Member: SECCA

Wow, SECCA, you have stepped right into the middle of a very complex situation, and a classic librarians dilemma! So, you ask for advice, which is always a double-edged blade, I think... I have managed to put together about four pages of advice for you, so you may want to read this over lunch under a shady tree. My apologies!

First, a little background info for you. Many librarians work by themselves in small to mid-sized libraries for organizations like museums, architecture firms...etc. They are called "solo librarians". While you might think (because of the word "librarian") that most of the job has to do with books, it does not. Modern librarians are the mediators of the information environment for their organization, and they have an important role in satisfying staff and patron information needs. This means helping to unify all the different sources under the banner of the organization, and make sure information is behaving properly for everyone, accessible to the staff that must have it to do their work, and flow smoothly between departments efficiently.

An example typical to visual arts institutions is the development of a digital image repository...lots of departments use the same images for different things. An image of an object in the collection may be used by the curator for something, the education dept. for something else, and the communications/marketing dept. for yet another reason. It is costly for each person to retain and organize the image over and over at their own workstation when a digital library can exist to care for the images (sometimes in the thousands!) and find exactly the right ones that people need.

So...what about all those books sitting around? Yes, they are part of the information domain. Ask Mr. Hanes if you can interview him briefly about what he is drawn to in the library at SECCA...his opinions and ideas might inform you in a very different way from staff.

The print collection (as opposed to "the book collection") is, as you mentioned, usually a rich and diverse place in a museum. Art museums in particular collect catalogs and pamphlets in depth that other kinds of institutions can't. They also sometimes have artists' files that contain very ephemeral stuff...called ephemera, actually...that doesn't fit neatly into one area or another. Sometimes this ephemera is CRITICAL in establishing provenance for a piece, or helping to authenticate, or do a myriad of things that the museum doesn't even know it needs yet. I have run into lots of little documents, letters, clippings tucked into the volumes at the Frye which may be lead or gold...depending on the need. How to decide what to keep? Totally overwhelming, yes?

So, I'll kind of walk through your reply line by line with my thoughts, and let's see if we can figure something out.

Those "old" books from before the 80's: You will have to look at each volume individually to assess it's relevance to the SECCA collection and alsoto the SECCA mission statement. The mission statement and collections may reflect each other, or not...depends on how they both developed. None the less, the library needs to support BOTH.

If SECCA started in the late 50's, that might be a better cutoff point. Who is to say, after all, that some PhD person writing their thesis might need to see what SECCA considered the "dynamic relationship between art and society" throughout its organizational life? (While this may seem a remote possibility, scholars today are faced with shrinking access to important cultural collections like SECCA library + archives, or Frye library + archives.) I say shrinking because, while the collection itself may remain, ACCESS to it shrinks when we lose intellectual control over what it contains.

On the other hand, the late 50's might not be early enough if any of the museum's holdings predate that. Or, if there might be something from the library that supports the explanations for an artist creating something...after all, art does not happen in a void in time. It comes from somewhere, reacts to something before it, dialogues w/something before it...

I can give you an example from my own experience at the Frye. As I was listing the books on LT, I came across a book that was older, (1900-1910, I think), and was a beautifully bound exhibit catalogue. I was amazed at the condition of the volume, and the obvious care with which it was created. Because I don't have a background in art history, I didn't know that it was from an "important" exhibition. (Very important, to the Frye, it turned out!) I showed the volume to my curator who told me that it was an identical example of a volume that they had recently collected, and informed me about it's intellectual relationship to the museum's holdings, and it's cultural value. Nobody knew it was there. They had totally lost access to it. Somebody on the staff had recently purchased one from a book dealer overseas at great expense. Doesn't that just sound like one of Aesop's fables?!? So, that informed me about handling the old stuff. I had to find the right person to tell me how valuable it was. Maybe if I had showed it to the marketing dept., they would have said...um, those plates are horrible, the color is bad, this is too old for us, get rid of it.

This kind of speaks to your comment about getting too many suggestions! It sounds like that hasn't helped, and I think that you are experiencing the phenomenon of "people are where they're at"...meaning that they will work from their "knowledge base" and don't have the time or experience to consider other perspectives. Like the ramifications of getting rid of all the pre-80's volumes. That is what librarians and archivists are for in an information environment like a museum or library. By the way, one interesting article I read claimed that the first use of the term "museum" had to do with Aristotle's huge library of works that formed the foundation of the famed ancient "Library of Alexandria"...(I haven't run that down yet, but a fairly well-known scholar made the claim.)

Childrens stuff: If your sense is that the education/children's stuff is not vital, don't spend time on it, let the incoming Ed. director decide. Maybe they will jettison it - maybe they will put it in a box for the future librarian or archivist to deal with. You can make a suggestion based on your perspective.

Magazines & Pamphlet: "The Gallery's History", in your words, seems a pretty accurate assessment. It may be too much to ask the intern to make a decision about something that could be critical. The person in charge of your internship, or whoever is giving you suggestions may also not be the person who should make the decision about this stuff. And whoever is the right person will certainly not have the time to go through these items in a fine-toothed fashion to do the right thing. It is a potentially losing battle. This part of the collection could contain items that are published by SECCA, or of SECCA shows, or it could contain magazines w/articles about SECCA, or it could just be the place that various staff over the years chucked their art catalogs when they thought something "might be of interest in the future". Well, the future is here, and it's a mess, right? I'm going way out on a limb here. If you deal with this stuff, grab SECCA related materials, if you can i.d. them, and hold the rest in a separate space.

