design disruption

There was a screening of Design Disruptors this afternoon up on campus. It is a documentary by invision about "the transformative power of design." The emphasis is on the user experience and mostly about how to make it seamless, effortless, intuitive. Some of the things I scribbled in the dark as the film rolled: design sprint; saving time is sexy now; obvious is not easy, great is still hard; iterate iterate; design thrives on constraints. Facebook HQ has 2G Tuesdays where designers and other staff use FB with a 2G connection to get a taste of how some of the bells and whistles work with a slow connection. Lots of good stuff to think about including packaging your ideas.

I was thinking about library cataloging software as I listened and watched. In the past decade or so, I have used several brands of cataloging software: Geac Advance; ALEPH from Ex Libris; III Millennium; Voyager from Ex Libris; OCLC Connexion. Each of them has quirks. I wonder how this software can be so clunky as I'm adding a new field or subfield, or editing the fixed fields, or putting in delimiters. Why do we put up with it? Most of the groovy library catalog developments have been on the user experience end of things, with discovery interfaces and one-box searching, usually with follow-up faceting. Maybe the back-end of some of the applications in the film are as clunky as the library programs. We only saw what Etsy looked like from the user side, not how the data on available objects is created. Still, I cannot imagine that inputting your objects on your Etsy site could be as clunky as the current library systems.

I also have used LibraryThing over the past decade. It is a website where you can catalog your personal books (or "wanna-reads" or "would-love-to-owns") and tag them and put them in collections. It's quite a lot more straightforward than the library systems, at least on the cataloging side of things. The library systems also try to control circulation and acquisition information. Our libraries also have mountains of legacy data.

Bomarzo

So I was in the stacks and noticed that a book on mannerist architecture was classified in NA350 and its neighbors were medieval.

I decided to peruse the book which was published in 1966. When I got to the pictures of the gardens at Bomarzo, I was struck by how the monsters were out in the open. We visited in 1999 and the monsters were hiding in the bushes.

And then I returned the book to the shelf, debating on whether anyone would notice or care if Tafuri's book on mannerist architecture -- L'architettura del manierismo nel Cinquecento europeo -- was misclassified. What a jungle we live in.

Tania Bruguera

I had heard the name Tania Bruguera before I went to Cuba in May during the Biennal de La Habana but I certainly didn't know her work well. Others in the College Art group were well aware and Judith Rodenbeck participated in the reading of The origins of totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt at Bruguera's house. The September 2015 issue of Art in America has an interview with Bruguera by Travis Jeppesen. Just a few quotations:

"Also, we will have a big library [at the Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artivism]. We'll put shelves on the walls. It will be a specialized library, for people working in art, activism, philosophy and politics."

"I'm an anticapitalist. So I'm present in the discourse. I believe that socialism is a better model, even if it has some problems. I'm afraid that Cuba will go in a direction that is completely contrary to the Revolution."

"And racism is coming back. Yesterday I was talking to a former student, a black artist whose work deals with these issues. She told me that she will no longer go to some private restaurants, because nobody there is black -- not the cook, not even the person who cleans. Everyone is white. Racism is, of course, related to classism. This is something we haven't seen for a long time in Cuba. We were color blind. We saw people for who they were, how they behaved -- not how much money they had or the color of their skin."

As I walked the streets in Havana, there did indeed seem to be a diversity and mixing of people that was authentic and positive. I've been reading The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness by Michelle Alexander so colorblindness and racism are much in my thoughts. The interview shakes my idealism about the situation in Cuba, a little bit, but I am very glad that there continues to be movement on the normalization of relations between Cuba and the U.S.

the curator and the cataloger

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, painted by Rembrandt, and one of the great Dutch paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Walter Liedtke, Curator of European Paintings, was tragically killed in the Metro North commuter train accident in early February. My good friend, Daniel Starr, Associate Chief Librarian at the Watson Library at the Met, wrote the following tribute to Liedtke, which I post here with his permission. The tribute was sent on February 5 to the list of the Art Libraries Society of North America.

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Last fall I received one of those e-mails catalogers hate to get:

“I see that when one searches Watsonline keyword ‘ter Brugghen,’ you get some recent lit, but not (anywhere in the list) the classic monograph by Nicolson. However, if you go with the Anglicized ‘Terbrugghen,’ you get his book and some of the other key works on the artist drop out. The results should be the same using either form. This would apply also to ‘ter Borch,’ etc. Thanks!”

Over the years I’ve learned that it pays to be flexible about cataloging whenever possible since it usually doesn’t pay to get into long discussions about rules with the unilluminated. So I was willing to make some changes, especially since this message came from Walter Liedtke, our distinguished colleague, who died so tragically in the MTA crash Tuesday.  I added some keywords to our records to address his concern. It was easy to do and didn’t break any rules. Since it was Walter I thought I’d go one step further and explain what was happening:

“I have adjusted our cataloging records to make the improvements you suggest. A keyword search for ‘ter Brugghen’ will now include the Nicolson book (http://tinyurl.com/mlthewj) as well as some of the other titles that were missing. Because Nicolson used the form ‘Terbrugghen’ in his title there is no way for me to make this work appear earlier in the results than number 15 since the ranking is by an algorithm I can’t control.

