Author: andrew

access to subjects

[Note: I started writing this as a comment on this post on “Bookworm and Library Search” over at Benjamin Schmidt’s Sapping Attention, but Blogger wouldn’t let me post it, probably for length reasons. Since my comment turned out to be mostly a standalone discussion and defense of subject headings, I figure I can post it here without causing too much confusion. I’ve added some context to make it clearer what I’m responding to, but it will probably make more sense if you read Schmidt’s post first.]

Summary: As I understand it, Bookworm is a new tool, still in an alpha/beta stage, for accessing and interacting with public domain books using both catalog data and full-text word data. As Schmidt describes it, Bookworm “straddles the space between something like Ngrams and the more traditional library catalog.” I’ve only played around with it just briefly and it looks pretty neat. My post below really has little to do with Bookworm itself.

Instead, I’ve used part of Schmidt’s post as a jumping off place to talk about subject headings and why I think they’re still useful in a full-text world. As an introduction to what Bookworm can do, Schmidt describes four ways of accessing books. The first two have their origins in the pre-digital era. First, subject headings:

1) Use the subject headings in a library card catalog.

Subject headings are the best resource for a particular topic, but a lot of the time they won’t work; your subject may not exist in the catalog, you may not know what it’s called, and librarians may not have assigned some relevant books to the subject heading you’re using.

As will become clear below, I think this is a too narrow way of characterizing subject searching/browsing; this is essentially all Schmidt writes about the method. I actually do quite a bit of subject browsing – when the catalog is set up in a way that makes it possible.

Next up:

2) Find one book in the stacks that you find interesting, and see what’s next to it on the shelves.

Since books in libraries are arranged on shelves according to a classification system (usually the Library of Congress or Dewey) that was designed to group similar books near each other, this is more or less another kind of browsing by subject. Schmidt covers this one pretty well; when I write about subjects below, I mean specifically subject headings, not classifications or call numbers, and even more specifically the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which are the main ones in use in North American libraries, especially academic libraries.

Schmidt doesn’t think the development of electronic catalogs made much of a difference for these two search strategies. Summing up, he writes, “so, this is the pre-digitized library; even electronic card catalogs don’t change this balance in any important way.” You can probably guess by now that I’m going to argue that it did make a difference for how people can use subject headings.

Instead, Schmidt writes, the big change came with full-text access:

3) Search the full text of thousands of books for a word or phrase of interest.

For scholarly journals and newspapers, two fields where full-text search is older than for books, this is probably the most important way of finding texts. For most purposes, full-text search obliterates method (1) above; where before you had to find a subject vaguely connected to your interests, now you can identify your topic as precisely as you can describe it in language.

I’m not going to disagree with the view that full-text searching represents a huge change in how people can access works – how could I? – but I don’t think it “obliterates” many of the uses of subject searching. More on that below. My take is that at least for now and for books, subject searching and full-text searching work alongside each other. Journal articles and newspaper articles may be a different story; historically, these have been dealt with according to different indexing and cataloging techniques, and in some cases have not been given subject headings in any form. Length of a work can make a difference too, although the best full-text search designs try to account for this.

For completeness, I’m including Schmidt’s fourth method in this summary:

4) Organize the library according to your personal principles, and browse it from arbitrary points.

It’s worth your time to go over to his post and read about this; I don’t have much to say on this point, except to say that I’m all for it. To the extent that it ties in with what I say about subjects, I’m really just advocating for the continued use of subjects as an additional “arbitrary point” from which you can browse. As long as they exist and continue to be assigned to books, there’s value in making them available for people to use (or not) as they so choose when accessing library and book data.

And with that long, and I hope fair, introduction out of the way, here’s what I tried to post as a comment.

___

I’m looking forward to digging around in Bookworm, but at the risk of missing the larger point, I want to speak up for subject searching/browsing. Subject headings are by no means perfect, but I’ve found them quite useful. They don’t seem to get much support when I hear people talk about them (not too often, but it happens), so I feel obligated to defend them, or at least to point out additional ways to use them.

