Robert-Goldwater-Library

The RGL blog has moved!

The Robert Goldwater Library has been relaunched!

http://goldwaterlibrary.typepad.com

{http://goldwaterlibrary.org} 

This old blog shall remain as an archive of posts ca. 2005-2007.

Thank you!
The Management

 

Call For Items: New Blog, ARLIS/NY

Announcing the new blog for the Art Libraries Society of North America, NY Chapter (ARLIS/NY): http://www.arlisny.org - see also their Flickr photos.

via their home page:

To give our blog a personal touch, we are asking for your help in sending our way art-related, newsy information about yourself. Our membership is made up of creative, fascinating, cultured and knowledgeable people. Let's find out what we are all doing and share our news.

Information can include:

art-related awards you've received, milestones, professional activities, presentations, articles you've written, announcements, staffing changes etc.

Photos are also welcome.

Send submissions to Suz Massen at [email protected] or Alexandra de Luise

at [email protected]

Thanks for your help in making the blog something we can all call our own.

Suz Massen & Alexandra de Luise

Too Cool for Their Shush-shirts

EAT, DRINK, BE LITERARY From left, Jessica Pigza, Maria Falgoust, Jeff Buckley and Sarah Murphy at a social event for librarians where the author Robert Sullivan, far right, spoke. photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

via NYTimes:

A Hipper Crowd of Shushers
By KARA JESELLA
Published: July 8, 2007
ON a Sunday night last month at Daddy’s, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, more than a dozen people in their 20s and 30s gathered at a professional soiree, drinking frozen margaritas and nibbling store-bought cookies. With their thrift-store inspired clothes and abundant tattoos, they looked as if they could be filmmakers, Web designers, coffee shop purveyors or artists.

SOCIAL BOOKWORMS Maria Falgoust helped start Desk Set to meet like-minded librarians. Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

“Maria Falgoust, 31, is also a founder of Desk Set, which took its name from the 1957 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy romantic comedy. A student who works part time at the library at Saint Ann’s School, she was inspired to become a librarian by a friend, a public librarian who works with teenagers and goes to rock shows regularly.

Since matriculating to Palmer, Ms. Falgoust has met plenty of other like-minded librarians at places such as Brooklyn Label, a restaurant, and at Punk Rope, an exercise class. “They’re everywhere you go,” she said.”

When talk turned to a dance party the group had recently given at a nearby restaurant, their profession became clearer.

“Did you try the special drinks?” Sarah Gentile, 29, asked Jennifer Yao, 31, referring to the colorfully named cocktails.

“I got the Joy of Sex,” Ms. Yao replied. “I thought for sure it was French Women Don’t Get Fat.”

Ms. Yao could be forgiven for being confused: the drink was numbered and the guests had to guess the name. “613.96 C,” said Ms. Yao, cryptically, then apologized: “Sorry if I talk in Dewey.”

That would be the Dewey Decimal System. The groups’ members were librarians. Or, in some cases, guybrarians.

“He hates being called that,” said Sarah Murphy, one of the evening’s organizers and a founder of the Desk Set, a social group for librarians and library students.

Ms. Murphy was speaking of Jeff Buckley, a reference librarian at a law firm, who had a tattoo of the logo from the Federal Depository Library Program peeking out of his black T-shirt sleeve.

Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers?

Not any more. With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”

When the cult film “Party Girl” appeared in 1995, with Parker Posey as a night life impresario who finds happiness in the stacks, the idea that a librarian could be cool was a joke.

Now, there is a public librarian who writes dispatches for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a favored magazine of the young literati. “Unshelved,” a comic about librarians — yes, there is a comic about librarians — features a hipster librarian character. And, in real life, there are an increasing number of librarians who are notable not just for their pink-streaked hair but also for their passion for pop culture, activism and technology.

“We’re not the typical librarians anymore,” said Rick Block, an adjunct professor at the Long Island University Palmer School and at the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science, both graduate schools for librarians, in New York City.

“When I was in library school in the early ’80s, the students weren’t as interesting,” Mr. Block said. 

