The Science of Information

There’s a degree of difficulty involved in understanding the bureaucratic-professional structure of Duke University Libraries. This is probably unavoidable for a field of meta-knowledge that is both integral and external to all other academic departments. The Perkins Library System is comprised of the Perkins-Bostock complex, in addition to the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the University Archives, Lilly Library, the Music Library on East Campus and an off-campus Library Service center. The medical, law, business and divinity schools have their own organizational hierarchy and management that operates for the most part separate from Perkins. The fundamentally collaborative, interdisciplinary nature of librarianism doesn’t lend itself to these formal distinctions.1

Cultural collection

Zooming into the International and Area Studies subsection: Edward Proctor is librarian for South Asia. He’s among the more distinguished in the System, and holds a joint appointment at Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Proctor is erudite.2 He wears a long, white beard, and—like the other Asiaphiles who taught my Buddhism classes—speaks dispassionately. He’s well versed in a half-dozen Indian languages.

When I visited his 2nd floor Bostock office, he’d recently decorated the hall with vibrantly colored paraphernalia related to Diwali, an upcoming Indian “festival of lights.” Inside the cubicle, he’d set up religious Hindu and Buddhist statuettes and hung an ornamental tapestry depicting Buddha.

“Tönpa Shenrab, actually,” Proctor said.

Tönpa Shenrab is a Buddha-like figure central to the Bön religion, which predates its better known cousin. A huge portion of South Asian studies is dedicated to religion. Proctor described Indian religious traditions including the ritual idolatry of books and the circumambulation (walking in circles around a sacred object) of libraries. Proctor spent a month this summer acquiring humbler Indian texts—cheap, popular literature that would be sold on the street instead of bookstores and not shipped overseas. And when he named his occupation, as required during Indian airport customs as “librarian,” the agent said “God bless you.”

World travel is an unexpected perk for librarians specializing in cultural studies. Proctor described a project that is bringing scanners to Tibetan monasteries so that Bön monks can digitize and preserve their works without losing possession of their sacred documents.

“The idea is you don’t take the materials away from the countries of origin,” Proctor said. “If we don’t preserve it somehow, it’s going to vanish—physically fall apart. [The idea] is make it universally available and to preserve originals.”

Preservationism is a principle of another branch of information science: archives. Karen Jean Hunt is the librarian for African and African-American studies, and developed the collection policy for Afro-Caribbean literature. She’s visited Puerto Rico, Martinique, South Africa and Ghana to gain a first-hand perspective on the objects of her research.

Unlike other children, Hunt’s future career path was relatively obvious: In elementary school, she would play hooky to spend her hours in Detroit public libraries. After working in the United States Air Force and the Peace Corps, she dedicated herself to library school3 while working three part-time jobs and taking care of her mother, who had Alzheimer’s. (“That’s just the kind of person I am.”) She’s an archivist for manuscripts, rare books, special collections and institutional records; much of her effectiveness has to do with her ability to persuade renowned authors to donate their materials to Duke. The digital age has changed this storage process for the better, but has also presented new challenges.

“Back in the day if you were an author I would say, ‘I want your papers!’ I would get all of your drafts—print copies. You could look at Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald and see the main draft of a piece and the final version and there was scholarship in looking at how they changed. You do everything through the computer now—no one saves it. You just delete and change whole paragraphs, it’s gone. You lose provenance, scholarship.”

Conservation in the Information Age

The scrupulous, packrat mentality of archiving might seem overly sentimental or even highfalutin, but it’s a principle of the practice. And though the digitization of archived documents can save a lot of physical space, the actual process of scanning immense stores of material is a daunting, underfunded task. Fortunately, some of the products of the Information Age can assist these efforts; Duke University was one of the first schools to operate Encoded Archival Description, a method of standardizing the online catalogues of archived materials that appeared first at University of California at Berkeley in 1993. The technology didn’t make the manual process of digitization any easier, but did create inroads allowing archivists to collaborate and coordinate across the nation, avoiding unnecessary filing or overlap of source materials.

Librarians

Molly Tamarkin, associate university librarian for information technology, leads efforts to streamline Perkins System functions whenever possible. She describes the goal: “Creating systems that will scale to hundreds of thousands to millions of items—making something as efficient and accurate as possible, never having to do this again. [We] want to get it right and never do it again.”