In the card era, which I remember but which was long enough ago that I never did much searching that way, you did indeed have to pick subjects ahead of time, hope they would work out, and go searching. But ideally a search would not be just a series of sequential [subject –> titles] lookups. What I remember being taught was that once you find a relevant book – maybe even a marginally relevant book – you should check its subjects and write down the ones you don’t already have. Indeed, if you already have a known book to start with, look that up first and begin building your subjects from there. Then you repeat this process until you think you’re done.

This is essentially the subject heading equivalent of your method 2) about classification. It’s more laborious, in that (I assume) this involved opening and re-opening a bunch of drawers in the catalog instead of being able to browse in a relatively confined area in the stacks — and then, of course, you would still have to take your list of books and go to the stacks. But it’s still a way of browsing relationally.

I must admit that I’m glad I never really did this with cards, but I’ve done and still do the electronic equivalent quite a lot. It’s not unusual for me to end up, starting from one “base” search and continuing through subjects, pulling books from two or three or more classification letters in the stacks (where I also browse the shelves). I haven’t found full-text searching to obliterate this but instead to augment it.* I could see developing a full-text search that attempts actual subject analysis and then tries to identify related works for a subject created on the fly, but raw relevance-ranked searches don’t really do that.

I also think the transition from cards to electronic catalog records did represent a fairly significant shift in how people could search library collections. In terms of subjects, it obviously made the strategies I described above a lot easier. Now you could put in a search – and this meant any (enabled) search: title, author, and so on, not just subject – and then pull out your next set(s) of subjects from the relevant results without having to physically traverse a bunch of card drawers. That’s not exactly revolutionary, but it was still an advance.

The big differences, to my mind, were the ability to browse subject hierarchies and the implementation of keyword searching. In the abstract, you could always browse the entirety of the Library of Congress Subject Headings by using the big printed (red) books of headings put out by the LOC – if your library had them in the reference collection. But there was no guarantee that your catalog would have the book(s) that correspond to a particular heading. The nice thing about subject browsing in the electronic catalog was that 1) you were looking at what your library held 2) you could look at the headings themselves without having to look at each particular (card) catalog record for each heading, and 3) you could more easily identify the hierarchies within the headings, which is the key to browsing. So now you could start with, say, “United States — Congress — History” and quickly see that you might also want “United States — Congress — History — Anecdotes” and “United States — Congress — House –History” and so on. (There are a lot of Congress and history headings.) And then you could call up the records for each heading right there in the catalog. This eventually got a bit easier on the web when you could simply click through to the results.

Furthermore, keyword searching meant that you no longer had to know the order of headings – there are rules to this, but most users aren’t going to know them – just the terms you’re looking for in the headings. So [United States Congress history] would lead you to the same subjects as [history United States Congress], and the results would include all subjects using those words in any order, not just the subjects that use only those words.

I suppose even that’s still not so revolutionary, but eventually keyword searching began to run across all catalog fields (as it does now): instead of having to run both a title keyword and a subject keyword search for the same terms, something I remember doing quite often, you could run one search and turn up all records that contained your terms anywhere in the record. A far cry from full-text search, sure, but still a major improvement in searching power. In a card catalog, you might have to deal with subject cards and author cards and title cards. (Have I mentioned I’m glad I did little with cards?)

Keyword searching did one more thing for subjects that I don’t think has gotten much attention and, to some people, might seem like just a curiosity: it made visible and searchable the subheadings that exist in LCSH that pretty much never show up as top-level headings.

The subheading “Homes and Haunts” is a fun example**: as of today, a subject keyword search in the Library of Congress catalog for “Homes and Haunts” (with the quotes) turns up 9853 headings, starting from A to beyond Z (i.e some use non-roman scripts). But not a single one of these uses a top-level subject of “Homes and Haunts.”*** This is because “Homes and Haunts” is one of a set of established headings that are used only to subdivide broader headings. Without the electronic catalog, it would be essentially impossible to track how it was being assigned across all subjects. Granted, I’ve never actually made this kind of heading a subject of research, but I find them sort of fascinating nonetheless. I’d love to see an analysis of which people’s homes and haunts have been considered subject-worthy and, by implication, book-worthy.

