Lunch & Learn: Arts libraries on the edge with Darwin Scott, Sandy Brooke and Hannah Bennett

Where do I shelve that? Photo of Decode, a dig­i­tal art instal­la­tion at the V&A, Lon­don, Decem­ber 13th, 2009. Photo cour­tesy of Rain Rab­bit, Flickr. CC license, 2009.

Note: to access resources cited in this blog post, you must either be on a machine on the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity net­work, or have a VPN or proxy server run­ning on your machine. For instruc­tions on how to set up a VPN or proxy server con­nec­tion, click here.

“These are exhil­a­rat­ing times to be arts librar­i­ans,” said Dar­win Scott, librar­ian of the Mendel Music Library at Prince­ton. Today’s Lunch ‘n Learn ses­sion explored just how exhil­a­rat­ing – and chal­leng­ing– it is to deal with new modes of deliv­er­ing var­i­ous media to library patrons, when the media exists out­side the tra­di­tional col­lec­tion of books, man­u­scripts, disks, draw­ings and other tan­gi­ble assets one usu­ally thinks of as library hold­ings. The pre­sen­ters rep­re­sented the three main arts repos­i­to­ries at Prince­ton; Dar­win Scott was joined by librar­i­ans Sandy Brooke (Mar­quand Library of Art and Arche­ol­ogy) and Han­nah Ben­nett (Archi­tec­ture Library), to dis­cuss their respec­tive collections.

Sandy Brooke began the ses­sion by describ­ing the ten­sion between a library’s mis­sion to col­lect, pro­vide access, and pre­serve for the future, in an age where dig­i­tal media seems to be increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to quan­tify in terms of own­er­ship, shared access, and sus­tain­abil­ity. “Old lit­er­a­ture is good lit­er­a­ture for art his­to­ri­ans,” Brooke said, explain­ing that schol­ars rely upon impor­tant doc­u­ments from past cen­turies. Marquand’s hold­ings are still largely print-based, she noted, how­ever, there is an increas­ing num­ber of dig­i­tal ver­sions of both text– and image-based ref­er­ences. Art has tra­di­tion­ally been stud­ied through sur­ro­gates, whether pho­tographs, draw­ings or descrip­tions of works that are either housed in remote places, or may no longer survive.

A new form of art–that which is born digital–presents cer­tain chal­lenges to those who would study it, because the deliv­ery medium is no longer a sur­ro­gate for the work, but may be the work itself. Dig­i­tal art is often recorded on per­ish­able media, the for­mats of which can migrate to incom­pat­i­ble for­mats in a fairly short period of time. It might be posted directly to the web, and lost when its link later dis­ap­pears. The work itself might be a record of an ephemeral event that is almost impos­si­ble to cap­ture in its entirety. When offered for dis­tri­b­u­tion by a ven­dor or dealer, its licens­ing terms can be extremely lim­it­ing and restric­tive with regard to how the work can be later viewed, shared, or migrated to more sta­ble dig­i­tal formats.

Such licens­ing terms, Brooke noted, are much more restric­tive than the terms of fair-use usu­ally applied to edu­ca­tional use of copy­righted mate­ri­als. Many dig­i­tal objects han­dled by deal­ers and ven­dors are deliv­ered with the idea of restrict­ing access to them, thus cre­at­ing an arti­fi­cial scarcity. Ensur­ing future access to this media that com­prises an orig­i­nal work is uncer­tain, since access is often pro­vided via an online resource with a fee-based deliv­ery method. If the online resource were to go out of busi­ness, its dig­i­tal con­tent might well be lost.

Brooke showed sev­eral still pho­tos of Rist’s work found in Art­STOR, an online data­base for the study of art his­tory, but found no images of the 2008 MoMA instal­la­tion. The artist’s own web­site con­tains links to her gallery and some visual ref­er­ences to other video projects, but not the MoMA instal­la­tion. The MoMA web­site has some valu­able doc­u­men­tary video footage about Rist’s instal­la­tion, but there is no video that presents a com­plete idea of what it was like to expe­ri­ence the com­plete work in situ. A YouTube search offers the MoMA videos again, along with two ama­teur videos made by peo­ple who attended the exhibit while it was at the MoMA; one of these videos, obvi­ously shot with a cell phone, is enhanced by a sound loop pro­vided by the ama­teur videographer–however it is music com­posed by the phone’s owner that has noth­ing to do with the orig­i­nal instal­la­tion. Since Rist’s works tend to deal in dream­like, dis­torted imagery, it’s almost impos­si­ble to tell whether the dis­tor­tions seen in the YouTube clips were intended by the artist, or sim­ply a result of a highly-compressed, low qual­ity copy of the orig­i­nal work. Autho­rized dig­i­tal copies of such ephemeral works are typ­i­cally priced at hun­dreds of dol­lars apiece, so col­lect­ing them on any scale is beyond the finan­cial resources of most repos­i­to­ries; try­ing to cap­ture some­thing tan­gi­ble and com­plete about such works, as Brooke demon­strated in the searches described above, is no easy matter.

