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Tag Archives: librarians

from the archive: round-up of beehive posts

08 Wednesday Jun 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in linkspam

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history, librarians, MHS

Seth Eastman on Dighton Rock
Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society

Putting up the Picture of Jesus web video on Monday made me realize it’s been a while since I posted links to The Beehive, the official blog of the MHS, where I post occasionally on our shenanigans there as independent research library librarians. So here goes:

  • While on vacation (I know, I know! my boss chided me for it) I wrote a short post about the renewed interest in Harvard University’s first Native American graduates.
  • I highlighted a 1910 police commissioner’s report on Boston’s “houses of ill fame” (i.e. brothels) as part of our “from the reading room” series.
  • I spoke with a dedicated researcher who has been in virtually every day from 9-5 for the past two months reading through John Quincy Adams’ papers on microfilm.
  • And as promised in the last link round-up, a write-up of Brian Gratton’s brown-bag lunch talk on immigration restriction discourse, 1890s-1920s.

While not written by me, I’d like to share a post written by Laura Prieto, my thesis adviser and current research fellow at the MHS on some of the gems she has found during her time in the reading room: Research Fellow Finds More Than She is Looking for in Sarah Louisa Guild’s Diary.

And finally, Digital Projects Coordinator Nancy Heywood offers an historical perspective on tornadoes in Massachusetts, in light of last week’s storm system which brought with it funnel clouds and caused four deaths across the state: Tornado Strikes Worcester County in 1953.

Follow The Beehive directly if you’re interested in more frequent updates on the goings-on of a bustling library and archive. School may be out for the summer, meaning a break for students and teachers alike, but that usually signals the beginning of our busy season as vacationing genealogists, academics, research fellows, and casual visitors, descend to get the type of history fix that just isn’t available via Masterpiece Classics!

booknotes: serving LGBTIQ library and archives users

07 Thursday Apr 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

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gender and sexuality, librarians, politics

The most recent batch of Early Reviewer titles offered at LibraryThing included this collection of essays for library and archives professionals: Serving LGBTIQ Library and Archives Users, edited by Ellen Greenblatt (Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland & Co., 2011). Being a librarian, I naturally put my name in for a copy and, lo!, I recieved it in the mail earlier this week.

Serving LGBTIQ… is a follow-up volume to Greenblatt’s Gay and Lesbian Library Services (1990), now twenty years out of date. As Greenblatt observes in her introduction to Serving LGBTIQ, a lot has shifted in the queer community and in the world of library and information science during the past two decades.

Most obviously, the scope of the book has broadened to include more letters in the alphabet soup of sexual identity and orientation. Linguistically speaking, I really, really wish they’d just gone with “queer.” The repeated use of “LGBTIQ” throughout the text was so clunky it made me want to scream … plus it just makes me think of the identities they’ve left out (neither asexuality or poly make it in) rather than reassuring me they’ve been all-inclusive.  At the same time, there does seem to have been honest effort put into the contents of the volume to provide a diverse range of topics — not simply essays about gay and lesbian folks under the guise of writing about non-straight communities in all their glorious iterations.

Another way in which the world of queer library services (indeed all library services) has irrevocably shifted since 1990 is the advent of the internet and the way in which online access to information and social networking has so rapidly saturated our culture. In 1990, few of us had heard of or made us of the World Wide Web; today most of my professional life is spent interacting in some fashion with the tools available to me via the internet (including the acquisition of this book and the blog post I’m currently writing about it). A significant number of essays in Serving LGBTIQ discuss the particular importance of internet access to queer folks as a source of information and as a space in which to connect with other queer people and explore their sexual desires. Given the popular concern about not only non-straight sexuality but also access to sexually explicit material online in general, a number of the essays stress the importance of ensuring that queer adults and teens (particularly) are not blocked from accessing needed information and social networking resources because of internet filters or other use policies.