Unfortunately, my anecdotal impression is that subject headings are not widely valued and there seems to be a trend towards library catalog interfaces making it harder and harder to use them effectively. Whether this (if my impression is indeed correct) is by design or simply the byproduct of other changes, I don’t know, but it’s a big part of my motivation for writing such a long comment. (I don’t mean to pick on your post; it just seemed like a good jumping off point. I’ve been meaning to write about subject searching/browsing for a while.) I wholeheartedly support developing more and more sophisticated ways to access library collections, but I think it would be a shame if subject headings got left behind because no one worked out a way to maximize their potential usefulness.

*I’m sure I could get more proficient at full-text book searches, but I often find a frustrating amount of false positives when I do that kind of search on a large collection, and not being able to re-order a result set can drive me crazy.

**I owe this example to my dad, who worked in library automation during the transition from paper cards to electronic catalogs.

***The closest you get are:

Homer, Art–Homes and haunts–Ozark Mountains Region.

Homer–Homes and haunts–Greece.

Homer, Winslow, 1836-1910–Homes and haunts–Maine–Prouts Neck.

owned content

Generally, I wouldn’t consider a return to posting on my blog something worthy of announcement, but then I never expected to stop posting for over a year.* During that time I have gotten both busier academically and more involved in the world(s) of platform-based social media – specifically, facebook and twitter – and that’s taken away much of the time I would have had for the blog.

Since my growing dissatisfaction with those social media platforms (facebook in particular) is a big part of why I’m going to start blogging again, I’ll start this post with that.

I’ve been on both facebook and twitter since 2009, but never really made much use of them until last year. I was a late adopter on facebook; for various reasons, I had been actively not signing up. When I finally gave in, my first facebook update read:

“Am no longer completely avoiding facebook. Now I’m incompletely avoiding it.”

I did not post again for over a year. As for twitter, I’d read and posted sporadically from the time I signed up, but in the past six months I’ve finally started checking in and posting a bit more consistently.

In both cases, my increased usage came not from spending more time online, but from the growth of my own in-person social networks. I simply had met and gotten to know more people who were on twitter and facebook; it began to seem natural to spend more time there. Especially if I wanted to participate in some of the conversations that I knew were going on.

This is not to say that I’ve been using both services in the same way. Facebook for me tends to be more about literal “friend” relationships: I don’t run the apps that interact with other sites, don’t “like” or become a “fan” of organizations, and as a result pretty much everything I see comes from my friends – and most of that is simply stuff from everyday life. I also manage my privacy in ways that are more or less consistent with talking with groups of in-person friends.

I have some of that on twitter, but partly because of its public nature, and partly because of the asymmetry of follow/follower relationships I tend to use it more as a professional/academic/informational service. In fact, I originally signed up just because having an account made it easier to manage the “following” I was already doing via RSS (which I don’t think twitter supports anymore). Even though getting to know more people who happen to have twitter accounts was the big change that’s gotten me to use twitter more, the environment has always seemed a bit more distant to me, more like a public square. (I should add: I don’t see this as a bad thing.) This doesn’t mean I avoid all mentions of lunch or sandwiches, but it’s just never been a big part of how I tweet.

This may be why I’m generally more satisfied at the moment with twitter than with facebook, even though facebook is the more “social” (in the sense of socializing) place for me, as well as the service I’ve spent more time on. To lapse into cliche for a moment, I feel like I have a sense of what twitter is, and it is what it is. Twitter has stayed remarkably consistent over the years I’ve been on it, even down to the interface (for better or for worse). There have been a bunch of updates, but most of them have been aimed at making it easier to do the same things, or to pull some of those activities, like link shortening and photo posting, under twitter’s own umbrella, rather than leaving them to third party applications. But like the old twitter web interface, the new twitter has at its core a box at the top of the page for writing your tweets and a stream of posts below it.