For the moment, Brooke con­cluded, the sus­tain­abil­ity of this kind of dig­i­tal art is uncer­tain; ques­tions of rights, of access, of preser­va­tion are only par­tially answered by cur­rent means of dis­tri­b­u­tion. Guerilla web­sites such as ubu.com, a web-based edu­ca­tional resource that oper­ates on a gift econ­omy, posts avant-garde works under an assump­tion of fair use. Ubu.com was cre­ated in protest to the mar­ginal dis­tri­b­u­tion of these elu­sive works, but the fact that the site some­times know­ingly vio­lates copy­right in post­ing links makes their sus­tain­abil­ity ten­u­ous, at best. Many of the sound and video works on the site are rep­re­sented by highly com­pressed video and audio files intro­duc­ing uncer­tainty as to their accu­racy; as with the YouTube video of Pip­i­lotti Rist’s video instal­la­tion, it’s impos­si­ble to say whether the files rep­re­sent the artist’s vision–or the tech­no­log­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions of a bad dig­i­tal copy. More sus­tain­able solu­tions may be in the future, how­ever. Brooke men­tioned the Elec­tronic Arts Inter­mix site, a not-for-profit ven­ture that is try­ing to pre­serve dig­i­tal art for cul­tural repos­i­to­ries such as libraries and muse­ums. An edu­ca­tional stream­ing solu­tion to pro­vid­ing high-quality copies of video art for art libraries is one licens­ing model being con­sid­ered by this orga­ni­za­tion, which has preser­va­tion and sus­tain­able access to video art as its two chief missions.

Archi­tec­ture librar­ian, Han­nah Ben­nett, next described some of the unusual chal­lenges faced by those want­ing to pre­serve records of con­tem­po­rary archi­tec­tural works. Long gone are the days of archi­tec­tural draw­ings being pro­duced i
n draft­ing rooms, with paper being the medium that recorded a building’s design from first inspi­ra­tion to the deliv­ery of final plans to builders. Dig­i­tal ren­der­ing of archi­tec­ture is now the stan­dard method for design, a method that cre­ates a dense stream of infor­ma­tion that orig­i­nates from archi­tec­tural offices, and even­tu­ally results in doc­u­ments that builders can work with to con­struct the build­ing. In fact, the trans­mis­sion of archi­tec­tural infor­ma­tion from archi­tect to builder these days is com­monly referred to as BIM – build­ing infor­ma­tion management–where the infor­ma­tion crit­i­cal to mak­ing the build­ing is cap­tured, but cer­tain aspects of the design process might not be pre­served. This par­tial cap­ture of data cre­ates a new level of com­plex­ity for those who would like to study the entire his­tory of an archi­tec­tural work.

Ben­nett showed some exam­ples of design sketches made by Prince­ton fac­ulty mem­ber, Axel Kil­ian, and demon­strated the CADenary soft­ware that Kil­lian devel­oped for his own design prac­tice. These tools allow for amaz­ing flex­i­bil­ity in terms of draft­ing com­plex shapes, but their unique­ness means that it may be a chal­lenge to read the files they pro­duce in the future. Ben­nett com­mented on this reliance on tech­nol­ogy, say­ing that “design lan­guage has now become inter­nal to tools, rather than to the form.” As enrich­ing as a com­plex design such as Bil­bao is to archi­tec­ture, pre­serv­ing the out­put of many dif­fer­ent pro­pri­etary soft­ware pack­ages presents a set of preser­va­tion chal­lenges for cus­to­di­ans of archi­tec­tural history.

Ben­nett enu­mer­ated the queries posed by these new design tools. “How will they main­tain tech­ni­cal cur­rency?” she asked. “How will we archive them?” And, ulti­mately, “how will we present them to the future scholar?” Ben­nett con­cluded her por­tion of the talk by show­ing some hang­ing loops of chain used by Span­ish archi­tect Anto­nio Gaudi (1852–1926) to explore the cate­nary curves he often used in his archi­tec­ture – in a pho­to­graph some­one just hap­pened to take of that exper­i­ment. “Older mate­r­ial can be equally valu­able” Ben­nett said, cit­ing this early archi­tec­ture exper­i­ment explor­ing forms that are very hard to draw using tra­di­tional draft­ing tools. Today’s computer-generated archi­tec­tural designs present a myr­iad of such capture-able design moments – and librar­i­ans need to find a way to pre­serve them for future scholars.

Dar­win Scott, librar­ian at Mendel Music Library, con­cluded the Lunch ‘n Learn by dis­cussing var­i­ous online data­bases used to present dig­i­tal copies of music and the per­form­ing arts. Scott men­tioned that rights man­age­ment is a major con­sid­er­a­tion in this area as well as in other forms of the arts, even though the resources for pre­sent­ing them via sub­scribed ser­vices are more numerous.

