Also, which fits in quite well with the next great tool, is a comparison tool based on the structure earlier described, so the student or researcher may see different examples of each from books in the Houghton library.

Similarly, comparison lies at the heart of the educational value of the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, a project supported by NEH and the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). It will one day feature all the quarto editions printed before 1642, but currently features only Hamlet. Even with this one play, one can see the amazing pedagogical and scholarly use. Opening, say, the 1603 British Library copy and comparing it with one Folger Library copy from 1611 in the main archive screen, is easy and revealing from the start. Bernardo and Francisco are absent as named characters in the first, though someone has helpfully inked in “now called Bernardo & Francisco,” which is evident in the 1611 copy, where they are introduced as “Enter Bernardo and Francisco, two Centinels.” What a wonderful tool for teaching bibliography and editing to graduate and undergraduate students of literature.

It’s the night before the last day of class, and I have to say that it has gone fairly quickly. I’m sad to be without Silver’s commentary and insight after this class, but have the completion of my assignments to look forward to (which I just couldn’t seem to manage to finish while I have been here).

Today was a whirlwind of sources, including “Miscelaneous” subjects, like Art & Architecture, Music, and Children’s Books, and Book Arts and the physical aspects of books in general. It was a bit overwhelming. Outside of going over those sources, the highlight for me, which has encouraged my thinking most, was an aside Silver made while we were covering sources for bookbinding reference. He bemoaned the lack of opportunity people have for connecting with the physicality of books, both as private collectors and as a part of an institution. On the private side, many book stores and booksellers are taking their stock outside of public browsing and selling solely on the internet, leaving less opportunity to serendipitously encounter books. On the institutional side, collections move to off-site storage, and more attention to conservation has led to many volumes, especially older and more climate sensitive items, to be boxed, thus hiding their bindings, and making it much harder to answer reference questions about, for example, how many books of a certain peroid one has in contemporary bindings. Some of this information is available in an electronic catalog, but as has been my experience, those records are often either incomplete or non-existent (or not easily searchable).

I had thought of another aspect of this when he was talking and since, and that is placement of the books in rare book libraries, even in closed shelves, and the priority of cataloging. The idea of the most efficient way to shelf books has come up a few times in my short time at Houghton, and I had often thought that accessioning everything and shelving as things came in would be easier for space planning and retrieval. However, without like things being shelved together, it would be nearly impossible to answer a question about period bindings by walking to the stacks. There simply wouldn’t be any sections with enough like books to make that possible. Of course, the choice of call number system determines what characteristic of similarity is used for shelving.  For Houghton “Author” class, for instance, it is the author’s origin place and time. Though most of the books might be from that time period and country, even first editions could be outside that country (not to mention later editions and translations). For instance, one of our final assignment questions for this class concerns More’s first edition of Utopia. Though classed *EC M8135U (as all of More’s Utopia editions will be in the Author system), it was published in Belgium, not in England. It might not therefore be a place to look for an English 16th century binding — and the Hollis record doesn’t set up any expectation of what binding we will find, contemporary or not. And the many other classification systems used for Houghton’s shelves (Old Widener, Typ, Accession Numbers, LC, etc.) will create different local similarities.

These may seem like trivial questions, but I actually think answering them refines the sense of the usability of the collection for staff and patrons. I fear with the rise of “folksonomies,” “tagging,” and keyword search supremacy in the general library world, we resist grappling with important questions of priority and classification that will in the long run not serve our patrons in the best way.  Especially when small typographical and technical mistakes can lead to things falling through the cracks in an electronic environment, it pays for an item to be logically catalogued and traceable by some reproducible method (e.g. a systematic call number).

I’m a little late in posting about this, but I have to mention that despite being thwarted in my efforts to take the train (“Sold out?” I said to the Amtrak operator, incredulously. “I didn’t even know trains could sell out!” This from someone who spent a Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend on an Amtrak train to Boston during college sitting on his luggage between the cars of the train. The whole 3 hour ride. In November. They sure as heck didn’t sell tickets based on seats back then), I made it to Chicago another way (shout-out to Illini Express Shuttle!)and in time for the 10:30am tour of the Newberry. I hadn’t expected it to be sobig, especially the massive general reading room and reference area. The Special Collections reading room (or “fish bowl”) was almost empty, but was interesting for its transparency and orderlyness. I chickened out and, perhaps influenced by HCL’s draconian in-building photo policies, feared retribution should I try to document it in any way.

To make the most of my short time in Chicago, I speed-walked from the Newberry to the Printers’ Row Lit Fest down Dearborn Street. I should say I am not a regular book fair attender, and am thus not sure if I should have been impressed at this one. I was, though, at the number and variety of booths and the amount of people attending, despite the impending showers. I did manage to just finish my walk-through of all the booths before the showers began, and the plastic sheeting was whipped out to cover shelves in danger.

