Meet the new library, same as the old library
Via Maud Newton, a few weeks ago I came across upon the website for Brooklyn’s Reanimation Library, which is a sort of a refuge for discarded books, which sounds like a good idea until you start poking around their website. Sounding more like a page from the Logan’s Run screenplay than the French flaps of a Nicholson Baker book, and with graphics that remind me of the menus for the Beastie Boys Criterion Edition DVD (if not for the Church of the SubGenius), the Reanimation Library is hardly a publishing utopia. Instead it’s, well, just another library. However, this is how the Reanimators see it:
The Reanimation Library seeks to assemble an inspiring collection of resources that will facilitate the production of new creative work and promote reflection and research into the historical, legal, and methodological questions surrounding the adaptive reuse of found materials. It strives to provide the necessary space and tools to allow these activities to flourish, and to foster a climate of spirited collaboration.
To me this begs the question, Who’s choosing which books to “reanimate”? And how is that decision more valid or important than the one to deanimate the book in the first place? After all, the Reanimation Library’s not taking just any discarded book. Even though the website states that the library takes donations, not every book will be accepted (just how dead does a book have to be before it’s given new life? And how ironic is that?). And, of course, what happens to the books that the Library of Lost Books simply doesn’t want? Well, “those that are not added to the collection will be sold or donated.” Which means, I guess, that the sad books that even the Reanimation Library doesn’t want to preserve get sent to the land of misfit books.
Not mentioned on the site is the fact that libraries are increasingly bypassed in today’s Googlepedia age. When I was a kid I had to bum rides to the library all the way across town in order to do research for school papers or to get stuff to read. But today’s kids are no doubt doing that same research from their laptop computers (if not their cell phones) while at home or in a coffee shop or at school or wherever. So why do we need to replace one kind of library with another? I would argue that the age when libraries played God is over; now they’re just trying to keep pace. The Reanimation Library website also quotes Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan’s first law of library science: “books are for use.” And yet, how useful will books in a library in Brooklyn be to anyone, well, not in Brooklyn? (There are currently no plans to digitize the collection.) So how does the Reanimation Library really differ from any library it’s probably a few blocks from? The public collection has been collected and curated, with thousands of books not making the cut. And the same goes for the Reanimation Library (if not more so). The difference, I guess, is that the Reanimation Library also has funky T-shirts and stickers. After all, who needs the Dewey Decimal System when you can have pins with hot dogs that say LIBRARY SKILLS?
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[…] Print is Dead - “Via Maud Newton, a few weeks ago I came across upon the website for Brooklyn’s Reanimation Library, which is a sort of a refuge for discarded books, which sounds like a good idea until you start poking around their website.” Posted in librar* | Trackback | del.icio.us | Top Of Page […]
From the verview and philosophy section of the Reanimation Library:
“Of particular interest to the Reanimation Library is the loss of visual information that occurs during the aforementioned process of weeding. Even though text is often accompanied by images, collection development policies generally assign little weight to the graphic dimension of a work, unless that work happens to be graphically driven (i.e. a book on a visual artist, graphic design, or an atlas). Most library collection development policies place priority on acquiring items with current textual information and replacing items where that information is lacking or outdated.”
Personally, I’m quite taken with the idea of the Reanimation Library.
Greetings,
As the founder of the Reanimation Library, I thought that it would perhaps be useful to respond to this post and address some of your points. Having been working on this project for over 5 years, I have to come to understand the limits of its appeal, so I am not entirely surprised when I encounter criticism. But I do think that it’s worth clarifying a few things.
To begin with, I am slightly perplexed by what I imagine is intended to be your first criticism: that “the Reanimation Library is hardly a publishing utopia. Instead it’s, well, just another library.” Um. OK. That the Reanimation Library is a library should be fairly apparent given its name, but it seems that fact in and of itself is problematic for you. I’m not quite sure what a publishing utopia is —as neat as it sounds— but I can assure you that I never set out to create one. What I did do was create a library with a fairly well-defined collection that is designed to serve (due to both financial limitations and its limited appeal) a fairly small community of people.
