New Books in Library Science

In Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday (MIT Press, 2016; paperback edition, 2023), Gabriella Giannachi traces the evolution of the archive into the apparatus through which we map the everyday. The archive, traditionally a body of documents or a site for the preservation of documents, changed over the centuries to encompass, often concurrently, a broad but interrelated number of practices not traditionally considered as archival. Archives now consist of not only documents and sites but also artworks, installations, museums, social media platforms, and mediated and mixed reality environments. Giannachi tracks the evolution of these diverse archival practices across the centuries.Archives today offer a multiplicity of viewing platforms to replay the past, capture the present, and map our presence. Giannachi uses archaeological practices to explore all the layers of the archive, analyzing Lynn Hershman Leeson's !Women Art Revolution project, a digital archive of feminist artists. She considers the archive as a memory laboratory, with case studies that include visitors' encounters with archival materials in the Jewish Museum in Berlin and projects like heritage projects organized by the Exeter City Football Club Supporters Trust. She discusses the importance of participatory archiving, examining the “multimedia roadshow” Digital Diaspora Family Reunion as an example. She explores the use of the archive in works that express the relationship between ourselves and our environment, citing Andy Warhol’s time capsules and Ant Farm, among others. And she looks at the transmission of the archive through the body in performance, bioart, and database artworks, closing with a detailed analysis of Lynn Hershman Leeson's Infinity Engine.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In In the Herbarium: The Hidden World of Collecting and Preserving Plants (Yale University Press, 2023), Maura C. Flannery elucidates how herbaria illuminate the past and future of plant science. Collections of preserved plant specimens, known as herbaria, have existed for nearly five centuries. These pressed and labeled plants have been essential resources for scientists, allowing them to describe and differentiate species and to document and research plant changes and biodiversity over time--including changes related to climate. Flannery tells the history of herbaria, from the earliest collections belonging to such advocates of the technique as sixteenth-century botanist Luca Ghini, to the collections of poets, politicians, and painters, and to the digitization of these precious specimens today. She charts the growth of herbaria during the Age of Exploration, the development of classification systems to organize the collections, and herbaria's indispensable role in the tracking of climate change and molecular evolution. Herbaria also have historical, aesthetic, cultural, and ethnobotanical value--these preserved plants can be linked to the Indigenous peoples who used them, the collectors who sought them out, and the scientists who studied them. This book testifies to the central role of herbaria in the history of plant study and to their continued value, not only to biologists but to entirely new users as well: gardeners, artists, students, and citizen-scientists.Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

School librarians have always connected learners’ life experiences, cultures, and communities to materials, projects, and processes. As schools look to make these connections within the classroom and to the curriculum, school librarians are perfectly poised to lead and model meaningful steps toward a culturally responsive mindset. Embracing Culturally Responsive Practice in School Libraries (ALA Editions, 2023) by Elisabet Kennedy celebrates how learners’ cultures shape everything from their communication to how they process information.This book translates complex concepts into accessible and practical school library strategies while challenging readers to embrace and nurture their personal and professional growth. An authentic and approachable guide to culturally responsive pedagogy aligned with the National School Library Standards, this book features an adapted framework with actionable steps and activities based on culturally responsive principles that directly relate to AASL Standards; scenarios offering context for learning, demonstrating conflicts, exploring potential harm, and suggesting strategies; and reflective exercises and challenges, introductory definitions, and resources for deeper exploration.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The disparate stories of the libraries of the fledgling colleges in the colonies of the Eastern Seaboard, beginning more than one hundred fifty years before the Declaration of Independence, has been recorded occasionally in scattered scholarly journals, but never has there appeared a fully-fledged history of the library of one of America's oldest universities from its founding through the present day.In I Give These Books: The History of the Yale University Library, 1656-2022 (Oak Knoll, 2022), David Alan Richards presents this story. In its pages, the founding, growth, organisation, and expansion of a major American university library is revealed over three and a half centuries of its history.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How the image collection, organized and made available for public consumption, came to define a key feature of contemporary visual culture. The origins of today’s kaleidoscopic digital visual culture are many. In Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy (MIT Press, 2023), Diana Kamin traces the sharing of photographs to an image economy developed throughout the twentieth century by major institutions. Picture-Work examines how three of these institutions—the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the stock agency H. Armstrong Roberts Inc.—defined the public’s understanding of what the photographic image is, while building vast collections with universalizing ambitions. Highlighting underexplored figures, such as the first rights and reproduction manager at MoMA Pearl Moeller and visionary NYPL librarian Romana Javitz, and underexplored professional practices, Diana Kamin demonstrates how bureaucratic work communicates ideas about images to the public. Kamin artfully shows how the public interfaces with these image collections through systems of classification and protocols of search and retrieval. These interactions, in turn, shape contemporary image culture, including concepts of authorship, art, property, and value, as well as logics of indexing, tagging, and hyperlinking. Together, these interactions have forged a concept of the image as alienable content, which has intensified with the advent of digital techniques for managing image collections. To survey the complicated process of digitization in the nineties and early aughts, Kamin also includes interviews with photographers, digital asset management system designers, librarians, and artists on their working practices.Links Mentioned in the Episode "Working With the Whitney's Replication Committee," Ben Lerner, The New Yorker, 2016 Invocation of Beauty: The Life and Photography of Soichi Sunami, Cascadia Art Museum, 2018 Soichi Sunami's manuscript autobiography, Museum of Modern Art Library The New York Public Library: A Universe of Knowledge, Phyllis Dain (Scala Books and The New York Public Library, 2000) What Photographs Do: The Making and Remaking of Museum Cultures, eds. Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious (UCL Press, 2022). Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Noa Shaindlinger's Displacement and Erasure in Palestine: The Politics of Hop (Edinburgh UP, 2023) explores the ways in which Palestinians negotiate physical and symbolic erasures by producing their own archives and historical narratives. With a focus on the city of Jaffa and its displaced Palestinian population, Noa Shaindlinger argues that the Israeli state ‘buried’ histories of mass expulsions and spatial appropriations. Based on a wide-variety of sources, this book brings together archival, literary, ethnographic and oral research to engage with ideas of settler colonialism and the production of history, violence and memory, refugee-hood and diaspora.Roberto Mazza is currently an independent scholar. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent scholarship in organisation studies has begun to address how organisations perceive and use their history. However, how organisations preserve and access their history, and how this affects how they are able to use their history is less researched. This thesis investigates how Barclays Group Archives (BGA) contribute to Barclays PLC delivering its strategic objectives. It asks, how does BGA, as a specific unit of the organisation, facilitate the delivery of Barclays PLC's strategic objectives? The researcher was embedded in the archives, enabling the gathering of observational data on how BGA operate as well as a unique level of access to archival organisational records. These were used to target and gain access to Barclays PLC employees to conduct interviews to ascertain how they used BGA's resources and what benefits they felt BGA brought. Using interviews, observation, and other qualitative research methods, Ian Jones introduces archival science theory to the study of how organisations can benefit from using their history, introducing the archival science ideas of authenticity, reliability, usability, and integrity to inform the research on organisational memory and use of the past strategies. The thesis focuses on the period between 2012 and 2015, a time when Barclays PLC made extensive use of their past in an attempt to manage and recover from the various scandals. It argues that BGA, and the archivists in particular, are integral to Barclays PLC's use of the past strategies, enabling Barclays PLC to bolster their claims to be returning to a historically 'authentic' corporate culture that would inform the organisation's strategies and behaviour going forward. Additionally, the archivists themselves act as the link between the information in the archives that forms part of Barclays PLC's organisational memory, enabling users to utilise this information and transforming the static memory held into the archives into dynamic memory that is then utilised by employees. The thesis highlights the importance of how organisations access the historical information that they use to inform their historical narratives, and the importance of the individuals that act as the link between those who are using the past in some way, and the repositories of historical information. The research findings presented in this thesis will be of interest to organisation studies scholars interested in how managers use history as well as to researchers who study corporate archives.Winner of the Coleman Prize in 2022, this research tells of the potential uses of the past as a source of competitive advantage as well as document the relationship between the Corporate Archives and Head Office in a mayor, long-lived British bank.This thesis is available open access here. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Greco-Egyptian syncretistic god Serapis was used by the 3rd century BCE Ptolemaic pharaohs to impose Greek cultural hegemony and consolidate political power. The Alexandrian Serapeum, sometimes referred to as The Great Library of Alexandria’s “daughter library,” may be seen as an archetype for institutions where religion and secular knowledge come together for the reproduction of ideologies.The Serapeum, however, is by no means unique in this regard; libraries have always incorporated religious symbols and rituals into their material structures. Very little research has been conducted concerning the sociocultural and historical impact of this union of temple and information institution or how this dynamic interrelationship (even if it may now be implicit or partially concealed) stretches from the earliest Mesopotamian proto-libraries to our present academic ones.Stephen Bales and Wendi Arant Kaspar's book Serapis: The Sacred Library and Its Declericalization (Library Juice Press, 2023) explores the role of the historical and legacy religious symbols and rituals of the academic library (referred to as the “Serapian Library”) as a powerful ideological state institution and investigates how these symbols and rituals support hegemonic structures in society. Specifically, the book examines the role of the modern secular “Serapian” academic library in its historical context as a “sacred space,” and applies the theories of Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, Ivan Illich, and other thinkers to explain the ramifications of the library as crypto-temple.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this book, Paul A. Thomas—a seasoned Wikipedia contributor who has accrued about 60,000 edits since he started editing in 2007—breaks down the history of the free encyclopedia and explains the process of becoming an editor. Now a newly minted Ph.D. and a library specialist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, he outlines the many roles a Wikipedia editor can fill. Some editors fix typographical errors, add facts and citations, or clean up the prose on existing articles; others create new articles on topics they find interesting. In Inside Wikipedia: How It Works and How You Can Be an Editor (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Thomas goes behind the familiar Wikipedia article page and looks at the unique brand of collaboration that is constantly at work to expand and improve this global resource.James Kates is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A wonderful interview with Kristen Daniels, Executive Director of Bernie's Book Bank. Since 2009, Bernie's Book Bank has provided 24 million books free of charge to children in the Chicago area. In our conversation, Kristen talks about what they do, how they do it, and how we can help out with this incredible initiative. Before joining Bernie’s Book Bank, Kristen held a variety of leadership roles at non-profits including Clearbrook, YMCA and USA Swimming Foundation.Mel Rosenberg is a professor emeritus of microbiology (Tel Aviv University, emeritus) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. He is co-founder of Ourboox, a web platform with some 240,000 ebooks that allows anyone to create and share flipbooks comprising text, pictures and videos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices