Saturday, January 08, 2011
God's Librarians
There is an interesting essay about the efforts to modernize the Vatican Library in Daniel Mendelsohn, "God's Librarians: The Vatican Library Enters the Twenty-First Century," New Yorker, January 3, 2011, pp. 24-30. The essay provides a good sense about the tensions between access and secrecy to the fabulous resources of this library and archives.
A New View on Public Scholarship
Beth Luey, Expanding the American Mind: Books and the Popularization of Knowledge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).
Luey, with extensive experience in scholarly publishing, makes, with this book, a valuable contribution to the literature on what has been dubbed public scholarship. She leads us through the changing technologies of publishing and the history of publishing to consider when and where occurred the interests in writing and disseminating books intended to reach and educate a broad audience. More specifically, Luey notes how the growth in academic specialization and the stress in research as a means of evaluating faculty has made the task of reaching or educating the public more problematic. Research and research funding has pushed aside teaching as a means of evaluating faculty and the old model of the tea her-scholar has been weakened, even lost, in many universities. The loss of the public as the audience has led to highly technical, opaque writing, or, to put it another way, has shrunk the audience of many academics to small groups of their colleagues or even farther down to their tenure and promotion committees. This is not a book that is concerned with the debates about the future of the printed book or that of reading, choosing instead to consider how the idea and practice of public scholarship has changed and how it needs to be re-established. Luey brings both a fresh perspective to the volumes of advice on academic writing, based on deep reading and extensive experience.
Luey, with extensive experience in scholarly publishing, makes, with this book, a valuable contribution to the literature on what has been dubbed public scholarship. She leads us through the changing technologies of publishing and the history of publishing to consider when and where occurred the interests in writing and disseminating books intended to reach and educate a broad audience. More specifically, Luey notes how the growth in academic specialization and the stress in research as a means of evaluating faculty has made the task of reaching or educating the public more problematic. Research and research funding has pushed aside teaching as a means of evaluating faculty and the old model of the tea her-scholar has been weakened, even lost, in many universities. The loss of the public as the audience has led to highly technical, opaque writing, or, to put it another way, has shrunk the audience of many academics to small groups of their colleagues or even farther down to their tenure and promotion committees. This is not a book that is concerned with the debates about the future of the printed book or that of reading, choosing instead to consider how the idea and practice of public scholarship has changed and how it needs to be re-established. Luey brings both a fresh perspective to the volumes of advice on academic writing, based on deep reading and extensive experience.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
The ethical archivist
Elena s. Danielson, The Ethical Archivist (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2010).
Those looking for the best introduction to archival ethics will be satisfied with Danielson's book, although they might be dissatisfied with the open-ended nature of much of her discussion. She states openly, right at the beginning, that this book will raise more questions than answers and while this does not bother me in the list it will certainly irritate some practitioners. She starts with an overview of the nature of ethics, the nature and role of professional ethics codes, the role of ethics in the role of archives in contributing to a sense of collective memory and human rights, and ethical issues in using archives as a means for social accountability. Then Danielson leads the reader through a detailed discussion, with numerous case studies and questions for reflection on ethics codes, appraisal and acquisition, disposal of records, access, issues about personal privacy and corporate proprietary information, forgery, and the dilemmas posed by displaced records.
Danielson is particularly good at grappling with tough issues, while not taking a particular side (something I am not good at) and still manages to be provocative. In discussing the nature of ethics codes, for example, she makes this comment: "If the profession continues the policy of providing an aspirational code rather than enforcing ethics with penalties, there needs to be a forum for the concerns of archivists who take a different form" (p. 40). At the moment, the forum is in the classroom, and while that is a start it is not where the profession needs to be. Another emphasis by Danielson is her belief about how much is changing and how fast this is happening, such as when she considers privacy: "After decades of efforts by archivists to protect the rights of individuals, people are surrendering their privacy of their own accord" (p. 205). Such an environment makes it difficult to figure what the ethical stance ought to be. And Danielson is very adept as drawing attention to severe contradictions and murky areas, such as discussing the complicated nature of legal protections for whistleblowers, while further noting that archivists who make consider such a step could be seen as violating their trust andante their own ethics code.
Those looking for the best introduction to archival ethics will be satisfied with Danielson's book, although they might be dissatisfied with the open-ended nature of much of her discussion. She states openly, right at the beginning, that this book will raise more questions than answers and while this does not bother me in the list it will certainly irritate some practitioners. She starts with an overview of the nature of ethics, the nature and role of professional ethics codes, the role of ethics in the role of archives in contributing to a sense of collective memory and human rights, and ethical issues in using archives as a means for social accountability. Then Danielson leads the reader through a detailed discussion, with numerous case studies and questions for reflection on ethics codes, appraisal and acquisition, disposal of records, access, issues about personal privacy and corporate proprietary information, forgery, and the dilemmas posed by displaced records.
Danielson is particularly good at grappling with tough issues, while not taking a particular side (something I am not good at) and still manages to be provocative. In discussing the nature of ethics codes, for example, she makes this comment: "If the profession continues the policy of providing an aspirational code rather than enforcing ethics with penalties, there needs to be a forum for the concerns of archivists who take a different form" (p. 40). At the moment, the forum is in the classroom, and while that is a start it is not where the profession needs to be. Another emphasis by Danielson is her belief about how much is changing and how fast this is happening, such as when she considers privacy: "After decades of efforts by archivists to protect the rights of individuals, people are surrendering their privacy of their own accord" (p. 205). Such an environment makes it difficult to figure what the ethical stance ought to be. And Danielson is very adept as drawing attention to severe contradictions and murky areas, such as discussing the complicated nature of legal protections for whistleblowers, while further noting that archivists who make consider such a step could be seen as violating their trust andante their own ethics code.