After being a bit overwhelmed at first by the sheer volume of tweets, I’ve gotten used to just dipping into the stream when I get the chance, or checking at the end of the day and scrolling down for a bit, looking for interesting links and conversations. Sure, sometimes I wish there were better ways to follow threads of conversation that span more than two or three people, or I want to have a bit of extra space for a few more characters in my posts, but if I really want to write at length, there are other places for that.**

Facebook, on the other hand, I find both appealing and maddening; recent changes have tipped the scale towards maddening. On the plus side, it’s proven surprisingly effective as a place simply to “hang out” (even despite not being a google plus-style “hangout”), and it’s been great for maintaining contact with people I don’t see much in person anymore. The posts are capped at just enough characters (420) to make me feel like I can express something on many (but not all) occasions when I feel expressive, and they’ve done a good job integrating photos with the text boxes and links.

In fact, the photo handling, while not at the level of flickr or other photo-specific sites, is better than anything I’ve found on the (free) blogger and wordpress services. And the reciprocal nature of my “friend” relationships means I’m not just interacting with real people, but I can actually see that happening – whereas blogging sometimes has the feel of posting bills on a wall along a crowded street, even when I know people are reading (silently).

So what’s the problem? It’s not the advertising, which I actually don’t see a lot of. I don’t begrudge facebook the need to make money. It’s also not really the proprietary nature of the system: twitter has the same issue with respect to the underlying platform, though of course most tweets are publicly viewable to anyone. It’s not even the privacy issues; I’m not happy with the ways facebook has rolled out new features, but I recognize that the settings have gotten more precise and fine-grained over time. They’re probably more complicated than they need to be, so there’s a learning curve, but they seem to work for me.

No, the big issue for me is the lack of control you’re given over what you contribute to the site. (Again, twitter has this same issue, but the ways I limit my usage there mean I run into these frustrations less often.) This runs all the way from the initial composition of an update to the management of what’s already been posted.

I get that facebook has broken down many of the barriers that may have been keeping people off of the interactive web: anyone can post a link there and not have to worry about those “<a href>” tags or even the location of the “embed link” button in an editor. But sometimes I just want some fully-enabled html. Sure, there are some unicode workarounds for things like strikethrough, but it’s not easy to format text. Or say I want to post two links in one update: only one will be given facebook’s automatically-generated “preview” link. Sure, I can post the second link as a comment on the first, but that seems silly, and anyway, if more than a few comments get posted on that thread, facebook will automatically hide the one with link under a “see more” tag once it’s considered an “old” comment. And don’t even bother trying to post a link to match a particular word in an update: the lack of enabled html rules that out as well.

The result is that facebook (and again, twitter) is, from a page design perspective, pretty much a monotonous, homogeneous stream, with only the particulars of links, photos, and raw text changing among the mass of pre-set elements. Unlike blogs, or even e-mail, there is no title or header or subject line: there’s just a text box. I’m a fan of the bloggy rhetorical style that involves juxtaposing a title with a short bit of text in the body of the post (often containing a link); this is impossible on a platform like facebook. Long posts are possible, but only if they’re formed as so-called “notes,” which aren’t well-integrated with the rest of the system. And forget about using categories or tags.*** Bulk management of previous updates is essentially impossible: want to change the settings on a bunch of posts, or maybe delete them? You can do it, but you have to do it one at a time. Your best bet for searching for content is to scroll down a bunch of times to extend the page and then use ctrl-f (or its equivalents).

The recent changes are the last straw for me. As John Battelle writes, facebook is positioning itself to be even more of a storyteller: the words may be the users’ own, but the structure of the narrative and to a very real extent its main content will be up to the platform. This has long been true of the mysteriously-generated “top news” viewing option available on user’s facebook page, but until the re-design users had the alternative of selecting a “recent changes” option that provided, in reverse chronological order, everything they wanted to see from their friends. I never really understood how the top news worked: occasionally it would highlight for me some conversation I had missed on an older post on some friend’s wall, but most of the time it pushed to the top updates that the facebook algorithms must have deemed popular (whether or not they interested me) while burying other updates I wanted to see. I used the chronological option almost exclusively.

