library of primitive art

Tracking open-access alternatives to traditional print publishing

A recent post on the blog Material World brought home to me just how quickly open-access publication has arrived, even in our often remote corner of the academic world. The post as it was conceived, illustrated and with scholarly apparatus (including an author's note), is likely to satisfy a research need just as much as any succinct journal article. It would seem that the appearance of the scholarly blog post heralds a certain 'coming of age' of the weblog.

A Note About the New Banner

Making Tappa (native cloth), 1890s (sepia photo)
Image source

Having just cobbled together a banner on behalf of Ross for this new blog of his, I thought I should post a note regarding its origin. The background image (Making Tappa, above) comes from The Bridgeman Art Library, which describes itself as

the world's leading source of fine art with images from over eight thousand collections and twenty nine thousand artists. We represent museums, galleries and artists throughout the world by providing a central source of fine art for image users

Aside from working with the world's museums to provide great images for scholarly use (etc.), there are other reasons for mentioning The Bridgeman Library, namely the ruling (c. 1999) that photographs of images from the public domain are not copyrightable. Referred to affectionately as "Bridgeman", this is considered a landmark ruling for fair use and digital reproduction of images.

See also: Wikipedia entry: Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.

and:
Recent Lessons from the Courts: The Changing Landscape of Copyright in a Digital Age
by Brett I. Miller, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP (RLG DigiNews, April 15, 2000, Vol.4, no.2)

excerpt:

To the extent that Bridgeman stands for the broad proposition that no copyright interest can be claimed in a digital reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art, the case unquestionably undercuts one of the most important weapons available to institutions to police the unauthorized copying and distribution of digital image collections. However, the Bridgeman holding concerns only reproductions of two-dimensional works in the public domain. This leaves reproductions of three-dimensional objects - which arguably involve a greater degree of "originality" by virtue of the selection of backdrop, lighting, perspective and other creative choices involved in their creation - still subject to copyright. Moreover, Bridgeman does nothing to impact or undermine the separate and independent copyright interest that institutions may have in digital image collections as "compilations." Compilations are works formed by the collection and assembling of pre-existing elements that, standing alone, may not be subject to copyright protection. Accordingly, although Bridgeman may affect an institution's ability to claim copyright in reproductions of particular images, the case does not undermine the copyright interest an institution may have in the selection, arrangement and coordination of the particular elements comprising a given digital image collection.

Furthermore:

While Bridgeman represents the first judicial pronouncement on whether a digital reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art is sufficiently original for copyright protection as a threshold matter, a case decided in December of last year, Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., provides critical insight into how the fair use doctrine will be applied in the digital context. The fair use doctrine is arguably the most important limitation on the rights granted to copyright owners. Fair use is a defensive claim that serves to protect third parties from liability for conduct that may otherwise constitute actionable infringement. The current federal copyright statute codifies this equitable doctrine by providing, in relevant part, that "the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching . . . scholarship, or research is not an infringement . . ." [read on...]

Re-education through blogging

I'd like to thank Annoyed Librarian for the thoughtful and comprehensive response given to my rather off-the-cuff (and perhaps even impetuous) observation on anger and loathing in the librarian community. As my eyes were opened by my initial 'discovery', so much the wider are they opened by AL's reply. (And by the follow-up comments to that post, but more of that perhaps at a later time.) She has devoted more thought and more bytes to the issue than I, and in doing so I hope clarified some of the questions raised by my more scatter-shot effort.

To respond to the easier points first, the politics of a blogger are either a matter of record or not, at the discretion of the blogger. In most instances I'm happy inferring them from the blog itself or, if there's no indication, not worrying about it. For me they're not usually an issue: I don't often preselect sources with a particular political bent in mind, although discovering them certainly may color how I respond to the blog, favorably or unfavorably. It's only human. Whether the blogger is also a librarian would seem immaterial.

Even as a neophyte blogger it's clear to me: If you see something blogworthy, whether a post or an entire blog, blog it. I did not intend to conflate AL with some of the views in her blogroll -- say, how ALA may be going astray doctrinally -- but if she shares some of the points of view there, so be it. (What I can make out of AL's political philosophy suggests we might actually enjoy a lively conversation with no few points of correspondence.)

Ironically, I see now that I managed to tar her for the 'crime' of providing access to these (still to me) disturbing points of view. And me a seasoned librarian, haven't I learned anything? My criticism, and it's a small one, was more about conflating humor and politics. Rarely do they mix well, let alone parse.

AL makes a good point: politically and socially conservative librarians get annoyed too, and why not? It's simply a different manifestation of the same human condition, one not often revealed in LIS blogs. I might submit that I should spend time reading 'liberal' blog rants, but that begs the question. Even as that prussian blue 'liberal' I have to concede that labels like 'liberal' and 'conservative' don't necessarily contribute to the debate, only to the shrillness of the demagoguery. And personally I find the labels more and more misleading, whether wielded by their owners or detractors. But I digress.

