North American Bird Phenology Program

Came across this North American Bird Phenology Program via this blogpost on ArchivesNext.

Thought it was an interesting notion, how to apply crowdsourcing to archival material.

So I tried it out. Really liked the design. Something to consider for the future.

Archivists in Film

Came across the following synopsis for a film tonight:

"Walking on a bridge late one night, a dour Latvian bureaucrat named Matiss Zelcs (Egons Dombrovskis) passes a woman looking out at the water. They exchange a long glance as he walks by. Moments later, she throws herself into the river and dies. Matiss, an archivist by profession, throws all of his research skills into a growing obsession with the motives for this stranger's suicide. Posing as the dead woman's boyfriend, he manages to procure her handbag, full of snapshots and unsent love letters. He grows increasingly self-destructive as he loses himself in a tormented investigation of the woman's last days. "Krisana" (whose title translates as "Fallen") is an existential detective story with the austere gloom of a European art film. Fred Kelemen's stark black-and-white compositions and his love for empty rain-slicked streets evoke the work of the great Hungarian director Bela Tarr, with whom Kelemen, a German, has collaborated in the past. Though its story is slight, "Krisana" is a moving meditation on guilt and responsibility." — Dana Stevens, The New York Times

Having a hard time finding the trailer, so here are some screenshots...

http://br.geocities.com/distanasia/krisana/

Flynn holds it together

"She loves that politicians lie. She loves her press pass with the city seal and signatures on the back. She loves that cops really do leave blood and glass in the street and that other cops let her get right up close to it. She loves that her profession is largely based in fact checking, and forcing others to be accountable. She loves that the paper's archives is called a "morgue," and that the evening of deadline is called "putting the paper to bed." She loves turning the phrase that will lay everything bare, make all the connections. She gets paid to watch for subtleties, gets paid to be untrusted. To be ethical. To have hope. To see things, and let them feed upon her, and somehow turn it around. Because somewhere, she knows, there's a collective good. If people understand, if they get information, they will do the right thing."

from Cara Hoffman's The Wedding And Other Stories

Steve Martin thanks an Archivist

"Twenty years ago, I looked at the collected flotsam of my life and sent it off to an archivist, Candace Bothwell, who did an outstanding job of sequencing and preserving whatever she could. Later, I collected other cardboard boxes from my parents' house, some moldy from garage floods. Inside were sedimentary layers of collected junk, ephemera, snapshots, and yellowed newspaper clippings. Like a geologist, I was sometimes able to date items by their position in the stack. As much as I enjoyed the writing of this book, researching it was a new thrill for me. Finding a photo that confirmed a dim recollection of days gone by hooked me on the detective work, and the legwork - marching from my desk back and forth to the archival boxes - gave me something to do besides type, think, worry, and cry."

from Steve Martin's Born Standing Up

James Neugass & the The Loss of Manuscripts

"I began looking for more of his work and tried to track him down. He had been a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, but that didn't help me trace him. I kept plugging away, writing people who might give me clues. Even his first wife could tell me nothing. Then after six months, I got a break. In 1949, he had published a novel with Harpers, and died he same year. Through the publisher I was able to locate his widow. At last, I thought, I will find his poems. Instead she wrote me from Los Angeles, where she had moved: after his death, all his mss had been stored in a friend's cellar in Brooklyn. Before she had been able to have them shipped to California, the cellar had been flooded and everything in it ruined...

The death of Jim's mss depressed me. To rediscover his talent; then, finally, to locate the place where his poems should have been, and to find that they too had died. It was Jim's second death for me...

-snip-

In the world's great bookkeeping systems of fossil ants and sabre-toothed tigers, and the dynasties of generations since the Cro-Magnons, the loss of a few poems is not likely to cause a wrinkle in the Van Allen belt. But I am a scientist who mourns for lost poems, the irreplaceable creative molecule whose fission you cannot predict or reproduce."

from Walter Lowenfels' To An Imaginary Daughter

Though it looks as though somewhere, somehow - one manuscript survived unscathed.

Personal Archives as Documentary

LibraryThing Early Reviewers

Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

My first exposure to Bennett & it will definitely not be the last I read from him. Despite the particulars of the plot which can be found anywhere - this is essentially the natural history of a reader. What makes the reader of this story uncommon is her station in life & the relative lateness with which she comes to enjoy books.

But if you are a bibliophile, you will come to recognize yourself in this book, as many of the properties the Queen displays as a reader, the stages she goes through, are common traits to those who are voracious in their reading habits. You will notice the historical progression from your own background as a reader, from childhood on up. The indiscriminate phase, the pointed & direct phase, the appreciation of classics, the capacity for discrimination between classics based on aesthetic preference, & if you're one of the lucky ones, the slow move from a love of reading to a desire to write yourself. The people & places you've shirked in favor of reading. The desire to share & revel with others in what your reading has taught you. The opening of the world before you as a consequence of this voyeuristic activity & the dawning realization of how you have shifted before the power of print. It's amazing what Bennett was able to compact into such a short space.

The book was a joy to read & one of the few I read this year which had me smiling & laughing throughout. Sly wit. As you approach the final pages, you wonder how the book is possibly going to close & on that last page, you realize with satisfaction that it couldn't have ended any other way.

Ah, the impact of reading.

Semester's End

Semester's end at Pitt. First of six for me. First of three for most.

Given that I peruse dozens of LIS blogs every week or so (which often total over 1000 posts), I perpetually wonder what the focus of this blog should be, without creating redundancy of content.

Ah, well.
In the interim, here's a link: Europa Film Treasures.

Archives of Dissent

"Archives of Dissent will bring together librarians, curators, oral historians, conservators, publishers, booksellers, and others working to prevent the loss and erasure of radical voices, events and movements of both the past and the present.

Stick it in a blender & something of dubious value will come out

Three months into living here & the cobbling your life method is slowly coming together.

Aside from the bibliographic essay on medical archives next month (which proves harder to research than expected), there is the poster presentation for another class. For that, I created a wikispace for our topic, orphan works. Mostly created as an excuse to play around in the space, & it's a bit rough at the moment.

In volunteering at the Center for American Music & being initially charged with updating a decades old finding aid, I'm stumbling my way across the EAD concept while holding out two more days for the DACS manual to be back in inventory (several books I've wanted through the SAA have been out of inventory; I would like to know how this happens).

At work, in addition to learning their databases, I may soon find myself working with Site Studio to help improve the library website, which to my understanding has had some funky transitional issues.

Which is to say - there is much to assimilate in a short amount of time.

If all goes well, I also hope to start using this site for book reviews. We've been doing this to some extent through courseweb at school, but I'm not keen on the format there. Reviewing them here might help synthesize my thoughts in a more memory sustaining fashion.

I've also recently agreed to participate in a two week study (brought to my attention by a co-worker) which seeks to study cognitive shifts from within an IR framework, as evidenced through blogging. Though this won't be happening on this particular site, per participation rules.

Also mulling over creating a weekly post dedicated to the new & random information which I accrue in short bursts at work. Being a reference librarian (even part-time) is a complete reward in novelty.

As one example - as a consequence of backtracking through the LOC's classification scheme, I discovered vis-à-vis Class C: Auxiliary Sciences of History -> Subclass CC -> CC 960 Lanterns of the dead, this little gem: poor souls light. Jubilations.

On the Pittsburgh social front, I'd like to thank the fine folks at Encyclopedia Destructica for letting a complete stranger & absolute novice join their binding party. It gave me a small thrill to learn basic Japanese stab binding & it's been entirely too long since I've played with glue.