I feel like I repeat this mantra a lot when it comes to anthologies, but it really is a truism: anthologies are almost by default uneven in nature. If you think this book might have something of use to you, I’d suggest at least browsing the table of contents before ordering … unless you happen to have a book budget and this particular text fits the bill of a professional purchase. This is a book geared distinctly toward practicing librarians (and, to a lesser extent, archivists), with an emphasis on praxis over analysis or theorizing. There are a lot of essays that trend toward case studies or profiles light on analysis, and pieces which read more like policy recommendations rather than in-depth examinations of the topic at hand. I actually found the profiles of various institutions (such as community-based archives), initiatives (oral history projects, web-based history projects) and political case studies (attempts to ban YA literature with queer themes) to be the most interesting part and potentially useful part of the volume. The recommendations for collection development, outreach initiatives, and other ways to be “queer friendly” felt fairly boiler plate to me. Maybe for folks who feel intimidated by the idea of reaching out to, or supporting, non-straight patrons, the practical advice in this volume could cut through a lot of the anxiety or fear. As it was, I’m not sure I learned a whole lot I don’t already know about the basics of being open and welcoming to all folks, regardless of orientation and self-presentation.

And ultimately, I suppose, the hope might be that guides like this will eventually become redundant or superfluous, as community spaces like libraries and archives move away from exclusionary practices (whether through intentional discrimination or simple thoughtlessness) and toward more democratic, inclusionary ones. It will be interesting to see what a volume of essays addressing these same (or similar) concerns will look like in 2031 – twenty years down the road.

the tattooed lady: or, more than you ever wanted to know about my first tattoo

19 Sunday Dec 2010

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in life writing

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

children, domesticity, librarians, simmons, travel

Maggie (age 4), Anna (age 11), Brian (age 7), Holland, Michigan, Summer 1992

I promise this is about my new tattoo (!). So bear with me here.

In 1943 prolific journalist and novelist Arthur Ransome wrote to a young friend, Pamela Whitlock in an attempt to encourage her in her own endeavors as a writer — even as she was pulled into work for the war effort. “The training for your own private job is going on all the time,” he counseled her (Signaling from Mars, 301).

Stick to it, filling your notebooks. Nothing is odder than the way in which a big slice of life, vivid at the time, fades utterly away when you escape from it into something different. It’s like coming back from a year abroad. But notes, no matter how scrappy, are like stones dropped into a pool of still water. They stir up the whole picture and bring to life all sort of other things, including things you don’t happen to have written down at the time (Signaling from Mars, 307).

Coniston Water, Cumbria (30 March 2004)

Ransome knew of what he spoke, having started his own writing career as a young university drop-out, scraping by on the salary of an office boy while trying his hand at memoir and other miscellaneous bits of writing. His Bohemia in London (1907) is something of a classic in the genre of starving artist memoirs, recounting days spent shivering in unheated flats and surviving on apples for weeks at a time so that he had enough money to buy books.  From London — and his first, deeply unhappy, marriage — Ransome escaped to St. Petersburg where he witnessed first-hand the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, sending back dispatches to both newspapers and family members (his mother received regular reports on his digestive health, including harrowing tales of surgery in wartime medical facilities; his small daughter received letters adorned with illustrations of papa in great fur coats) and editing a collection of Russian folktales in translation.

Eventually, he abandoned Russia — taking with him one of Trotsky’s secretaries, Evgenia Shvelpina, whom he had to smuggle out of the country through the Mediterranean. The two later married and eventually retired to Ransome’s beloved Lake District in Cumbria where between 1931 and 1947 Ransome authored a series of adventure stories with child protagonists (Ransome himself always protested that he had not set out to write children’s stories, but rather wrote the stories that he himself most enjoyed). Set primarily in the Lake District — though later volumes take the cast of characters into Scotland, south to the Broads, and into the realm of half-fantasy — each book follows the adventures of several families of children who spend their school holidays sailing, camping, and spinning out all sorts of adventure stories that weave seamlessly between fiction and reality. As Ransome observed after completing Swallows and Amazons, the introductory tale,

I was enjoying the writing of this book more than I have ever enjoyed writing any other book in my life. And I think I can put my finger on the thing in it which gave me so much pleasure. It was just this, the way in which the children in it have no firm dividing line between make-believe and reality, but slip in and out of one and the other again and again (quoted in In Search of Swallows and Amazons, Roger Wardale, 32).

Above Coniston Water on my 23rd Birthday (30 March 2004)

While Ransome’s novels have become enduring classics in Britain and, oddly enough, have a devoted following in Japan, they are known only rarely here in the United States. When my family stumbled upon them in the early 1990s, they were unknown treasures. Treasures which we readily devoured, my parents reading them to us every night before bed. Treasures that turned into extended fantasy play of our own. Lacking an island or annual holidays in the Lake District, we turned our own urban landscape into a wilderness, camping in the backyard and repurposing the (profoundly unseaworthy) hull of an abandoned rowboat in which to play captain, first mate, and “ship’s girl” for hours on end.