Rights issues, par­tic­u­larly in the case of the­atri­cal works, become more and more com­plex as more peo­ple (and their intel­lec­tual prop­erty) become involved in a pro­duc­tion. “Most record­ings of Broad­way shows are ille­gal,” Scott noted. Older forms of media that pre­served works such as con­certs, or plays were “col­lec­table objects.” Tapes, disks, LPs and other media at least pro­vided one way that an event could be cap­tured and preserved–and pur­chased to form part of a col­lec­tion. By con­trast, stream­ing libraries of musi­cal and dra­matic per­for­mances pro­vide sub­scribers with thou­sands of record­ings for an annual fee, but this model pro­vides an inter­est­ing chal­lenge for a library col­lec­tion, since the library does not in fact “own” the con­tent to which it sub­scribes. This raises impor­tant ques­tions about sus­tain­abil­ity and preservation.

Sev­eral ven­dors of stream­ing ser­vices promise that they will pro­vide a form of per­pet­ual access to the mate­r­ial in their library to sub­scribers in the event they go out of busi­ness. This usu­ally means that data files will be avail­able in some form for bulk down­load, but per­haps not with a sus­tain­able model to pre­serve the user inter­face that makes it pos­si­ble to use them. Scott men­tioned some com­mer­cial stream­ing ser­vices that are avail­able to retail con­sumers. Until recently, insti­tu­tional clients had been shut out of the dis­tri­b­u­tion model for these pop­u­lar ser­vices. How­ever, some dis­trib­u­tors are now bridg­ing the gap by pro­vid­ing high-quality stream­ing sub­scrip­tions for libraries and other cul­tural insti­tu­tions. Scott demon­strated a few of these ser­vices, using the Quick Links sec­tion of the Mendel Music Library’s home page, and Scott’s own Lib Guide list of links to music and per­form­ing arts resources.

The Naxos Music Library, var­i­ous col­lec­tions from the Alexan­der Street Press, and DRAM (The Data­base of Recorded Amer­i­can Music) were among the col­lec­tions that Scott fea­tured in his pre­sen­ta­tion. Naxos, a respected record label, offers a large col­lec­tion of musi­cal record­ings of var­i­ous gen­res, includ­ing clas­si­cal, jazz, folk, blues and world music; DRAM also offers stream­ing music; here, the focus is on Amer­i­can com­posers and per­form­ers. The Alexan­der Street Press offers a wide vari­ety of sound and video offer­ings, includ­ing Opera in Video, Dance in Video, and The­ater in Video. The videos offered from the Alexan­der Street Press not only will play on your com­puter, but are cap­tured in a high enough res­o­lu­tion to project on a larger screen. A new ser­vice from Alexan­der Street even allows you to stream some of this con­tent of these col­lec­tions to your com­pat­i­ble mobile device (cur­rently sup­ported are iPhones on a 3G net­work or bet­ter, and devices run­ning the Android OS) by using a link, a text mes­sage con­tain­ing the link, or a QR reader on the device. These links stay cur­rent for 48 hours, allow­ing plenty of time to enjoy the con­tent. Recent enhance­ments to the library’s online cat­a­log also allow direct links to many of these dig­i­tal assets via searches done in Prince­ton Library catalog.

Got a QR reader? Get bal­let! A screen shot of the bal­let Sleep­ing Beauty, show­ing the inter­face to mobile devices­The video con­tent in the Alexan­der Street data­bases come from var­i­ous sources. For the The­ater in Video col­lec­tion, many of the videos are drawn from per­for­mances intended for broad­cast tele­vi­sion, Scott noted. TV con­tent also accounts for much of the Dance in Video col­lec­tion, whereas the Opera in Video col­lec­tion has more access to com­mer­cial releases. The qual­ity and range of the works offered are some­times not ideal, although in some cases, they record spec­tac­u­lar per­for­mances. Each ven­dor also uses their own pro­pri­etary user inter­face – there is no standardization–so it can take some time to famil­iar­ize one’s self with each inter­face in order to get the best results. Links to the resources men­tioned in this post–and many more–as well as tips to help users nav­i­gate and search these online repos­i­to­ries can be found in this Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion, which Scott pre­pared for Lunch ‘n Learn attendees.

The ses­sion con­cluded with Dar­win Scott’s sum­ma­tion about it being an excit­ing time to be an arts librar­ian; the chal­lenges pre­sented by the diver­sity and vol­ume of new media types also make this a won­der­ful time to be a sub­scriber to many online resources that make it pos­si­ble to expe­ri­ence art, archi­tec­ture and the per­form­ing arts in increas­ingly acces­si­ble ways. The fact that old media has lit­tle in com­mon with new forms of deliv­ery presents chal­lenges for librar­i­ans and for patron access, but as sources for these mate­ri­als become increas­ingly more numer­ous and more diverse the end user and the scholar can only benefit–and enjoy.

Got band­width? Wel­come to live per­for­mances on a device near you!