reading and hopping

The tag "books and reading" has overtaken "galleryhopping." It's not that I don't have any galleries to hop through in the Southern Tier of western New York State. As a matter of fact, yesterday's post about Gregory Battcock was written between an opening of Josef Schützenhöfer's works on paper at the Cohen Center and that for "Reading through Beuys" at the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery. I stopped in the ceramics library to read Artforum while I waited for the later opening to open. But I do have more time for reading and less art to hop.

And I just finished reading City boy by Edmund White, his memoir of his "life in New York during the 1960s and '70s." I really enjoyed parts of it and found it all interesting, partly because I didn't come out until 1980 and have some regrets that I didn't come out during the high times of gay liberation. White is six years older than I am, not enough older that I couldn't imagine having lived through the times as he did ... if I'd lived in New York City. White is a great believer in the special glory of NYC which I understand.

And back to Schützenhöfer who lives in a small town in eastern Austria (when he's not being the Randall Professor at Alfred University) and who extolled the value of living on the periphery last night in his gallery talk. He also talked about how his Liberation Monument was vandalized and was then displayed in Graz, a much larger city, after being repaired.

The Beuys show, curated by Andrew Deutsch, includes a lot of books and other publications, not too surprising for a "Reading through Beuys" exhibition. A few of the pictures reminded me of seeing the Beuys show at the Guggenheim, oh, maybe fifteen years ago. But I generally can't think of Beuys without being reminded of the riff on Beuys and the coyote, wherein Dennis Bellone in his "Beuys" spends some very scary time with a domestic pussycat in a similar setting. I was lucky enough to actually meet that work in Ghent when it was on display in the inaugural show at the new contemporary space.

Before I "go," I want to pass on a wonderful characterization of an anarchist from the closing pages of City boy (p. 293): During the 1970s I moved away from seeing myself as a socialist and even a fellow traveler to recognizing communism for the sustained international nightmare it was and myself as an anarchist (not the bomb-throwing sort but an extreme individualist).

The illustration is a watercolor by Josef Schützenhöfer of a North Carolina hillside, 1980, from the Werkstadt Graz website. It wasn't in the exhibition at Cohen but there were some truly beautiful watercolors done in Istria as well as the more political works. Not that there wasn't some political undercurrent in some of the Istrian scenes.

confluence, RDA, Big Heads

It may be a wonderful confluence of cataloging trends. At this morning's Big Heads, there was a report from John Attig about RDA development and implementation as well as a discussion of the LC response to the report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control and on the results of a survey on vendor records. At two or three points, the concept of embryonic bibliographic records came up. The embryo is not the important aspect; the evolution of that record and the accretion of additional access is what makes the concept potentially revolutionary.

RDA is different from AACR2 in discussing the nature and form of an element more than how the elements fit together. While that can be frustrating for us catalogers who have been at it for a while, it can also be freeing. Since the implementation of ISBD in the mid-1970s, we have thought of a bib record as having a character that could be marked as pre-ISBD, ISBD, or AACR. As we move into RDA, it may be more profitable to think of elements as RDA but not worth it to try to code a record as RDA.

It seems to me this really fits with the idea of a record that accretes information. The record might start out as the barest description but adds descriptive elements, subject headings, call numbers, etc as it is used by various catalogers and other record builders. As the book is used, the record might also grow with social tags, reviews, relationships, pictures of the bookjacket, sample text, full text links, whatever. Sounds a bit like Amazon or Flickr.

It will be interesting to see how this mindframe works itself out in the MARBI discussions of RDA and MARC, perhaps especially how the FRBR Group 1 entities play out.

social art

Last week, Steve and social tagging of art works -- http://steve.museum
Today, crowdsourcing at Apex Art -- http://www.apexart.org

I have been intrigued for some time about the intersection of expert cataloging and social tagging. I've been hearing about Steve at least since the VRA conference this spring in Baltimore. There was a workshop/seminar on the project last week at the Guggenheim. I have now arranged for Michael Jenkins to talk to NYTSL in November. Several of my NYTSL colleagues have expressed strong interest in the topic. http://nytsl.org

This morning, I went to get a ticket for the 9:25 p.m. showing of "Shortbus" at Sunshine and then meandered into SoHo and Tribeca to do a bit of art before coming to Bobst. Both Participant and Canada were closed, probably open at noon. It's frustrating for us gallery goers to have Saturdays such a late, and thereby short, day. Over to Church Street and Apex Art. The card for the new show had been compelling -- simple drawings of animals. The show is curated by Andrea Grover and is called "Phantom captain: art and crowdsourcing." The brochure for the show quotes Jeff Howe from the June 2006 Wired Magazine wherein he "introduced the term crowdsourcing ... to describe a new form of corporate outsourcing to largely amateur pools of volunteer labor that 'create content, solve problems, and even do corporate R & D'." Examples such as EBay where users stock the marketplace and Amazon where users provide the reviews that sell more books. Sounds like social tagging wherein we use untrained catalogers to supply the words that might supply the inroad to a resource.

In a conversation with one of my cataloging colleagues (Diana Greene) last week, we skirted around the value of longterm, constructed subject headings and the sometimes slangy way we describe certain concepts, e.g., Cointelpro, black feminism, coalition building. Sometimes the way we speak of a concept, say "peace activist," conflicts with the way it is dealt with in LCSH. "Peace activist" is a reference from "Pacifist." Diana's concern is that pacifists needn't be peace activists (witness the current writer), and peace activists needn't be pacifists. And LCSH uses "... movements" for groups of activists, e.g., Student movements, Civil rights movements, Antislavery movements.