Since then, however, library organizations have been trying to recruit a more diverse group of students and to mentor younger members of the profession.

“I think we’re getting more progressive and hipper,” said Carrie Ansell, a 28-year-old law librarian in Washington.

In the last few years, articles have decried the graying of the profession, noting a large percentage of librarians that would soon be retiring and a seemingly insurmountable demand for replacements. But worries about a mass exodus appear to have been unfounded.

Michele Besant, the librarian at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the Association of Library and Information Science statistics show a steady increase in library information science enrollments over the last 10 years. Further, at hers and other schools there is a trend for students to be entering masters programs at a younger age.

The myth prevails that librarians are becoming obsolete. “There’s Google, no one needs us,” Ms. Gentile said, mockingly, over a drink at Daddy’s.

Still, these are high-tech times. Why are people getting into this profession when libraries seem as retro as the granny glasses so many of the members of the Desk Set wear?

“Because it’s cool,” said Ms. Gentile, who works at the Brooklyn Museum.

read on...

Museums in Libya 2.0: "lamusediffuse"

via Rhizome.org, 7/6/07:

After several months of intense and exciting work, the project Museums in Libya 2.0 is already available on the Internet.

lamusediffuse is a nonprofit research group proposing the use of Social Web tools for the inclusion of non-dominant cultural expressions in the scopes of culture diffusion on the Internet. Accordingly with this objective, the project “Museums in Libya 2.0” is focused on two starting facts, the first is the lack of information about Libyan museums available in the website of the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM) and the second is the apparent lack of museum websites in this country. As a consequence of this, the objective of our project has been overcoming both realities through the following actions:

* Overcoming the gaps of Web 1.0 by using a methodology based on Web 2.0 tools as a flexible, interactive and participative alternative option of information exchange;
* Proving Social Web academic usefulness and its tools as a valid and effective research tool;
* Palliating the lack of contents on Libyan museums on AFRICOM website by compiling, contrasting and structuring the information available on the Internet about the subject;
* Elaborating a reference map where gathering and locating the museums of Libya;
* Raising awareness about the online institutional forgetfulness situation of Libyan Museums at the present time in comparison with others in the rest of the world;
* Creating a methodological model for small museums and museums of developing countries or under conflict situations, reasonable in economic and maintenance terms;
* Encouraging museum professionals to Web 2.0 tools use as an economic, simple and effective solution to overcome any lack of computer science personnel or tools and digital technology;
* Emphasizing the importance and role of the Jamahiriya Museum of Tripoli and improving its online visibility for both international and local audiences;
* Finally, creating a reference document on the Libyan museums that will be published under a Creative Commons license of attribution and for noncommercial use.

You can find more details about this project on lamusediffuse's website

From now on you can enjoy the wonderful Libyan museums strolling through the interactive map, where you will find information on each museum provided by our collaborators and Social Web users. Do not forget also consulting our wiki and updating it with new data. Besides, you can collaborate sharing your photos of Libyan museums including them in our group in Flickr, e-artcasting.

At this moment we leave you with the presentation we have made to present the project on next July 11 at the Medialab of Madrid (Spain,) within the Inclusiva.net encounter: New Art Dynamics in Web 2 mode (http://www.inclusiva-net.org) In the meanwhile, you can consult the references of the project in lamusediffuse's del.icio.us account (http://del.icio.us/lamusediffuse/libya). We hope meeting some of you there!

Link to the presentation.

Museums + folksonomies: bridging the semantic gap

via NYTimes:
One Picture, 1,000 Tags {excerpts}
By PAMELA LiCALZI O’CONNELL
Published: March 28, 2007

[...]

"Museums have recognized that their online collections are not doing the job — we're hiding the content away from nonspecialists," said Jennifer Trant, a partner at Archives and Museum Informatics in Toronto. "We've got to provide access on the same level as visual memory."

Now, after spending millions of dollars and years of effort on their virtual homes — which draw many more visitors than their physical ones — museums are rethinking their online collections. They are experimenting with one of the hottest Web 2.0 trends: tagging, the basis for popular sites like Flickr.com. In social tagging, users of a service provide the tags, or labels, that describe the content (of photos, Web links, art), thus creating a user-generated taxonomy, or folksonomy, as it's called.