Suffice to say, the series, its author, and its landscape (both fictional and actual) continue to signify, for me, profound ties to my childhood and my family of origin, as well as my particular affection for the landscape (both literary and actual) of Britain.

Ransome illustrated all of his own stories with whimsical pen and ink drawings … which is where this post finally makes its way back around to tattoos. Because when I began thinking about what sort of tattoo I was looking to acquire in celebration of my completion of library school, I knew I wanted something that was able to weave together in a particular image the part of myself that is at the fore when I am living that part of myself that sought out librarianship as a vocation. And that is the part of myself that is grounded in my childhood steeped in literature — the part of myself that does not distinguish between reading and living, between gaining knowledge and doing. As well as the part of myself that seeks both the comfort of the familiar and domestic … and the sharp edge of political analysis and social critique. And knowing what I know about Ransome as a person, while also relating to the novels he created very much as an ingenuous child, Swallows and Amazons offers just such a mix of the political and personal.

Amazon sails (photo by Hanna), ink done by Ellen @ Chameleon Tattoo Cambridge, Mass.)

It was my mother who suggested I look to AR’s illustrations — and she who finally located the illustration that became the basis for my finished tattoo. The sailboat is the Amazon, the boat belonging to Nancy and Peggy Blackett of Beckfoot Farm.

We are introduced to the Amazon sisters in the first novel of the series, Swallows and Amazons, and they remain central throughout. One of the strengths of Ransome’s series — which is indubitably visited by the British imperialist fairy on occasion, not to mention the overtly racist fairy — is his range of both male and female characters. He goes much further than his contemporary, C.S. Lewis (for example) in portraying girls who openly eschew gendered expectations — and who are celebrated for their agency. Nancy Blackett (who has changed her name from “Ruth” to a name she feels more aptly reflects her position as pirate captain of the Amazon) abhors wearing dresses is often de facto leader of the expeditionary forces. Neither does Ransome punish boys whose idea of a good time is less conquering and more conservation: The plot of Great Northern celebrates the ethic of preserving a rare species of bird in the wild, rather than harvesting its eggs for scientific study and prowess.

I close this post with the text of a telegram that, in Swallows and Amazons begins the whole adventure. The Walker children, on holiday in the Lake District with their mother, have been anxiously awaiting word from their father (serving in the Navy) who is to weigh in on the proposition that they be allowed to camp sans adult chaperon on an island in the middle of the (unnamed) lake.  In the opening pages of the book, young Roger is racing from the house across the headland to his siblings to deliver the final word:

BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN.

On the one hand you can (and I often do) read this in a fairly harsh, survival-of-the-fittist, fashion (see? I said the British-imperialist fairy came to visit!). Yet on balance I prefer to imagine that the absent Walker parent is expressing trust in his children’s judgement and abilities — something I often find is uniquely in the power of a very small set of English literary parents (see E. Nesbit’s fictional parents for another example). These adults are always present — yet rarely intrusive. They engage with their children when called upon to do so, taking their children’s concerns seriously and often deferring to them as the experts of the moment.

It is this act of trust in their own children’s abilities to act independent of them in the world, and not only to survive but in fact thrive while doing so, that makes the wonderful adventures of the following thirteen novels possible.

Which (coming full circle) is precisely the same trust my parents placed in us as children — and made possible, for me, so many things that have led up to this moment.

So for all of those reasons let me say: I am very pleased with my first tattoo. And am already well on my way to envisioning a second!

saturday survey: librarians, archivists and historians as activists

06 Saturday Nov 2010

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in linkspam

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archivists, call to participate, history, librarians

My history adviser, Laura Prieto, alerted me to this survey being done on librarians, archivists and historians as activists in preparation for a conference paper to be delivered at a meeting at the University of Dundee, Scotland, in December. From the solicitation email:

If you are a historian or archivist, broadly defined, and you consider yourself an activist, we invite you to fill out a survey about your experiences. The definition of “activist” that we are using is “an especially active, vigorous advocate of a cause, esp. a political cause.” This survey is being collected for a study of historians and archivists as activists. The survey explores the ways in which people participate as activists and the consequences for their employers and themselves. We anticipate this survey will take approximately 20 minutes to complete.