I'm not sure I would abandon the idea of blogrolls just yet, however. I like the idea of being able to showcase and promote useful (informative? humorous?) blogging elsewhere. But as far as seed material for my own blogging or for areas I think are out-of-scope for my blog, there are some corners I may choose not to highlight in my blogroll, and they will remain 'private'.

And here's where the librarian's professional mantra of impartiality and the still-quite-personal blogosphere might seem to conflict. Should individual librarian bloggers avoid capitalizing on the intrinsic potential of blogs because of perceived professional standards? I see now probably not. (Here I might be retreating from the 'blogs don't have to be personal' position I took in a comment to Life As I Know It.) Yet as someone who hopes to bring up an library-generated blog, with all the institutional and individual professional responsibility that adheres to it, I will have to face issues regarding the tenor and authority of our blog soon enough; Selection will become an issue.

By the way, some might think that I started a tempest in a teapot in order to draw attention to my new blog. That would be really clever if I had actually thought of it. Far from it! It's more a case of underestimating the potential for the very medium I was jumping into. I have been dodging controversy most of my life, in that annoyingly WASP-y sort of way, and applying it in my library career is simply a new outlet for a familiar attribute. I would just as soon matters here weren't thoroughly distorted by this one post, canting a blog meant for positive discussion of social networking software in the context of art museum libraries (and elsewhere by extension) toward polemics. There will always be a place for the latter; I'd rather it wasn't here. I don't want to stumble into a nightmare of endless intellectual pre-ignition.

And many thanks, AL, for the book citation as well. What kind of librarian blog contribution would it be without one? I look forward to perusing it. Rest assured that when I do, it will be more because you cited it and to enrich my own personal philosophy than as a vade mecum to your political beliefs. I'm sorry I can't gainsay a comparable publication that matches my political p.o.v.

Thanks also to Dances With Books for reminding me that I should be paying closer attention on what's blogging around me, let alone about me.

So let's on with the blog!

The things you learn ...

... when cobbling together a blog.

Today I learned that there are a lot of angry librarians out there. Not disgruntled. Not cranky. Not even quarrelsome. Just plain angry. This when I was trying to populate the sidebar I've called Anecdotes, facetiae, satire, etc. In my pre-blogger days (that is, until this week) I might drop in on Librarians Guide to Etiquette or Annoyed Librarian to enjoy self-mocking jibes at the library community. It seemed something definitely worth sharing.

I found many of these dyspeptic blogs nestled in a blogroll of the Annoyed Librarian, whose wry stylings I admit enjoying. Granted she labels her roll Library Blogs and Websites: Political, Humorous, Informative. The blogs that alarmed me must be the 'Political' in that collection of strange bedfellows.

An interesting thread running through many of these blogs is the conspiracy theory. I haven't had too many professional dealings with the A.L.A., but I have a hard time believing they're the center of a cabal whose evil goal is fluoridating the water, figuratively speaking. In any event, there was a distinct us-against-them thread running throughout. The profession, they bemoan, is heavily weighted by wrong-thinking liberals set on despoiling the name of Library. It's sad to contemplate the self-loathing inherent in thinking you're the persecuted minority within your chosen profession.

One of the reasons I was attracted to this profession -- enough to want to be part of it -- was the universally good-naturedness of its practitioners. Librarians may be overly self-effacing, I reasoned, but they're fiercely proud of who they are and keenly aware of their intrinsic worth. It's probably one of the reasons that librarians have such a high approval rating with the general public. It's not often that a librarian will throw a book back at you. The infrequent exception tends to stand out glaringly. I never imagined these were inherently left-wing traits.

Librarians, like sanitation workers, lawyers, and houseparents, are political (well, some of them, at any rate), but as a group they tend not to be bomb tossers. 'Earnest' might be the worst thing you say of them collectively; in some cases, 'blinkered' or at their very worst, 'strident'. (In the interest of full disclosure, I work in the prussian blue core of the Blue States.)

In the end it put me in mind of the fact that, even in the hands of librarians, the quintessentially impartial, there's no pretence that the blogosphere is anything but personal. And If 'political' here means 'conservative' or 'right-wing', all power to her. Maybe in this instance, however, it would be wise to wield those library-learnt categorizing skills more deftly.

 

Belated Blog Day

I'm not sure what it means when you create a blog one day after Blog Day (3108). For one thing, you miss out on being identified and acclaimed by your blogster colleagues. But it gives you a whole 365 days to perfect the product.