Sunday, January 02, 2011
In this Year, Books Are Not Going to Disappear
We continue to be reminded that printed books are not going to disappear. David Ulin, LA Times book critic, provides a compelling defense of the value of reading books in his The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter In A Distracted Age (Seatlle: Sasquatch Books, 2010). He sees the reading of books as an "act of contemplation" (p. 16) whereas the present more prevalent browsing of blogs, web sites, and so forth Ulin characterizes as "an odd sort of distraction" (p. 34). Ulin's text reminds you of earlier works such as those by Sven Birkerts, and for those who still buy and collect books that is not problem. Jo Steffens, ed., Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), is testimony to the value of books, featuring interviews with New York architects and engaging photographs of their libraries.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
9/11, Images, & the Information Age
W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)
War, as Mitchell notes, can be viewed in real time, from just about any vantage via social media: "The shaping of perceptions of history does not have to wait for historians or poets, but is immediately represented in audio-visual-textual images transmitted globally" (p. xii). In a clever bit of analysis, Mitchell teases how the meaning of the images associated with 9/11 by relating their interpretation to the highly politicized debates about the cloning of life preceding the terrorists' attacks. Cloning assumes many levels of meaning, from just plain copying to that of image making, especially since both the arguments about cloning and the terrorist attacks used images in very similar ways. Mitchell notes that the Bush administration was fortunate to have the terrorist events since it ended what was probably an endless debate about the bioethics of cloning before that debate had really settled in. Still, there is an inherent fear of images, that is, that they might come to life.
Mitchell examines what he calls the "memory archive" of the war, the essential and seemingly " unforgettable" or iconic images of 9/11 that have shaped our understanding of the war on terror (a term not now used by the Obama administration). The study of or interest in iconic images is nothing new, having emerged certainly with the birth of photography and even farther back with paintings. But there is something different now because of our networked information technologies. "Images migrate around the planet at blinding speed; they become much more difficult to quarantine or censor; and they are subject to more rapid mutation than ever before" (pp. 73-74). Not surprisingly, then, Mitchell focuses on the images of the Twin Towers and the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture (this example having been transformed into an "archive" of leaked images and other images commenting on or playing with the photographs). Mitchell suggests that what makes the Abu Ghraib archive "new and different" is that the "central collection of documents is virtual (a body of digital images accompanied by metadata automatically encoded in their files)' and that the archive itself -- its location, structure, and retrieval system -- is also virtual. The digital character of the images has had momentous consequences for their circulation, of course, giving them their notoriously viral character, resisting all attempts at quarantine and containment" (p. 123). From my vantage, we can understand the present "war" as much more of an Information Age phenomenon, even as we realize that images shaped our sense of earlier conflicts such as the Civil War, the World Wars, and Vietnam. War and memory is something different today: "The emergence of social media such as YouTube and Twitter has turned every citizen into a potential journalist, every innocent bystander into a potential witness whose testimony can be uploaded to the global nervous system" (p. 130). It is why Mitchell plays with the nature of bioethical debates about cloning, the latter representing a "deep copy, a perfect transcript at both the digital and analog levels, visible embodiment and molecular structure coordinated" (p. 164).
War, as Mitchell notes, can be viewed in real time, from just about any vantage via social media: "The shaping of perceptions of history does not have to wait for historians or poets, but is immediately represented in audio-visual-textual images transmitted globally" (p. xii). In a clever bit of analysis, Mitchell teases how the meaning of the images associated with 9/11 by relating their interpretation to the highly politicized debates about the cloning of life preceding the terrorists' attacks. Cloning assumes many levels of meaning, from just plain copying to that of image making, especially since both the arguments about cloning and the terrorist attacks used images in very similar ways. Mitchell notes that the Bush administration was fortunate to have the terrorist events since it ended what was probably an endless debate about the bioethics of cloning before that debate had really settled in. Still, there is an inherent fear of images, that is, that they might come to life.
Mitchell examines what he calls the "memory archive" of the war, the essential and seemingly " unforgettable" or iconic images of 9/11 that have shaped our understanding of the war on terror (a term not now used by the Obama administration). The study of or interest in iconic images is nothing new, having emerged certainly with the birth of photography and even farther back with paintings. But there is something different now because of our networked information technologies. "Images migrate around the planet at blinding speed; they become much more difficult to quarantine or censor; and they are subject to more rapid mutation than ever before" (pp. 73-74). Not surprisingly, then, Mitchell focuses on the images of the Twin Towers and the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture (this example having been transformed into an "archive" of leaked images and other images commenting on or playing with the photographs). Mitchell suggests that what makes the Abu Ghraib archive "new and different" is that the "central collection of documents is virtual (a body of digital images accompanied by metadata automatically encoded in their files)' and that the archive itself -- its location, structure, and retrieval system -- is also virtual. The digital character of the images has had momentous consequences for their circulation, of course, giving them their notoriously viral character, resisting all attempts at quarantine and containment" (p. 123). From my vantage, we can understand the present "war" as much more of an Information Age phenomenon, even as we realize that images shaped our sense of earlier conflicts such as the Civil War, the World Wars, and Vietnam. War and memory is something different today: "The emergence of social media such as YouTube and Twitter has turned every citizen into a potential journalist, every innocent bystander into a potential witness whose testimony can be uploaded to the global nervous system" (p. 130). It is why Mitchell plays with the nature of bioethical debates about cloning, the latter representing a "deep copy, a perfect transcript at both the digital and analog levels, visible embodiment and molecular structure coordinated" (p. 164).
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