Although the email only indicates archivists and historians, the actual questions about occupation include “librarian.”

The researchers doing the study are:

Bea Hardy, Interim Dean of University Libraries
College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, VA

Sonia Yaco, Special Collections Librarian and University Archivist
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, VA

If you feel you fit the bill and have twenty minutes to spare, help bolster their sample size!

UPDATE: Again, the survey can be found online here: https://forms.wm.edu/997. I neglected to put the link in earlier due to my lack of black tea and the earliness of the Saturday-morning hour :). Thanks to Hanna for alerting me!

work+school+life: launching year four

09 Thursday Sep 2010

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in a sense of place

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domesticity, education, family, history, librarians, simmons

The Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge (Boston, MA), by garreyf.
Made available at Flickr.com.

It’s the week after Labor Day and thus that time of year again … to look back and look forward and wonder when that third year (that seemed so speedy-fast and incredibly filled with eventfulness at the same time) slid by and to wonder what the year ahead is going to bring.

Hard to believe this is the third anniversary, already, of my move to Boston. (See my post from the end of year one and from year two here). With the hectic nature of the last two weeks (punctuated by several severe migraine-grade headaches), I can’t say that I’ve had a lot of time to reflect meaningfully on the question of whether I feel more authentically “Bostonian” now than I did at this point last year, when I was still very much on the fence. But here I still am, and here Hanna and I are likely to stay for at least the medium term (job opportunities willing!). I admit, in my heart of hearts, to longing for the Pacific Northwest now and again, since it has always felt like something of my second home — and both of us have close friends and family ties there. But the possibility of such a cross-country move is in the distant world of future possibilities, alongside Hanna’s equally important lifelong desire to live, for at least a time, in England. For now, our life is here.

And a jam-packed-full life it is at the minute!

Hanna, who graduated with her MA (History) and MS (Library Science) last December, is working as a processing archivist at the Countway Medical Library at Harvard and as an archives assistant at Northeastern (a position I now share with her). She’s working on studying for her GRE, with plans to pursue her PhD in Irish History, and in her spare time can be found blogging both at …fly over me, evil angel… and her recently-created companion tumblr feed, evil angel. I suggest to any of you reading this that you check out both if what you’re looking for are all the most entertaining links on current events in Britain/Ireland, in the world of books, libraries and archives, and genre fiction/film. As she regularly points out, Hanna’s RSS feeds are way more diverse than mine, and I always end up learning the most random and interesting things!

I’m in my final semester of work for my Library Science degree, and taking two classes: one on archives management and the other on the curation of digital materials. While both classes promise to be useful for my future work as a librarian, I’m definitely ready to be finished with formal schooling. Being a student makes me claustrophobic, prone to migraines, and depressed; it also tends to sap the pleasure out of the pursuit of learning, which I adore, and on the whole seems to be an unhealthy sort of thing for me to engage in. A bad match, personality-wise, I’ve discovered. Ironically even more so when the learning is intended to be of professional use rather than something I do because I find it intrinsically valuable (as with my history research).

To celebrate the completion of my degree, I am making plans to get my first tattoo. While I have yet to settle on a design, we discovered a kick-ass artist at Chameleon when Hanna got own inaugural tattoo (a Dr. Who question mark) over the summer, a joint birthday present from me and our friend Diana. I have two or three conceptual ideas in the pipeline right now, although I think for numero uno it might be one of the boats from Swallows and Amazons. My friend Ashley counsels that tattoos should be symbolic enough to be re-interpreted over time, wise words that make me hesitate to use something so pictoral. But I’m sitting with the image for the next few months to see how it feels, and then we’ll go from there! (If it all goes well, I’ll have to start thinking about what to get when I turn in the final draft of my thesis!)

Speaking of my thesis, the draft is away in the hands of my readers and will likely not be completed until next spring, although final deadlines are still in high-level negotiations. There are some arguments for finishing it this fall, but for quality-of-life reasons, and for quality-of-thesis reasons the handwriting is on my own personal wall that this isn’t going to happen. I don’t want to be miserable and over-extended for four months, which in turn will make my girlfriend feel miserable and over-extended as she tries to mop up my tears, soothe my migraines, and manage all of the things I simply won’t have time for. So we’re shooting for May, 2011 presently. Which is actually the term I originally projected I’d graduate (I’m making progress: it took my seven years for the B.A., so four years for the double Masters’ degrees ain’t shabby!)