Now, apparently, everything a user sees on the front page is going to be like “top news” and it drives me crazy. On the reading side, I often have no idea why something has been pushed to the top of my page, and I end up missing things I want to see. Facebook offers a new option to mark stories in such a way that supposedly indicates that you want to see more like them, but there’s no explanation for how it determines similarity: if I mark something because it’s well-written, will it get filed as “about music” instead? Who knows?

I’ve noticed that facebook won’t even put some things I post on my own front page. (That is, I log in and go to facebook.com and I don’t see them, no matter how far I scroll down.) They do get posted to my profile (technically, my “wall”) in the same way as before, and some friends have reported seeing some of them on their front pages. But why should I share something if I don’t know that it will reach the people I’d like to share it with? How can I refer to the chronology of what I post if the lack of chronology in subsequent presentation means that my posts will appear out of order, if they appear at all for some friends? By taking control of the content this way, facebook has both weakened the bonds of reciprocity that have kept me on the site and stripped the platform of some of the few ways a user could express individuality through narrative. The system has  inched towards the model of posting bills along a crowded street – and the users can use only one type of printing press.

In claiming that this new Facebook will tell the “story of your life”, it’s like they took this passage from Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (hey, it’s an embedded link) as a model, not a warning (hey, it’s an enabled blockquote):

It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation, to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. If the person under examination be one’s self, the result is pretty certain to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch a second glance. Or, if we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which, after all–though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage–may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves!

So I’ve decided to re-exercise just a little bit of the control I used to have over my own personally-generated content and bring back this blog. It’s still on the wordpress.com free platform, which may make it a part of what Battelle is calling the dependent web, but it still offers far more flexibility than I’ve found on a micro-blogging platform. Maybe some day I’ll be ready to move onto my own domain. I’ve been considering it.

In the meantime, after thinking about it for a while, I just can’t delete my facebook account outright: I still like the in-the-moment social aspect, and I want to keep my network. But I’m reducing my own personal footprint: pulling photos and old posts, not signing up for any services that will share things that I don’t explicitly choose to share. Some of that data will no doubt live on behind the scenes, but I just don’t trust them enough to keep sharing more.

Anyway, I’ve gone on far too long here, probably as a reaction to being cooped up for so long in walled worlds with strict character limits. So I’ll just say that the “gotten busier” part of my year away from this blog to which I briefly referred above largely comes down to this:  I’ve decided to revive my history phd. I still have a couple of terms left on my archives and library degrees, which means that for the time being I’m working on three degrees at once. More on that later.

*If you’re looking at your RSS feeds and wondering where this post came from, hi! I hope this blog will continue to provide whatever it was that led you to subscribe in the first place, if you can remember that.

**In fact, I’m usually in danger of writing too much when given the chance. This post is probably a good example of that.

***You can “tag” people, but that’s more like identifying or notifying them; it’s not a subject system or taxonomy or anything like that.

Published
Categorized as meta

“based on a true story” wasn’t enough

The makers of The Life of Emile Zola would like you to know that

This production has its basis in history. The historical basis, however, has been fictionized for the purposes of this picture and the names of many characters, many characters themselves, the story, incidents, and institutions, are fictitious. With the exception of known historical characters, whose actual names are herein used, no identification with actual persons, living or dead, is intended or should be inferred.

I wonder if their goal was to get certain historically-minded members of the audience time to walk out before they started complaining.

parkways

I don’t quite get this post by Atrios. He says he’s often skeptical of urban parks, which is understandable (depending on the park), but to judge by the link he provides, the places he’s talking about aren’t really parks. I’ve never seen Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway, but the picture here in the Boston Globe is not a picture of anything I’d call a park. It looks like a median strip in the middle of a wide and busy road – a street that might be called a “way”, perhaps, with some “green” in the middle.

Incidentally, unless other sections of the Greenway have wider “parklands”, I doubt the solutions proposed in that Globe article will do anything for the “park” even though they would probably benefit the neighborhood. But that pictured section is probably never going to be better than something to look at while driving by.