A Wrung Sponge give an explanation of how it works. Technorati is where to grab as many as possible in one search. Here's a random sampling (what else?) of blog faves from Library Garden (and her follow-up trade-last), LIS :: Michael Habib, and Life As I Know It (one of my candidates for the award), who even revisits Blog Day.  Of course, as John Blyberg points out in his blyberg.net (who also unwittingly provided the graphic in this post), everyone in his blogroll deserves special mention:

I would be lost without the wisdom, insight, silliness, seriousness, frustration, elation, anger, love, intrigue, courage, patience, thoughtfulness, sarcasm, sourness, pettiness, hope, criticism, insight, and everything else that hums and vibrates within this strange coil of technology we call the biblioblogosphere.

Amen to that.

About the blog's name

The phrase primitive art may still offend some people. To them, my apologies. But for those of us 'in the trenches' of research in the area, the term lost its pejorative meaning long ago, leaving only a wispy quaintness in its wake. But for me it also evokes the history of 'my' library and pays tribute to my library mentor, Allan Chapman.

The Museum of Primitive Art opened in 1957 in a townhouse on West Fifty-fourth Street. And up on the third floor sat the museum's new librarian, Allan Chapman, surrounded by 'fifty books and a lamp', as he often said -- adding wryly, 'The typewriter came later.' From that modest beginning the Library of the Museum of Primitive Art grew steadily, becoming by the time of its closing in 1975 the preeminent collection of African, native American and Pacific Island art and archeology. For much of this time it was Allan alone who saw to the acquisitions, cataloging and public reference in the library.

In 1969 Nelson Rockefeller offered the entire Museum of Primitive Art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which established a curatorial department for the care, study and exhibition of the works. Allan and the library moved uptown to the Met in 1976, shifting about in temporary quarters while the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing was under construction. The library moved into its present quarters in 1980 and opened to the public in 1982, shedding the primitive art moniker to be rechristened as The Robert Goldwater Library. [Goldwater (1907-1973) was the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art.] The department continued to be known as the Department of Primitive Art until 1990, when it changed to the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

It was also in 1980 that I started work at the then Department of Primitive Art Library, as a callow library assistant to Allan. I learned a lot from Allan, even though I didn't always appreciate the wisdom at the time. In many ways Allan chose to resist what he saw as faddish changes in library practice: The library continued to use ALA 1949* until his retirement in 1989. But his core beliefs, borne of his Progressive and commonsense Wisconsin upbringing no doubt and tempered by his adopted Brooklyn smarts, have proven timeless. Chief among these, his unwavering belief in the importance of the professional standing of librarians.

I assumed responsibility for the book collection on his retirement -- thirty-two years after Allan began the library. And here I was, only a year older than the library itself, and nearly the same age as Allan was when he began there.

Allan wouldn't have taken easily to the idea of a blog: I seem to recall he had great difficulty dealing with the mutli-button PBX telephone. ("Put the phone down, Allan!") But I expect he would have recognized instinctively its potential for reference and outreach.

• Read a remembrance of Allan Chapman (on page 7) [.pdf]

* A.L.A. cataloging rules for authors and titles. 2nd ed.

Casus blogi

I guess you have to be careful about having long lunches in the company of your creative friends. Since it's out of a conversation over scrumptious Italian food & drink that this blog was born.

A little background Since the middle of last year (2005) my library colleagues -- they of the bibulous lunch -- and I have been happily toiling away at a blog dedicated to news and information on world indigenous arts. All of us work in The Robert Goldwater Library, a publicly accessible reference library dedicated to the arts of sub-Saharan Africa, native and Precolumbian America, and the Islands of the Pacific. The library serves the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In deference to the museum's adminstration we've kept the blog password protected while the museum studies the implications of having a blog emanating from within its walls: This is after all  new territory. Should the museum host it on its own server? With its own software? How much legal hoo-hah does this expose the museum to? How much administrative and editorial oversight ought the museum exact? Must it 'look' like the museum's other web pages?

Suffice it to say that it's taking a while to sort through all these issues. In the meanwhile we continue to post our blogs to its necessarily limited audience, as well as troll the blogosphere for clues to the effective hosting of blogs in a museum setting.

The concept  I originally contemplated this blog as a workaround for the password protection: posting inoffensive 'copies' of the posts that appear on the library's blog. I may yet post selected entries here.

It now seems as if this might better be the place for a 'meta'-discussion of using blogs for outreach, dissemination and gathering of news and information, and reference. Discussions around the library blog might find a more appropriate home here, keeping the other blog more on topic. Secondarily I think this can still be a blog funnel for the library's blog, maybe even generating a modest groundswell for unfettered access to the library blog.

It remains to be seen whether this blog will retain its meaning and purpose when the wraps do finally come off the other blog. By then it might well have taken on a life of its own. Stay tuned.