Author Archives: drlynrobinson

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About drlynrobinson

Academic, Londoner. She/Her

I Collector

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Mimi Troll in one of my earliest outfits

So, December 31st, and all the books lying on my attic floor are still there. They have progressively accumulated since last January, and whilst I have every good intention of promoting them to their ‘proper’ place on the shelves, they remain where I first put them, in little huddles on the floor. The reason they are still resident on the carpet, where the Bad Persians spitefully spike their corners, is that I have no more room on my shelves.

I get older painlessly, endlessly absorbed with taking everything off one shelf, dusting, and believing that it will now be possible to squeeze more in than before. As I return the volumes I become distracted by something as I leaf through the pages, and time slips away as I engage with something I have owned for ages, but never focused on before. There is then the dilemma of whether a book should be in place A, with X Y and Z, or in place B with E F and G? Should my books on Lithuanian libraries stay alone in my attic with LIS related material, or should I unite them with their natural co-habitees of books on Lithuanian places, folk tales and cuisine (currently downstairs with travel, fiction and cookery respectively..)? Should my Ladybird book of ballet stay here with the other ladybird books or should I separate it from its same size siblings and put it downstairs with the other books on ballet? Maybe I should have two copies of these things..? No. Definitely no. There is no more room on my shelves.

In his book ‘The Library at Night’, Alberto Manguel devotes a whole chapter to ordering (The library as order). His dilemma in arranging his collection offers me some solace.

He writes that as a boy, he would decide:

… to place them by size so that each shelf contained only volumes of the same height.

But that

… sometimes this order would not satisfy me and I’d reorganize my books by subject: fairy tales on one shelf, adventure stories on another, scientific and travel volumes on a third, poetry on a fourth, biographies on a fifth. And sometimes, just for the sake of change, I would group my books by language, or by colour, or according to my degree of fondness for them.

Once a category is established, it suggests or imposes others, so that no cataloguing method, whether on shelf or on paper, is ever closed unto itself.

And  later, in adulthood, when creating his own library, he writes on the subjective and personal nature of the organization of private collections:

Why stash the works of Saint Agustine in the Christinianity section rather than under Literature in Latin or Early Medieval Civilizations? Why place Carlyle’s French Revolution in Literature in English rather than in European History, and not Simon Schama’s Citizens? Why keep Louis Ginzberg’s seven volumes of Legends of the Jews under Judaism, but Joseph Gaer’s study on the Wandering Jew under Myths? Why place Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho under Carson but Arthur Golding’s Metamorphoses under Ovid? Why keep my two pocket volumes of Chapman’s Homer under Keats?

Ultimately, every organization is arbitrary.

Not just me then.

Then there is LibraryThing – and the need to not only to add in all my books (scanning in the covers for the more ancient or foreign ones), but to devise a scheme to tag them all according to where they are on the shelves, and consequently to which category I feel they should belong. Although any electronic catalogue allows for the possibility of placing an item in more than one category by adding multiple tags, this does not help in my quest to create the ideal collection, in the ideal order, with all the books on the shelves. And sadly, on the topic of social networks for books, Alberto Manguel is silent.

But, dear reader, there is more to this prose than the story of how I maintain a collection of books rather than just a stash beside my bed. The truth is I collect quite a lot of things. I mean collect them rather than just happen to give them space in my house, because they are obtained specifically in relation to the other things which I possess. They are organized. I organize them. Endlessly, never to my complete satisfaction, and occasionally (designer handbags) to facilitate gloating. And there is never enough space to present my collections on the shelves and in the cupboards, in the way in which I would like.

I have been driven to contemplate my true nature as I read “An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World”, written by Frances Larson, in which she investigates his compulsion to collect just about everything. Whilst the word ‘obsessive’ is not mentioned, the negative consequences of Wellcome’s desire to collect ‘everything’ are painful to read about.

His marriage failed; his need to control not just the objects his buyers found, but any subsequent research ideas that ensued, caused significant friction between Wellcome and his employees, and perhaps most sadly of all, he collected too much. The process of collecting overshadowed the desire to learn from, or enjoy, the things collected. Most of his collection was in storage, destined to be partially dismantled after his death.

Wellcome believed that only a complete collection would be worthy enough to display, one which would truly tell the story of the history of medicine. He believed that by arranging the items in his collection, contrasting and comparing, making connections, previously unknown facts and understanding would be revealed. But in the meantime, he died:

… Wellcome ran out of time. The story that might have emerged from all his frantic collecting – the great history ‘of the art and science of healing’ that he intended to depict through his rarities – was never finished. The collection was never exhibited en masse, polished and consistent, as he intended it to be.