Meanwhile, I’m working at my beloved Massachusetts Historical Society (from whence I am writing this) and also at Northeastern, as previously mentioned, where I tag-team a position as archives assistant with Hanna. My latest project is 20.65 cubic feet of records from Northeastern University’s cooperative education program, dating from the mid-1970s to the present. Lots of folders of interdepartmental memos and committee meeting minutes, not to mention all the internal dramas to which any organization is prone. I should also (fingers crossed!) finally be wrapping up, this October, the Marjorie Bouve scrapbook digitization project. We still don’t have a firm idea for how to display the images and information for users, but as soon as we have anything up and running I’ll be sure to link it here.

That’s all going to keep me more than busy enough, although I’m definitely looking forward to an October visit from my parents, over the Columbus Day weekend, and to some new blogging projects (i.e. the continuation of reading the (lesbian) classics with Danika the Lesbrarian; my copy of Beth Goobie’s Hello Groin arrived in the post just this morning!). Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to staying in touch with y’all via the usual modes, posting here when I can, and tumblr when I can’t.

And maybe, some time later in the fall or early next spring, you’ll see that we’ve finally taken the plunge and adopted a cat like we keep talking about doing. If we do, you’ll be some of the first people to know (’cause who can resist cute cat photos; I know I can’t!)

Best wishes for a lovely early autumn to you all, wherever you may be, and you’ll be hearing from me soon enough.

Peace,
Anna

to be or not to be a "professional" (and does it matter?)

03 Monday May 2010

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in library life

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

education, librarians

Blogger and librarian Ryan Deschamps @ The Other Librarian posted a thought-provoking piece last week, Ten Reasons Why ‘Professional Librarian’ is an Oxymoron. He introduces the list by writing

Before you comment, yes, this is an unbalanced look at professionalism. Yes, I am trolling a little bit – but with a heart that wants to lead discussion on the topic of library professionalism. Please do write a post about why these ten reason are bullocks.

On the other hand, I often see librarians and library school students that take professionalism as a given. I see this as unrealistic, especially in an era of rapid change . . . If librarians cannot personally address the following anti-professional assumptions as individuals, they cannot call themselves professional. What I am saying is that the MLIS or whatever equivalent a librarian has on their wall cannot count towards any status in society.

You can read the rest of the post at The Other Librarian.

I’ll be upfront about the fact that, while I am proud to call myself a librarian and to the work that I do in libraries and archive (and enrolled in my Master’s degree program in order to pursue work in this field that I love) I am not so hot about the idea of holding “status in society” as a “professional.” In fact, the idea that my MLS degree (when I complete my course this December) will signify some particular status in the world — one that sets me apart from my colleagues who do the same work but do not hold a library science degree — does not sit comfortably with me at all.

It wasn’t something that I thought about before starting graduate school: the fact that graduate school is, in large measure, about socializing workers into a particular professional identity. And to be quite honest, when it dawned upon me in the first few months of library school that this was part of the agenda, I kinda freaked out. The amount of angst among my fellow students and the faculty over defining and defending professional status makes me feel kinda claustrophobic. I hate drawing boundaries, boxing people in. Forget claiming “librarian” as a professional identity — try making the case for “archivist,” “records manager,” and other sub-fields being professional identities in their own right, distinct from the already-on-the-defensive identity of “librarian.” Sometimes I feel like folks spend more time worrying about their percieved status in society than they do just, you know, doing the job they feel called to do.

Being an historian, it’s really hard not to look at every identity or state of being in the world as contingent on specific historical forces having created it as such, for specific historically-relevant reasons that may or may not continue to have relevancy today. Take, for example, the concept of professionalism, and of workers belonging to particular professions for which they have recieved (in order to be deemed “professional”) advanced training, usually in an institution of higher education.

In our society, today, we consider “professional” jobs to be more credible — and able to command a higher level of income, at least in theory — than non-professional jobs. Believe me, as a pre-professional librarian (assuming librarianship is, indeed, considered a professional occupation) I am acutely aware of this. The thing is, we decided it should be this way. The notion of being a professional equaling status if actually a fairly recent development, starting in the late nineteenth century, back when people who were paid for the work that they did were considered of lesser status than, say, the “men of science,” the gentleman scholars whose accumulated wealth allowed them to pursue activities like history and scientific inquiry without worrying where the next meal was coming from. Slowly, claiming the identity of “professional X” became a way to claim a certain expertise, a certain skillset, that made you a credible source of information: even if you got paid for the work you did every day. (I’m totally over-simplifying, but you get the basic idea).