Museums plan to encourage the public to annotate their collections by supplying descriptive tags that could exist alongside professional documentation, creating a new shared vocabulary. Van Gogh's "Starry Night," for example, could elicit tags like "stars," "planets," "swirls" or "insanity."

The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, already have prototype tagging applications on their Web sites, and nearly a dozen other museums plan similar projects.

But can the public be trusted to tag art? Will curators let them?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art ran a test in fall 2005 in which volunteers supplied keywords for 30 images of paintings, sculpture and other artwork. The tags were compared with the museum's curatorial catalog, and more than 80 percent of the terms were not in the museum's documentation. Joachim Friess's ornate sculpture "Diana and the Stag," for example, was tagged with the expected "antler," "archery" and "huntress." But it was also tagged "precious" and "luxury."

"The results were staggering," said Susan Chun, general manager for collections information planning at the Met. "There's a huge semantic gap between museums and the public."

Based on this and other research, a group of museums formed the steve.museum tagging project, which recently received a two-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The grant work, which began last fall, is based at the Met and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and includes the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. People may tag selected art from these museums on the project Web site; some of the museums plan applications on their own sites as well.

[...] Aside from the prohibitive cost of subject indexing thousands of works, there are other reasons museums want the public to tag art. For one, "art professionals can find it surprisingly difficult to describe the visual elements of a picture," said Ms. Trant, who is managing the grant work. She recalled that during early testing of tagging at the Met, a frustrated curator complained, "Everything I know isn't in the picture." [read on...]

iMoMA: Virtually Phlogging the Museum

via Artnet News, Feb 8, 2007:

DIGITAL CAMERA WOES AT MUSEUMS
Digital cameras and cell phones are playing havoc with the "Photos Not Allowed" policy at museums, according to a recent article by Ruth Graham in the New York Sun. Museums typically fret that if their visitors take snapshots of artworks on the walls, important "intellectual property rights" are being violated -- though cynics have long suspected that the museums just want to protect their monopoly on postcards and reproductions. These days, images of any popular art project can usually be found on photo-sharing sites like Flickr.

Now, pushing things one step further, comes the iMoMA Project by Travis and Brady Hammond, which aggregates all the Flickr images taken at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The project has special pages for celebrated MoMA works like Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk and Andy Warhol's Soup Cans, as well as the Yoshio Taniguchi-designed stairwell. Featuring snaps from all angles and under a variety lighting conditions, the project is a veritable phenomenology of the works. Hammond told the Sun that he hopes MoMA will embrace the idea, and feature their project in the museum itself, perhaps as "a little kiosk." How about putting it on www.moma.org? The project would provide a head-spinning mise en abyme on the web!

On the left coast, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been aggressively enforcing its "No Photos" policy in its current "René Magritte and Contemporary Art" blockbuster. According to BoingBoing, a tech blog, LACMA guards are being forced to leap into action whenever a museum visitor takes a cell phone from his or her pocket. (The guards are also required to wear Magrittean bowler hats!) BoingBoing particularly savored the irony of a show that blocks ordinary people from participating in the very proliferation of Magrittean imagery that the show itself celebrates.

As with other attempts to stop the sharing of digital content, any attempt to curtail the circulation of digital images is a fool's errand. As of this posting, dozens of photos of the "Magritte and Contemporary Art" have been posted on Flickr, including numerous snaps of artworks.

Links:

iMoMA home

About iMoMA

How to contribute

iMoMA's flickr group: theMoMAproject(NYC)

Diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library and Archive

Photo: Gleb Garanich/Reuters
The looted and burned National Library and Archive in Baghdad in April 2003, a week after United States forces seized the capital.

via NYTimes:

Baghdad Day to Day: Librarian's Journal
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: February 7, 2007

Saad Eskander, the director of  Iraq's National Library and Archive in Baghdad, finally had some time to catch up on his diary after a couple of very busy weeks. As he wrote in his latest entry, he was having trouble repairing the Internet system; the Restoration Laboratory "was hit by 5 bullets"; and "another librarian, who works at the Periodical Department, received a death threat. He has to leave his house and look for another one, as soon as he can; otherwise, he will be murdered."