Yet, perusing the fantastic legacy that is now the Wellcome Collection and Library, it is impossible to say anything other than that Henry Wellcome’s activity was worth it.

So what about my collections? Well I don’t think I collect anything with a view to having everything. I think I first thought of this when attempting to compile a list of toxicology resources for my PhD – too many even a decade ago for the most ardent of resource collectors. My approach has evolved to aspire to a representative sample of what is available (e.g. LIS books, colored frock coats and SpaceNK products). After all, there is no more room on the shelves. And I doubt that anyone will consider my collections a legacy.

But I do enjoy being organized and I naturally form collections from the things I have. I have to put like things together and take great pleasure in thinking of ways to do this. My great uncle’s bible and his stereoscope, for example, may seem unlikely shelf sharers, and yet I place them side by side in the cupboard because they are the only things of his that I posses, and so even though I have other bibles, this particular one sits alone on a box of cards intended to generate 3D images at the beginning of the 20th century.

Sometimes I discover new things from arranging the old things. Recipes for example. All the cut out ideas from magazines and newspapers could so easily sit in a heap, good for nothing except artful clutter. Yet when organised according to savoury or sweet, and even crudely subcategorized, I find a pattern in the type of food I felt drawn to, and a renewed interest in cooking something nice to eat. And then who hasn’t enjoyed making playlists from all the CDs which lay forgotten in their rack, as soon as all the tracks are loaded onto iTunes – the software arranging the random pile of sound history into something new and attractive – hateful to those who admire the concept of an entire album, but smashing for those of us who only ever liked one track anyway. And the same for photos, and papers as well as books. What about all those old letters and postcards? Is there anything that cannot become a collection? Cleaning products, the contents of the fridge, knitting patterns, crockery … mmm  I can see where Wellcome had a problem – its all so interesting, placing like things together, establishing differences, seeing what is missing, and what has previously passed unobserved.

My earliest collection was one of books by Enid Blyton – and then when I was eight, I started to collect trolls (see Mimi above) – each named and dressed in clothes I designed and made myself. Easy to see where I came from.

But it is December 31st , and so before another year passes, I am going to the fridge to find cheese and champagne – and yes … the cheeses are stored according to country of origin… but no – I don’t collect champagne – I drink it as soon as it is chilled. Happy New Year.

Bibliography:

Larson F (2009). An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Manguel A (2006). The Library at Night. Yale University Press: New Haven and London.

The virtue of forgetting…

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Forgetting things is annoying isn’t it? Anniversaries, names of places and people, poems, formulae, book titles, the postcode, the name of the singer and where you left the keys. Names are a nightmare. In the midst of an intellectual exposition I can recall the faces, the clothes and when/where we last met but the white bubble above the head where the name should be remains tauntingly blank, the contents sneaking back at some later point in time – if I’m lucky there will be time to reassure my audience that the memory was not a fantasy, but often the forgotten monikers return hours later, when I am trying to remember something else. A better memory would save so much time – no need to re-read prose on which I have already spent hours, or to go through every CD until I find the title of the song I just can’t remember. Top of the annoying list has to be forgetting the perfect wording which drifted effortlessly into my mind an hour or so ago .. and yes, my pile of notebooks (write it down when you think of it) is now so unwieldy that I need to index them. Ha!.

But help is at hand in our information society, where we co-exist alongside our digitized books, music, photos, videos, diaries, lists, contacts and ideas. Once uploaded into cyberspace all the stuff we need to remember is permanently recorded for us – just waiting to be plucked out of the ether by the right keyword. Free text indexing gives us endless points of access, a name, a place, a date or subject, can produce our media like magic. Remembered or forgotten, it is all still there, just waiting patiently. The electronic box in the attic. Even things we gave away and forgot about for decades can be retrieved from services such as Ebay, Abe Books and Amazon. The antidote to regret.

And in our work, preservation of material is often our main focus. We professionalize the art of selecting what to remember and the best way to remember it – in archives and records management, and even in libraries. The challenges of digitizing and preserving material in a society where yesterday’s format is something you were using this morning, are things we thrive on. We are keeping the past alive for the future.