So (to return to Mr. Deschamps question), is “professional librarian” an oxymoron? His lists of reasons why they we (see? I work as a librarian in two separate libraries and still have to purposefully think in terms of a professional identity) are not certainly has merits. Though the arguments in favor are often equally compelling. My question is, do we really need to worry about fighting to preserve the status of “professional”? What are the benefits (and costs!) of understanding librarianship as a professional endeavor: when we are on the defensive, seeking to draw the boundaries between “librarian” and other identities and activities, what potentially valuable knowledge workers are we leaving out in the cold? What is the value of being exclusionary? If the work we do is valuable, it shouldn’t matter under what title (or identity, professional or non-) we do that work.

My thoughts on this are still muddled, often contradictory, and in constant flux and I plot my own trajectory moving forward (in work and in life). However, I do think it’s important not merely to examine the evidence for and against librarianship as a professional field, but also to ask why it matters that librarianship is considered a professional identity and whether those reasons (spoken and unspoken) are reasons we feel comfortable standing behind.

quick hit: sex info @ the library study

02 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in linkspam

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gender and sexuality, librarians, politics

The group Sex Work Awareness is conducting a research study to gain a better picture of what sexuality information is available at public libraries in the United States, and specifically the way internet filters effect the accessibility of information about human sexuality. They write

We are investigating the use of content filters on public library computers with Internet access. The priority research areas are access to information about sexuality and sexual reproductive health. We need help with this work, and request that people all over the United States visit their local public library and do some simple searches using the computers provided by the library. In places with filters, the items that are filtered are not standard across systems. Filtering today cannot be fine-tuned to exclude only pornographic or violent content rather than health information. For example, in a large east coast city, only the word “anal” seemed to be filtered, which prevented people from gaining access to information about anal cancer as well as any potential sexual content.

In order to get as large a number of site visits as possible, they are calling on volunteers to visit their local public libraries and complete a short two page survey. Visit the project’s website at www.infoandthelibrary.org for more information about the study and how to participate.

Wintersession: Digital Memorial and Cultural Archives

08 Tuesday Dec 2009

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in library life

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history, librarians, simmons, thesis

On a quick personal and professional note (for all of you who read this blog to find out What Anna Get’s Up To When We Aren’t There To Keep An Eye On Her):

I’m excited to report that I’ve been accepted to participate in a wintersession course (beginning this evening) on Development of Digital Memorial and Cultural Archives, taught by Kevin Glick, Electronic Records Archivist from Yale University. The class is being offered as a joint project between Southern Connecticut State University and the group Voices of September 11, which curates the 9/11 Living Memorial digital archive to commemorate the lives and stories of September 11, 2001 and the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

I’m really excited to be taking this class, since I am hoping to create a digital archive for the materials I collect as part of my oral history research. I am also looking forward to broadening my knowledge of New England a bit, since I have never been to Connecticut except passing through on the Amtrak on the way to New York City. Now I have a totally educational (read: legitimate) excuse to make the trip!

Quick Hit: Letters of the Presidents

12 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in library life

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blogging, history, librarians, MHS

I have a brief post up on the Beehive describing a talk given my friend and colleague Tracy Potter and her intern, Sarah Desmond, at the MHS on their project documenting the letters written by U.S. Presidents in the Society’s collections. For those of you interested in political history, wander on over and check it out.

In praise of context

14 Sunday Jun 2009

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in think pieces

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

books, gender and sexuality, librarians, politics

So far this month, two articles on a Milwaukee-area book-banning (and potential book-burning) kerfluffle have come across my virtual desk — a piece from the ALA website, and a more recent article from the books page of the Guardian. Particular points should be awarded to the Guardian, I feel, for their deadpan quotation of some of the more hyperbolic charges made by the Christian Civil Liberties Union about the threat certain young adult novels pose to the good citizens of West Bend, Wisconsin, simply by remaining accessible in the public library (more below). As the ALA reports:

Milwaukee-area citizen Robert C. Braun of the Christian Civil Liberties Union (CCLU) distributed at the meeting copies of a claim for damages he and three other plaintiffs filed April 28 with the city; the complainants seek the right to publicly burn or destroy by another means the library’s copy of Baby Be-Bop. The claim also demands $120,000 in compensatory damages ($30,000 per plaintiff) for being exposed to the book in a library display, and the resignation of West Bend Mayor Kristine Deiss for “allow[ing] this book to be viewed by the public.”