Published
Categorized as the city

a system of signs

Sometimes, in the library, information seeks you.

Books on the hold shelf come wrapped in sheets of paper fastened with rubber bands. This is next to the self-checkout machine.

Self-checkout has its perils.

So do certain kinds of micro- readers. I think this is in front of a microcard reader. I’ve never used it; I guess it’s bad for the fiche. The back walls of the carrel are adorned with melted fiche, but I couldn’t get a good shot of them.

You have to be very careful when you use these machines. Smart thieves know to strike just when you’re leaning forward, nauseous, squinting at blurry text.

It wasn’t easy shooting these signs, especially since I was just messing around and not putting a lot of effort into it. As I said in an earlier post, I don’t really know how the camera works, so I don’t know why there were times when I’d click and it wouldn’t shoot any picture at all. I assume it had something to do with the ambient lighting; in a lot of places the overhead lights, or sun from the window, or reflections, or the contrast between the edge of the wall of a desk or carrel and the open space beyond, may have thrown off the “auto” feature. After clicking a bunch of times trying to capture that burglar sign and failing to get anything, I decided to test the camera by turning it so that it would catch only objects inside the carrel walls, and this is what I ended up with. It might be the best photo I have.

I don’t know why someone went to the trouble to create a pink insert with the word “pink” on it. All the other signs I’ve seen in the area read “GREEN” (which is covered up here); but so few people use these carrels as they’re intended I don’t even know what the actual tabs and flags look like. I don’t think I’d want to leave my books on an unlocked shelf.

That’s a typical-looking basement desk. The upper-floor desks look nicer, but there’s more graffiti. Here at a fifth floor desk, there’s no hiding the writing from the flash. I wonder if it came after the sign was put in.

This sixth-floor desk has no such sign and look what happened. I wonder if anyone knows what kind of citation style this is? I can’t figure out what’s so significant about Bush, 2007 and Obama, 2009.

Back in the basement, this appears to be the good cop/bad cop strategy applied to movable shelving instructions. Too bad they didn’t give that guy a word-bubble in comic sans.

This sign always cracks me up. There’s one near the computer group on the second floor too. Kids these days.

This last photo is from the other main library, the one I don’t go to very often because it doesn’t have as many social sciences and humanities books. That library is pretty boring, signage-wise, but there’s a great view from the stairwell. You just have to keep moving while you enjoy it. I had some trouble blocking the reflection on this one; it was another clear, well-lighted day today.

I would assume that if there were a fire, the people sitting in the stairwell would simply be the first to leave, but who am I to question a sign? In the real world, just as it is on the internet, the best arguments are made in ALL CAPS.

clarity is cold comfort

It’s just incredible to me that the temperature has fallen to near freezing tonight, and possibly will drop below that. Don’t get me wrong, even though I’m from the mildness of coastal California (the Bay Area, mainly), I’ve spent the last three winters on the east coast (not the Canadian one). Those winters, at their coldest, were much colder than just about any time I’ve been here except a brief clear cold period in early December – a clear cold that I welcomed, in fact. Though I must admit I was happy to drive through it and out of it and on down to California for the winter break.

No, what’s incredible to me is that I’m leaving for the summer, and when I do, the weather will have been more or less the same, on aggregate, from mid-October to late April. And by the same, I mean cold and overcast, cold and drizzly, cold and rainy, cold-but-not-as-cold and rainy, or even colder and clear. And this is the warm part of this country.

pointed and shot

I finally remembered to bring “my” camera to the library today. Keep in mind that the windows are  dirty, I’ve actually borrowed this camera and barely used it before, I don’t know anything about how to set lighting/zoom/etc properly though I did manage to do basic things like turn on flash/macro/etc., my hands aren’t very steady, and the last time I took photos for myself was about fifteen years ago using a film camera that had almost no customizable settings. Any advice on very beginning photography would be appreciated. I guess I might finally use flickr.

Anyway, as spring has sort of come in, I’ve come to realize this area has something in common with LA: when the visibility is high, it’s really strikingly beautiful. Too bad about the architecture, though.