Tamarkin unwittingly entered the field early as a work-study library aid during her undergraduate years at the University of Chicago. Her post graduation career track has been fairly homogeneous since: she managed acquisitions at her home university, did freelance book indexing4 and spent $27,000 completing the CD collection of the St. Louis public library. Things were different back then, pre-Google, when library users were eager to treat her as a search engine. Among the unusual queries, she recalled consulting consumer appraisal guides to give value estimates on $8 mason jars, and in one case, assuring a stubborn man that, no, the Rembrandt painting he found in a dumpster was not an original.

But at Duke, Tamarkin’s specialty is actually information technology, not library science—meaning she’s adapted rather fortuitously to changing demands.

“Whether you work in IT or not, you’re to some extent in technology.”

This was not intentional for Tamarkin, at least not at first. After responding affirmatively to the question, “Are you good with computers?” (by which she meant “Yes, I can use a database”), she found herself in a programming position at the library of Marlboro College in Vermont. Instead of admitting her inexperience, she learned it all from scratch, and hasn’t looked back. A major obstacle in the field is now integrating traditional modes of access with the increasing user demands for 24-hour information, no matter the medium. The question now is what this market demand will do for the future of the stacks.

“We need to actually digitize a lot of information to really level the playing field and give equal access to knowledge,” she said. “If you’re going to have a choice to read an article [online] or go get a book, you’re going with the article.”

Librarians worry that putting materials online will privilege digitized over physical sources. Newer coding styles, CSS and beyond, have also made it impractical to archive old webpages for future rendering, though projects like the Internet Wayback Machine address this issue. The basic concerns are for equity and longevity, not the romantic imagery of retrieving dusty tomes from labyrinthine stacks. The problematic nature of providing universal access to other forms of media, like oral histories and video, goes beyond technological limits.

Lilly Library is the motherlode for film and video collection at Duke. Twenty thousand DVDs and as many videocassettes are circulated for entertainment and education—there’s a necessary stockpile of VCRs. The unique challenges that film and music librarians face are not just characteristic of the media they deal with, but the industries that produce them.

Unlike independent authors, the higher profits of consumer-driven media created for theatrical releases or Billboard-topping albums have allowed industry executives greater ability to attenuate unmitigated digital access. This control has been realized through litigation and legislative reform that would’ve never accompanied the theft of the “intellectual property” of literature. Every three years the Library of Congress has people come testify about the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which places strict controls on the dissemination and accessibility of copyrighted works.

There’s even a Duke staff member devoted to technology and copyright laws, a so-called “lawyer-librarian.” The frustration faced by anyone who’s had to watch a Closed Reserve video stems from legal hurdles.

“Sometimes films will just sit in an archive because no one has the rights to make a copy,” said Danette Pachtner, film, video and digital media librarian. “We’re stuck with material that—it’s gonna die.”

State of the System

The cover story for the latest issue of American Libraries Magazine, the magazine of the American Library Association, is “Which Way Forward? – Avoiding the path to obsolescence.” The self-consciousness and imperative to adapt is not lost on the information scientists. Perpetuating certain industries—say, investment banking5—requires aggressive recruitment of talent, but apart from the obligatory two-year master’s, the librarians I interviewed entered their line of work through a pretty organic trajectory. The common criteria were simple: helpfulness and a love of knowledge. And maybe also a little bit of unconventionality. According to Malarkin: “Libraries are weird places.... You have that stereotype of an IT who’s this guy living out of his parents’ basements; like all stereotypes we know somebody who is like that. You could see a librarian get into an argument over whether Hamlet is a ‘fictional’ character or a ‘legendary’ character. To anyone else it would seem crazy.”


1 The intra-professional distinctions are manifested in research and professional associations of with amazing degrees of specificity: e.g., International Federation of Library Associations, Society of American Archivists, Society of North American Archivists, the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries, Special Libraries Association, Association of American Universities, Association of Research Libraries, Center for Research Libraries, the Research Library Group, and so on.

2 Among his published works: “Boolean Operators and the Naïve End-User: Moving to AND.”

3 The American Library Association accredits Master of Science programs in Library and Information Studies programs at 58 schools in the U.S., Puerto Rico and Canada. The amusingly named School of Information at the University of Michigan, where Hunt went, even offers specialization in Human Computer Interaction.

4 Apropos a career in libraries: publishing companies—perpexingly—contract out the labor of making reference indexes at the back of books.

5 Speaking of, a group of librarians (with official support from the Progressive Librarians Guild) has amassed a temporary library at the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York. Over one thousand titles, ranging from germane works by Marx and Payne to children’s fiction, have amassed from donations. Similar libraries have since appeared at the demonstrations in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston.

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