This claim follows unsuccessful attempts by area citizens to get the library trustees to remove the offending material from the library: in a June 2 vote of 9-0, the trustees decided to “maintain the young-adult collection as is ‘without removing, relocating, labeling, or otherwise restricting access’ to any titles.”

As Allison Flood at the Guardian reports in more detail, the offending title which the CCLU wishes to publically burn (publically burn!!!) is a young adult novel that deals with issues of nonstraight sexuality and violence inspired by homophobia and racism:

The offending book is Francesca Lia Block’s Baby Be-Bop, a young adult novel in which a boy, struggling with his homosexuality, is beaten up by a homophobic gang. The complaint, which according to the American Library Association also demands $120,000 (£72,000) in compensatory damages for being exposed to the book in a display at West Bend Community Memorial Library, was lodged by four men from the Christian Civil Liberties Union.

Their suit says that “the plaintiffs, all of whom are elderly, claim their mental and emotional well-being was damaged by this book at the library,” and that it contains derogatory language that could “put one’s life in possible jeopardy, adults and children alike.”

“The word ‘faggot’ is very derogatory and slanderous to all males,” the suit continues. “Using the word ‘Nigger’ is dangerously offensive, disrespectful to all people. These words can permeate violence.” The suit also claims that the book “constitutes a hate crime, and that it degrades the community”.

While I haven’t read this particular work by Francesca Lia Block, I have read others and Block’s characters are often struggling in very messy ways with marginalization, poverty, their own complicated sexualities, and histories as perpetrators or victims of violence in one form or another. Her work, while often lyrical, is not for the faint-of-heart. It has never particularly spoken to me, but as an author she commands a wide audience of teens and adults who find her characters compelling.

What I find interesting about this lawsuit — based, at least, on these two news stories — is the way in which the CCLU has (1) adopted the language of the political left to frame their complaint and (2) the way in which they conflate hateful actions with descriptions of hateful actions. While I suspect that what traumatizes the offended parties is Block’s affirmative depiction of characters with nonstraight sexual identities, and possibly (knowing her other works) instances of drug use, sex scenes, and the old standby, vulgar language, instead they claim to be concerned about the use of words such as “faggot” and “nigger.” This isn’t necessarily a surprising tactic, since the radical right has increasingly adopted leftist rhetoric in their effort to shift the culture wars in their favor.

What I find more stunning is their apparently inability to understand (or, possibly, their tactical decision to ignore) the difference between an actual, material act of violence or an act of speech that supports that violence and a work of fiction that depicts the reality of bigotry and violence in the lives of marginalized youth. Children face daily abuse at the hands of bullies for perceived or actual gender and sexual nonconformity; a novelist like Block, who depicts that violence in her work of fiction, is describing the reality of our children’s lives rather than advocating such abuse. If uttering the word “faggot” actually constituted a hate crime regardless of context, we would be incapable of speaking out against the use of that language by individuals who actually seek to do harm.

While this conflation of thought or depiction with actual illegal violent crime is not unique to the Right (Exhibit A: the campaign by some feminist activists during the 1980s to have pornography treated as violence against women, whether or not actual individuals had been harmed in the making of the piece), it seems to me that it displays a legalistic, overly-simplistic, atomized way of thinking that is more prevalent among conservatives than it is among those on the left. Another example that comes to mind is the approach of the MPAA rating board in assigning ratings to American films (see This Film is Not Yet Rated), and the members’ obsession with individual words or acts of sexual contact, rather than overall message conveyed. I find myself wondering if this is strategic blindness or an actual belief that a word or activity, devoid of its overall context, has a constant and unwavering effect (whether positive or negative).

As an historian (among other things) I have to cry foul and point out that context, while certainly not everything counts for a hell of a lot — and as a librarian-in-training (among other things) I have to point out that words themselves are never, ever “hate crimes.” Words are just words: it’s what we do with them that makes all the difference in the world. Francesca Lia Block has done many beautiful things with the words available to her, and in my opinion her work is the opposite of a hate crime: it has made the world a better place.

Photo credit: “Mercy! Books Burning” (c) Catherine Jamieson @ flickr.

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