And yet … something about this permanent, digital shoebox has troubled me for about a year now – since I began uploading myself into the ether, in fact; I mean – how long does this digital shadow trail after us? Well forever duh…. even when we die. Not a new worry, and of course, not a new answer, but I am prompted to write after listening to Vicktor Mayer-Schonberger talking about his book “Delete – the virtue of forgetting in the digital age“, in which he raises the question of whether there are some cases in which forgetting is better than remembering. As an aside, the book is a good read, and I recommend it to anyone taking our LAPIS (INM380) module next semester.

Returning to my concerns, I think there are two facets to the wonder memory of cloud computing and USBs. The good bit is that public domain data can be preserved for everyone – the bad bit is that so can personal data. And whilst I accept that it is often hard to define what is public and what is personal (personal letters found in an attic and published after the authors death ..?) it is clear by now that much of what we hope will remain personal, is is fact, horribly public.

I have often read of how you can never delete a Facebook profile – you merely deactivate it. Is this the same for other social networking sites? A permanent record of the person you were when you were 11 ( or 35 …) – sitting there waiting to be hacked in the present or pillaged in the future?

What happens to all those primary school friends to whom you bestow complete access to what’s on your mind and in your photographs – do you starkly unfriend them (no quotes – this is a real word now) as you evolve, or do they slither after you years into another life. Remember anyone from primary school ? High school ? Are they still part of your life? (ok – with three exceptions I can say no. The thing is that it is hard to move on when our digital shadow bites at our heels even in the dark.

Viktor raised issues of ‘amusing’ photos being retrieved to ruin someone’s career, and of seemingly buried, throwaway admissions being retrieved 40 years later to serve as a reason for being refused entry to the US. Others quickly furnished the event with perhaps more chilling examples – ever posted your undying love for someone on your social networking site ? Ever cried over the keyboard as you ‘delete’ your entire profile and start again using your middle name?

Ever conducted an affair by email ? Did it end badly ? Did you use del *.* ? Did he? It’s all still on a server somewhere isn’t it ? Maybe copied to someone’s USB. Waiting.

And to add to our woes Google keeps details of every search undertaken, and results clicked on for 9 months (this was reported at the event and I have not checked this definitively) – all linked to a specific IP address. Do you keep clicking on his website ? Sad. Worse – everyone at Google knows.

After 9 months the Google data is anonymized. But how hard is it to pinpoint someone from anonymized data if you are determined ? Hmmm.

So what’s the answer? How can we publish our fabulous lifestyles to our cohorts without risking future ridicule or consequences? How can we ensure that the contents of the box in the attic remain something poignant yet personal? Do we have to self-censor all the time? Viktor Mayer-Schonberger suggests the use of ‘expiry dates’ on electronic media, so that our past does not have to haunt us. In the meantime, dear reader, do not marry into royalty, or enter politics.

Why Information Matters

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National Archives, UK

Natalie Ceeney joined our class in London yesterday to talk about how she sees the role of the modern information professional, from the perspective of the work undertaken by the National Archives at Kew, where she is currently CEO. If you are interested in facts and figures, or curious about what the archives do, their website is excellent and I won’t attempt to give my version here. Instead, I will offer a brief listing of some of the themes which arose from our session, which are relevant to all of us working as information professionals, or those hoping to in the near future.

  • professional silos such as ‘librarian’, ‘archivist’, ‘information scientist’, should be dissolved/merged so information professionals see themselves as members a cohesive body – perhaps under the umbrella of ‘knowledge and information management (KIM)’
  • technology has reduced the need for face-to-face consultation in many professions (e.g. most people book their own travel now) – this has implications for how information professionals work
  • physical ‘library’ spaces will continue to exist, but in a different way to that which we are used to – more people centered
  • choosing/selection is about content not media
  • there is (still) a need for good content management – file structuring and database design – it is better if information professionals are involved in this and are technologically competent (IT literacy is important)
  • the best way to keep up to date is to read a lot (yes)
  • information is a political issue now – see Information Matters
  • public spending is constantly under scrutiny – can information professionals offer cost savings and solve problems?
  • how can we use information to change society?
  • how do we define a record? (theory is important)
  • we now serve everybody, not just those used to or interested in research

Not for the faint hearted who cannot appreciate change – but certainly an indication of the opportunities for those interested in a career in information – whilst printed works will continue to inspire love and devotion in many of us, the virtual world provides us with many more challenges and employment prospects.

Thanks to Natalie for her time and expertise.