Art History & Photography Books: Sounds like a strong suit for the library. If you continue this project, maybe start your shelf list here...(LT was down when I looked just now to see what you have actually started with.) Maybe you have started w/these. IF you start tagging things, "Art History" and "Photography" are very large and general tags. That's not to say they are bad, just broad. If you develop other tags, try to keep the numbers down, and see if you can use them to describe subgroups of items under the broadest tags. You might give a book on German Photography in the Interwar Period tags like "photography" and whatever else the people at SECCA might use to find the thing, like "German" or the art history time period ("Interwar" was the term I used as an undergrad in the 80's...maybe it is the same, maybe a new term for that era is in use now.)

Reference, Architecture, Biography: Often these are core materials in an art library but these days most folks feel that they get a good bio off of Wikipedia...without realizing that Wikipedia has lots of flaws like the lack of authority on a subject, or competing intellectual views that get covered up or misrepresented. Of course print materials have the same flaws, but chances are you will get more diversity and volume of ideas from a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright (including the authors bibliography that is often included) than you can get from Wikipedia. Because staff at museums are SO under the gun in terms of time and productivity, they will not have the ability to grab a print volume for the information, instead using the thumbnail sketch from Wiki, or another online resource. While this isn't your problem, what is your problem is making the case for keeping these volumes until someone can assess them in relationship to the organization (starting to sound like a refrain to a song, isn't it?). Follow your instincts about this stuff. If you are inclined to keep it, keep it. If you run across something that you know is deeply flawed or is so far outside of the organizations purvue, get rid of it. (I found a book in the Frye Library on Oriental Rugs that was not only really inaccurate, it was also very disrespectful and disseminated information about who made the rugs that was, well, very bad information. I had no problem weeding that one.)

A word on TAGS:

Tags are not subject headings, they are little ideas that multiply and spread as quickly as people can think of them...like rabbits, in other words, and they are equally hard to contain. Subject headings in library catalogs work because there is a vast and organized substructure for them. LT doesn't let you do that. If you start using tags, try to make a few VERY BROAD categories with a handful of SUBCATEGORIES. Books are not about just one thing, and your category system will break down quickly, so it's better to tag less, and use broader categories right now. You will be tempted to get specific, but then your tag-world will be messy, and might not reflect how the people in the organization think about the stuff. I would suggest keeping your tag count limited if possible to under 50 or 60 tags. Less if you can swing it!

Document any decisions you make about the collection in a notebook, don't spend too much time documenting, be brief & to the point. "I think this, I did this, this is where the stuff is." Decisions like how you used tags, what the categories are, what books are holding for someone else to decide about...etc. Copy & Paste our correspondence into a Word document, attach it to your decisions, make it available to whomever is ultimately responsible for the library.

My gut feeling about your library is that you have been asked to do something extremely complex, and the reason is because the people who asked you to do it have no idea what it really means. If they think about it for a while, or try it themselves, they might start to understand what you so beautifully articulated to me.

Depending on what your other "projects" are for SECCA this summer, I would advise them to keep this library as is until they recruit an intern from a nearby graduate program for Library and Information Science. I would suggest UNC's program because it is accredited, and has faculty who could hook the intern coordinator at SECCA up with the right graduate intern. An intern from a graduate program would probably be really happy to work with this collection, and the result for them and for the Gallery will be more in line with what they need. (You are obviously totally able to do this intellectually, but you probably have more demands than just this, and there is a set of skills needed that is outside of the training of an art historian.

You are in charge of the intellectual CONTENT, not the library STRUCTURE as an art historian. The librarian is in charge of the STRUCTURE, and actually can do fine with passing familiarity of a subject in many cases.)

If you can make a case for them keeping this valuable resource (the library), and getting a library science graduate intern, do it. If you can get them to let you interview Mr. Hanes about why he likes to use the library, that might be really cool, and if you structured the interview right you could get all kinds of stuff that will help the library and the gallery in the future, plus be a historical reference for this very important person in the history of the gallery. (Kind of an art history sideline, donors/founders interviews...usually they're long dead by the time a historian wants to ask them a question!!!)

If you wind up keeping this project, well, do your best! You are smart and articulate, and the library is LUCKY TO HAVE YOU!

Please email the Frye at the following address: info AT fryemuseum DOT org
Request that they forward your email address to the curator of collections regarding a LIBRARY REQUEST. You can put Frye Librarian in the subject line, and it should get to me. We can chat more via email that if you like.

Again, sorry about the length! Cheers,
Frye Librarian

posted by FryeMuseum at 1:45 pm (EST) on Jun 26, 2008

Hi, SECCA - tell me a little bit about your collection? How big do you think it is? And...do you have some background working in libraries, or are you a librarian or planning to become one? Or did you just take on the job 'cuz it was there and looked interesting?!?

Background over here:

I'm a librarian, so my approach to using LT is extremely specific, and it will help me to understand where you're coming from...and while I like books just fine, I'm more interested in how people learn, and how people get information that they need, no matter what the format. I'm also committed to cultural institutions and public access.

Right now at the Frye Museum, I'm doing what is called "shelflisting" the books. It is VERY different than actually cataloging them...like in a card catalog. While LT calles itself a "catalog" (on the LT "about" page...first paragraph...!) it isn't one. It is a cool social utility first, an okay shelflist next, and (from this librarian's perspective), a lousy catalog.

A catalog is the reflection of the intellectual content of your bibliographic holdings. (code for "all of your books") It has many sophisticated relationships and substructures. While tagging in LT is cool, it does not reflect intellectual relationships, and can become increasingly messy and unwieldy to work with.

If the collection will remain small, say under several hundred volumes, and be of one kind of thing mostly (books, as opposed to catalogs or directories or serials (journals) or...a million other kinds of print things getting listed in LT), then it will be great!

I look forward to hearing more from you, and finding out more about SECCA.

posted by FryeMuseum at 7:56 pm (EST) on Jun 25, 2008