For a month now, Dr. Eskander's intermittent diary entries have been appearing on the Web site of the British Library (bl.uk/iraqdiary.html), and they detail the daily hurdles of keeping Iraq's central library open, preserving the surviving archives and books and, oh yes, staying alive.

"We thought it would be a good opportunity to highlight the conditions Dr. Eskander and his staff are really facing and that they are risking their lives to provide this service," said Catriona Finlayson, a spokeswoman for the British Library.

Written in a flat, unemotional style, the entries relate the bombings, blockades, shootings, threats, shortages and petty frustrations that make up everyday life for the cadre of civil servants working at Iraq’s main cultural and literary storehouse. A complaint that heating fuel prices are 40 times higher than in the fall is followed by a report on the assassination of one of the library’s bright young Web designers and the need to ask the government to keep the electricity on.

Dr. Eskander said that a friend who works at the National Archives in Britain suggested he write a diary for an archivists’ Web site. "I was hesitant," he wrote in an e-mail exchange yesterday. "I feared that people would not believe what I would say about our daily life and the state of total chaos and destruction prevailing in Baghdad."

Finally, he agreed, because "I was in debt to my librarians and archivists, who have been working very hard and making all sorts of sacrifices to serve the cultural needs of the educated class of the country."

The British Library started publishing his journal on Dec. 30, the day of Saddam Hussein's execution. It includes material beginning in mid-November, right before Dr. Eskander decided to close his library for three weeks after a frightening series of bombings, shootings and death threats. The mostly unedited entries retain their typos, missing words and mistakes in English, contributing to a sense of immediacy and intimacy.

Museum Anthropology launches a blog

The Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA) of the American Anthropological Association has recently announced the establishment of an interactive weblog to support the work of the journal of the same name and the field.

Jason Jackson, Museum Anthropology editor, writes in the most recent issue (Nov. 2006) of Anthropology News:

Found online at http://museumanthropology.blogspot.com, the Museum Anthropology blog will be updated with news of, and from, the field. Among its functions, the blog will fill the role formerly performed by the journal's Exhibitions Listings section. As museums provide the editorial office with press released and other information regarding new exhibitions, these materials will, when appropriate, be posted to the blog. The blow will also provide a space with which news related to the journal may be easily conveyed to the CMA membership as well as the general readership. As with other new media, this blog will surely change as technology and user practices shift. To begin with, the comments function will be enabled and we will experiment with strategies to promote professional dialogue on the subjects featured on the site.

The Museum Anthropology blog appears on the Goldwater Library blog in the Blogroll to the left of this post, under the heading MUSEUMS & CULTURE.

Goldwaterlibrary.org

ANNOUNCEMENT:

The RGL blog can now be reached by clicking http://goldwaterlibrary.org

One good blog deserves another

As the blog you're reading has grown in coverage and complexity these last fifteen months, two threads have emerged: the one centering on the art and material culture represented by AAOA and the Goldwater Library; the other, issues surrounding museum library practices, including using socially networked software (such as blogs, wikis, &c.).

As the museum continues to grapple internally with issues surrounding the role of blogs in overall web content generation, it seems counter-intuitive for these issues to be treated solely within the blog itself and for what is under current policy a restricted audience. It's a discussion that would benefit greatly by being opened to a larger librarian and researcher audience. What's more, it might draw attention to the Goldwater Library blog as well as generate suggestions for refinements and improvements.

After prodding from my blog colleagues I inaugurated the library of primitive art blog to capture the 'meta'-discussion which the Goldwater Library blog has engendered. The primary authors of the Goldwater Library blog, namely Joy and Erika, have graciously agreed to participate in the LOPA blog as well.

I invite everyone to take a look for him- or herself. Please make allowances for its newness and the inexperience of its creator. And feel free to post comments or contact me directly with your thoughts.