If you’d like the technical explanation for why the problem arose it is because American libraries use ‘Terbrugghen, Hendrik, 1588?-1629’ as the preferred form of his name based on Princeton’s formulation of the heading in the National Authority File. The different forms matter less in a subject search because all variations will be brought together under the preferred form: http://tinyurl.com/lvj9el7. If someone searches the subject ‘ter Brugghen’ they will be directed to a hyperlink that takes them to the ‘Terbrugghen’ form of the name: http://tinyurl.com/nfsxmw2. Thank you for making these suggestions. It is gratifying to know scholars still use Watsonline and care about these things.”

I never thought I’d get a response, but one arrived quickly:

“[T]hanks so much for this full explanation. I wonder what the ‘National Authority File’ does with Van Dyck. As you'll see in my Dutch and Flemish catalogues, and any scholarly American publication of the past 30 years or so, these artists are all alphabetized as in Europe, so Borch, Dyck, Gogh, Goyen, et al. Anyway, the important thing is that the search reveals what we have. “

This exchange was going much better than I thought possible. Maybe I should have stopped here but I went on:

“When Princeton decided to use ‘Terbrugghen’ instead of ‘Ter Brugghen’ in 1988 they based their decision on how the name appeared in two general Dutch languages encyclopedias in spite of the fact that the book on Dutch painting they were cataloging used the latter form:

1.      Holländische Malerei in neuem Licht, 1986: t.p. (Hendrick ter Brugghen) p. 65 (Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen, Den Haag (?) 1588-1629 Utrecht)

2.      Grote Winkler Prins, 1974: v. 18, p. 348 (Terbrugghen, Hendrik, 1588 (?)-Nov. 9, 1629)

3.      E.N.S.I.E.: v. 10, p. 1160 (Terbrugghen, Hendrik (1587/1588-1629), Ned. schilder)

Rest assured that whenever the prefix (van, ter, van der etc.) is written separately for a Dutch name the artist is alphabetized by the form following the prefix and there is a reference from one form to the other--except for Van Dyck. Because he died in London the Library of Congress consulted English language sources and decided he was ‘Van Dyck, Anthony’ not ‘Dyck, Anthonie van’ just the way they would treat the American name ‘Van Buren, Martin.’

These are some of the compromises we have to live with because we are part of a national network of libraries.”

Walter’s response showed what a good teacher he was: he always had something useful and interesting to add.

“Actually it's worse overseas. Today Flemish names use the prefix and when compound run it together, so that my colleague in Brussels is (in a bibliography) Vander Auwera, Joost, not Auwera, Joost van der. This is perhaps one of the diseases they caught from the Spanish. Ter, by the way, is a contraction of ‘te der,’ meaning ‘at the.’ Henrick ter Brugghen = Henry at the Bridges.”

We will miss him.

Daniel

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Daniel Starr

Associate Chief Librarian

Thomas J. Watson Library

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Watsonline is the online catalog of the Met. Sometimes we wish that our authority records interacted seamlessly with our bibliographic records, that is, gave a combined result of "ter brugghen" and "terbrugghen." On the other hand, some argue that it is better to let the catalog user know what is happening, as here you are notified that "Ter Brugghen" will be found under "Terbrugghen."

book is just a dirty four-letter word

Way back in 1972, Ada Louise Huxtable wrote an essay in the New York Times about the library at Phillips Exeter Academy, designed by Louis Kahn. I'm reading her collected essays entitled On architecture, published by Walker in 2008. The Exeter library essay first appeared in October 1972. Her closing words about the library sound as though they could have been written quite recently.

"Mr. [Rodney] Armstrong [Exeter librarian] will be leaving Exeter to become the librarian of the Boston Atheneum on Walter Muir Whitehill's retirement next year, and a suitable parting gift would be completion of the still-unfinished terraces and planting. His parting gift to Exeter is one of permanent grace, in the pre-McLuhan tradition, although electronic resources are duly included.

'Book,' says Mr. Armstrong, obviously not believing it, 'has become a dirty four-letter word.'

'No one ever really paid the price of a book,' Kahn says, 'only the price of printing it.'

Together, they have made a beautiful box that celebrates books."

I haven't made it to Exeter, New Hampshire, to see this Kahn building but I've seen quite a few other Kahn buildings, including eating lunch many times on the porch of the Kimbell Art Museum. By the way, the Huxtable essays in On architecture are proving very enjoyable, especially since she is talking about buildings and architects that informed my appreciation of architecture way back then. And the historical distance is also intriguing.

(Photograph 2009 by Pablo Sanchez, Prague, from Wikimedia Commons)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phillips_Exeter_Library,_New_Hampshire_-_Louis_I._Kahn_%281972%29c.jpg

Speaking of historical distance, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has moved from a beaux-arts building on Massachusetts Avenue to the mid-century modernism of Watergate.