Looking left:

Center view:

Looking right (a partition kept me from turning further):

seeing and believing

Alana Newhouse’s article about photographer Roman Vishniac, his photographs, the stories he told with and about those photographs, and the evidence that challenges those stories, is really kind of fantastic. Never heard of Vishniac? (I hadn’t.) Not sure you’re interested?

Take a look at the slideshow that goes with the article – whatever you think of Vishniac’s storytelling, his photography was very, very good. Then read these three paragraphs from near the start of the article:

But the center will not only be acquiring Vishniac’s entire life’s work; as the father-son spread suggests, it is also inheriting a fascinating set of ambiguities and unanswered questions — all unexpectedly uncovered by a 34-year-old curator named Maya Benton. As Benton has discovered, Vishniac released, over the course of a five-decade career, an uncommonly small selection of his work for public consumption — so small, in fact, that it did not include many of his finest images, artistically speaking. Instead the chosen images were, in the main, those that advanced an impression of the shtetl as populated largely by poor, pious, embattled Jews — an impression aided by cropping and fabulist captioning done by his own hand. Vishniac’s curating job was so comprehensive that it would not only limit the appreciation of his talents but also skew the popular conception of pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Europe.

Sometime in 1989, Maya Benton, then a 14-year-old living in Los Angeles, had an epiphany. The daughter of a single mother, a psychoanalyst who as a child lived for years in a displaced-persons camp in Germany, Benton grew up in a household that was a relative rarity in American Jewish life: Yiddish speaking but cosmopolitan, well off and not Orthodox. As she lolled on the couch of her grandparents’ home, Benton started sneaking chocolate rum balls from a sterling silver box — one of two family heirlooms from, she had assumed, Novogrudek, the historic Jewish town in what is now Belarus from which her grandparents hailed before the Holocaust. As Benton stared at the weighty birthright from the alte heym, or Old World, bafflement struck: she knew, from an interview she conducted with her family members for a history class, that they fled the German invasion, hid in nearby forests, were interned at multiple labor camps and trekked through miles of often snow-covered forest in the east. How on earth, Benton thought as she considered the ornate container, did they manage to schlep this through Siberia? The confusion grew when she considered the second heirloom: a full set of Rosenthal china.

As it turned out, the box and the china had not been in the family for generations, nor were they from Novogrudek. As Maya’s grandmother, Tonia Benton, explained that afternoon, they were among the things that she and her husband bought from impoverished Germans after the war; bartering the chocolate and cigarettes they received in the displaced-persons camp, they were able to buy valuable items that could be used as currency to get the family to America. That day, Maya Benton says, she learned a lesson about people’s need for, and uses of, mythical narratives.

Then decide if you want to click through (or, you know, just click through, really, it’s worth it).

you’d probably need more than old newspapers for that kind of story, though

The excitement of research.

recall numbers

I still remember the old card catalog at the main university library. I don’t think I ever used it. My mom worked in the cataloging department and sometimes I’d walk by the rows of drawers on my way to the reading room, where I’d sit and read children’s books or Garfield comics while I waited for her work to end so we could go home. Once, during a summer when I’d been at the office more often – probably after some regularly scheduled daytime activity – someone pushing a shelving cart stopped me as I walked through the cataloging department with a kid’s book in hand and, perhaps thinking I was enrolled in a course on children’s literature, asked: “Do you go here now?”

A few blocks away, in library automation, my dad and his colleagues eventually put the card catalog out of existence. When it was finally dismantled, library staff were given the option of carrying the old cards home. Even now, decades later, you can still find catalog cards in my parents’ house, usually by the phone, the blank sides serving as scratch paper for notetaking.

I’ve grown up around libraries, but until recently I never seriously considered working in one. I’m still not sure I ever will. It would be easy to draw a direct line from my experience as a grad student in history, spending much of my time in libraries and archives, to my current position as a graduate student in the field of libraries and archives, but it wouldn’t be right. I’ll explain why in a later post.