It was then on to the Chicago Public Library for a brief stop, and then to Grant Park. I wondered as I arrived there if it would now become a tourist stop by virtue of being the site of Obama’s emotional victory speech on election night. I admit that this was the main thing that brought me there, despite the increasing intensity of rain.

My ride back was courtesy of Amtrak, a less popular run, though one that was still full.

You can see more pictures of my Chicago adventure on my Picasaweb Album.

When comparing the Bibliotheca Americana Catalogue of the John Carter Brown Library with the Church Catalogue yesterday while covering Americana, we looked at yet another interesting juxtaposition of Librarians and Booksellers/Collectors. This one concerned the content of the descriptions and bibliographic detail of the entries for books.

Church (and George Watson Cole, specifically) says something interesting about each work, letting you know why it is important as a book, why we as librarians and collectors might care about it. The Bibliotheca Americana is more detailed bibliographically and the descriptions are accurate, but it doesn’t tell you why the work is important, or why we should care about it.

The same could be said for library catalogues vs. sales or exhibition catalogues. One is attempting to be an accurate and as detailed as possible description of the item. The other(s) is in part a PR document meant to both educate and generate interest on the part of the reader. If there is one thing that tends to supress rather than generate interest in the general public for something, would it not be the Library Catalogue?

From personal experience of preparing for and conducting seminars on some subjects I was not exactly an expert in, to put it kindly, I would much rather be able to reach for a catalogue or bibliography that gives rich context for the bibliographic details of the work and its importance, than a supremely accurate bibliographic description. I say this not to disparage the knowledge and work of rare book catalogers and bibliographers (I’m not worthy!), but to think through this for my own work as a public services librarian.

Perhaps it is all of my time spent at Harvard, where they don’t officially exist, but I find the ubiquity of fraternities here overwhelming. Is everyone in a frat at Urbana-Champaign? If I look out the door closest to my room, without actually going outside, I can see three different fraternity houses (left, straight, and slightly right). And that of course does not include the back of Alpha Kappa Lambda which is always viewable out my cell, I mean room window.

The variety of care in maintaining them is also astonishing.  Some, though majestic looking, clearly should be cared for more (note the broken window). For others, the building itself looks fine, but the surrounding environment could use improvement, including signs and lawns. Then there are those that even have advertising built right in. If I had more time right now, I might make a pithy comparison between these frats and rare books, including clever examples of how the above descriptions could be used also for rare books and collections… but I’ll leave that to you.

A nice benefit of reference works for rare books in the internet age is that many still used today are quite old. In the early days of the internet, perhaps this would be a problem rather than an asset. But since large-scale digitization projects are beginning to enter (dare I say) their maturity, there is the great opportunity of having “facsimile” copies of great reference works accessible anywhere.

For example, as part of the topic “British Books to 1800,” on Wednesday Silver introduced Dickson and Edmond’s Annals of Scottish Printing: From the Introduction of the Art in 1507 to the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century, (1890) which though overlapping with the coverage of the STC and Wing, has useful narratives of Scottish printers and their works. This work is nicely accessible through the Internet Archive, and the copy can be searched through the “Read Online” link, or downloaded for consultation. This is a simple example.

Of course, most reference works come in multiple volumes in parts. And as others have noted (specifically about Google Books) it can be quite hard to tell exactly what part or volume you have found without paging through. The search results are not at all helpful. For example, on Tuesday, while covering Early Printed Books, we looked at Hain’s Repertorium Bibliographicum, that first great incunabula catalog.  A search for the reasonable Repertorium Bibliographicum in Google Books (full view only) gives us a title list that doesn’t note volumes. Not only that, but the first item listed, though noted as being v.1 pt.1, is actually v.2 pt.1. You can see how this could get very complicated, with even Lowndes’ multiple-volume Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature (which we looked at on Wednesday). Sure, there’s this volume one, but there is also all of these (56!) that come up as different editions in full-text. Tough to sort through.

I’m sure some will be thinking that who would actually do this anyway? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just search for what you’re looking for as a keyword? It’s true, sometimes that does work, but often, the OCR of the page images is poor for these early works, and for tracking down a citation might require browsing through the work. In a multiple volume work, even with a citation to the proper volume, it might take a little time to find what you need. Perhaps this is why, even with many of these things already being available online, there is still the market for something like rarebooks.info, which has mostly public domain material available elsewhere.

For some visual stimulation, head over to my Picasaweb Album of Urbana Champaign. Now with mapping!