Sam Chachra

I had two rough ideas that I could research:

1. I could look at school libraries and how their content has changed as the expectation of what education should be has changed throughout history.
2. The rise in private libraries and how they might’ve changed the way knowledge within books were thought of, as well as accessibility.

For my first idea I could compare pictures of architecture of older school libraries vs. modern to get a feel for what the architecture might say about the attitude surrounding knowledge of the time. Then I could look at databases and see what knowledge has been censored throughout history, or look through old education magazine editions and see the differences in approaches to teaching that are advertised.

For my second, I could look at the rise of private libraries going back to the renaissance and see how books were gotten a hold of before that. I could look at who has access to them and what knowledge was considered worthy to curate.

 

In Drabinski’s article, on page 13 she claims, “a queer theoretical approach calls instead for queer solutions: shifts in analytical approach that take seriously the contingency of these apparently stable structures…they should highlight and make visible the fundamental paradoxes of classification and cataloging from a queer perspective: in order to be accessible to users, materials must be fixed in place and described using controlled vocabulary. However, this fixing is always fundamentally fictive; classification and subject heading decisions are always made in a context that is subject to change.” Considering this statement about queer theory in libraries, where is this theory’s place in the digital age? In the conversation of going from print to digital in libraries, there is always the question of how do you go about deciding what parts of a collection to digitize. On top of this, how would you transform the physical space in the library to foster better collaboration with the digital? How does queer theory fit into this?

My imaginary library created in class was one that is completely impossible to make. It contains the books that might have been, the cataloguing of the discarded ideas authors throw away. Each time a book is published, the version or versions of the published books with the ideas that were thrown away appear in the library. The library would be organized by the type of ideas discarded, and the library would be built from writers themselves. It might contain a Frankenstein without Frankenstein, or a Romeo and Juliet without death, or even a Harry Potter with Nevill as the chosen one. All of these are fairly absurd ideas, but they get the point across nicely. The books the library would be filled with would be all of the pieces of writing that authors decided against writing, creating a backwards record of the wrong information.

A new idea that was posed particularly in the Benjamin reading “Unpacking My Library” was the relationship and purpose books serve to collectors. Benjamin asserts that for the “real collector… ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have with inanimate objects” (67). This is interesting because it suggests that the physicality of books is what gives a book value, rendering ebooks pointless. To collectors, what owning a book means is very different to others who view books as the knowledge within their covers, rather than the actual book itself. The idea that books serve a different purpose than knowledge is new in its own right, as to the collector, owning a large number of books is “pleasurable.” Rather than the knowledge within the books being the pleasurable purpose, the act of the book existing to be owned in the first place is what is considered the book’s purpose. In fact many of these collectors do no0t even read the books, something called “non-reading” (62). What owning a book means to collectors is far different from most others who also own/read books.

Within this reading is also the new idea that the knowledge the book communicates to the reader as being the book itself rather than its content. A collector will take note of “the period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership” which all “adds up to a magic encyclopedia” (60). The actual way the book is made is indicative of both the time in which it is made and the status of the previous owner. This makes the physical book a purveyor of different knowledge than the information stored in its pages. This raises the question of how a book’s purpose changes in relation to its history. What makes a good book to collect? What does this say about the collector’s definition of what a book is, or what the book’s purpose is?

My first idea came from a paragraph that included “many public libraries have prioritized spaces for community engagement and coffee shops over books and bookshelves…For inspiration, the NYPL’s leaders did not look to other libraries, but to FedEx, Netflix, and Barnes and Noble…” (Sherman preface xvi). This inspired many different questions, such as can FedEx, Netflix, Barnes and Noble and Google be considered libraries? What importance do coffee shops and cultural centers have to a library? Why might they belong there? The same paragraph also talked about the planned change in architecture, although it is not quoted above. This brought up the question of how architecture is tied into the library. What does architecture mean in terms of a library? Why is it important? The fact that there was even a plan to change the library in the first place made me wonder if libraries today mean something different than libraries of the 20th century. Along with that, is there a universal definition of a library that spans centuries, countries and technology? All of these numerous questions mentioned lead to a more broad, elusive question: what makes a library?

On page eight of the Sherman reading, it was mentioned that the NYPL shattered the idea that public libraries were only for “a small class of rich men.” Considering that public today usually means that anyone who wants access can get access, the definition of “public” seems to have changed throughout the years. This begs the question, what does public mean and what has it meant in the past? This question is most likely linked to where libraries are placed and who can get the information within them. It would be interesting to research today’s public libraries and see if the definition of “public” is really so open as it seems.