P.S. I'm still stunned that we were saying "electronic resources" 42 years ago, or at least Huxtable was.

watch your templates

Our small but lively public library here in Alfred got one of the grants to establish a Public Computer Center. It's the smallest library in New York State to get one of the grants and it will be inserted into the space through rearrangement and using netbooks to maximize space needed as well as allowing for the lending of the computers for those that don't have them at home. At the "groundbreaking" ceremony, the representative of our state assembly member read a letter which praised us for our "woman-owned business." Now I knew that librarianship was a female-dominated profession but really. It was rather more humorous than sad but showed how easily one can use the wrong template for a formulaic letter. Nonetheless, the assemblywoman Cathy Young seems to be pretty good for our region. I haven't decided yet if I'll vote for her (she seems a knee-jerk fiscal cutter).

And speaking of integration of special text into a formula, Jesse Kahn posted a link on Facebook to MoveOn.org's video about President Palin. It uses photos and names from your Facebook archive to personalize the message. I think it works pretty well though it's a bit scary how quickly they can insert themselves into your life.

random acts of MADness

After an early lunch on Saturday with Charles and Don who were down from Syracuse for a Lincoln Center fix, I stopped at the new building of the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), the much-criticized reworking of the "lollypop building" on Columbus Circle by Edward Durrell Stone. One of the opening shows is "Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary." There were a number of interesting objects in the show. The most compelling perhaps was Michael Rakowitz's papier maché reconstructions of objects that disappeared or were damaged during the looting of the Baghdad Museum in 2003. Most of the works in the show were not so overtly political. There were two lovely cupboards using recycled materials: one with panels of recycled wood by Piet Hein Eek and another with panels of recycled steel by someone (the artist list for the show hasn't yet yielded a match in my addled brain). Jean Shin did a wonderful Hiroshige wave out of old LPs. And Devorah Sperber did a great Mona Lisa out of spools of thread (this is for you, Jenni!). On the floor of works from the permanent collection, there's a nice textile work by Elaine Reichek called "Egyptian Curtain" with a quote from Matisse: "I used to buy pieces of tapestry ... a little museum of samples ... my working library" (ellipses in the caption).

My favorite confusing headline from the morning paper is "Keeping Lawmakers Happy through Gifts to Pet Charities." I was expected something about Leona Helmsley and her billionaire puppy. Instead, it was Congressman Murtha and grants to the symphony orchestra in Johnstown, PA. I'll accept that sort of congressional payout more than grants for military-industrial complexes or "bridges to nowhere."

That article was cheek-by-jowl with an article about the dudes that are storming Sarah Palin rallies. That was scary.

After reading some of the paper with my pancakes at Silver Spurs on Broadway, I walked over to see the Banksy Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill installation wherein fish sticks swim in a bowl, gorillas watch the Discovery Channel, a fur coat sits on a branch swinging its tail, chicken nuggets snack, sausages wiggle like sea lions, a bunny burnishes her nails in front of a mirror, and whatnot. On the way to Seventh Avenue, I ran into a guy who had a hard luck story, locked out of this apartment and if he didn't get uptown by 10 a.m., he'd lose his job with "The Drowsy Chaperone." Well, I fell for it, "lent" him a twenty, and he promised he'd leave a twenty with my doorman in an hour or so. There's the "random act of madness" but perhaps my faith in the street story will be restored. I've made more foolish investments in bum rushes. Not that he seemed to be memorizing my address.

a full house

When your house is full of books, the last thing you need is 100 books and more checked out from the library. While I like the fact that they can be in perpetual renewal unless requested, it means you just let them pile up (well, *I* let them pile up). In order to retrieve some space, I decided that I could use LibraryThing with a tag of "checkedout" rather than the similar "unread" that is often suggested and used. Some of these books are not to be read but used. As I'm going through them, I'm finding some wonderful bits of moments from some time ago. The one in hand is Propos de littérature by Alain. The slip of paper in the book indicates that I was taken by a statement about memory but I have no idea where I saw the quote. The text in the book: "Il semble que le souvenir soir esthétique par lui-même, et qu'un objet soit beau principalement parce qu'il en rappelle un autre." Or as it says on the piece of paper: "It seems that memory is aesthetic in itself, and that an object is beautiful chiefly because it recalls another." I still like the quote, it still strikes a chord, now if I could just remember where I saw it.

Jenny Holzer, library builder

In the "Inside art" column in Friday's New York Times, there's a notice about Jenny Holzer's project for the exterior of the Guggenheim. She will be illuminating the spirals with sayings that "will range from terrorism and the Iraq war to poems about loss, grief and love." The installation will become part of the Guggenheim's permanent collection and she will be adding sayings and poems throughout the fall. She calls it a "library."

would ben be proud?

Tuesday's N.Y. Times had an article about the Mercantile Library moving from its longtime home in Midtown Manhattan. There's a picture of the top of the card catalog with a bust of Benjamin Franklin. The caption reads "Noreen Tomassi, executive director of the Mercantile Library, among the portraits and paintings that will move to a new location, as will a bust of Benjamin Franklin, a noted librarian." True, he did some statesmenlike and inventive things but what a librarian!?