To answer your begged question: I am. You ask: “how is that decision more valid or important than the one to deanimate the book in the first place?” I make no claims on my website —nor would I— that my decision to acquire a book is any more “valid” or “important” than then someone else’s decision to get rid of it. Many of the titles that I collect are discarded from other libraries for perfectly sound reasons. The decision to acquire or discard a book is guided by something called a collection development policy. Every library has one, including mine. If you would like to read it, please visit this page: http://www.reanimationlibrary.org/pages/collectiondev.htm. This should clear up any confusion as to why I don’t accept every donation that comes my way. And I hope that it does, because I fail to understand what makes you so upset about the fact that I pass certain books up. You lament “the sad books that even the Reanimation Library doesn’t want to preserve get sent to the land of misfit books.” Perhaps a better idea would be to send any donations that I don’t keep to you so that you could start a publishing utopia?
In an oversight, you say: “not mentioned on the site is the fact that libraries are increasingly bypassed in today’s Googlepedia age.” You did a decent job of reading the library’s site, but you must have missed this: http://www.reanimationlibrary.org/pages/programmers.htm. You might want to read through that and then click on the “information seekers” link. So, OK, right, that clears that up. You then continue: “When I was a kid I had to bum rides to the library all the way across town in order to do research for school papers or to get stuff to read. But today’s kids are no doubt doing that same research from their laptop computers (if not their cell phones) while at home or in a coffee shop or at school or wherever.” Absolutely - I agree 100% with that; however, your logic derails with your next question: “So why do we need to replace one kind of library with another?” For one thing, the Reanimation Library was never conceived of as a place for kids to come and research their school papers. I mean, they’re more than welcome to, but they would probably be better served at a different kind of library that was set up to accommodate those activities. You seem to be laboring under the delusion that all libraries are essentially interchangeable, but the library world is filled with a vast array of collections, each catering to different populations. If you would like to see this for yourself, go to your local neighborhood public branch library and then visit a medical library at a major university and compare their collections. Or, if you happen to live in New York, come visit my neighborhood branch library in Carroll Gardens and then go to the Reanimation Library. While located within a mile of each other, I would be astonished if there were 10 overlapping titles in the two collections.
And finally you finish with the ubiquitous reference to the Dewey Decimal Classification System: “The difference, I guess, is that the Reanimation Library also has funky T-shirts and stickers. After all, who needs the Dewey Decimal System when you can have pins with hot dogs that say LIBRARY SKILLS?” Having worked in libraries since 1994 and graduated from the Information and Library Science program at the Pratt Institute, I can assure you that we librarians love —really love to the core— those automatic references to DDC. But your question offers a false choice: Indeed, at the Reanimation Library you can buy a pin with the image of a hot dog, but you can’t locate a book using Dewey—we catalog our books according to the Library of Congress.
Kind regards,
Andrew Beccone
what was the name of the dancing movie? i think there were cheerleaders or something … oh yeah, YOU GOT SERVED!
Though I like the concept of the Reanimation Library, especially now that it has been thoroughly critiqued and countered, I have to wonder if the inertia to the concept of ‘weeding’ out within libraries might come from the fact that our media as a whole perpetually recycles itself, and thus limits the potential for social, cultural, intellectual, and creative growth and change.
For example, how many movies — especially mainstream movies — this past decade were actually remakes of other movies, or adaptations of books or stories written within the last century? How many of them were extremely poor rewrites of literary works so old that they already live in the realm public domain and thus can be brutally bastardized when put to script by the writer/director/producer. (Yes, I am still angry about no less than two of the Beowulf remakes I have seen in the past couple of years.) I’m not talking about ’selling out’ into a new media, such as happens with comic book and manga artists to the great pleasure of readers and nonreaders alike. I am talking about the complete process of franchising or rehashing, such as happened with ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers,’ ‘I am Legend,’ and even ‘Batman’ in his many incarnations.
The real issue to me is not whether the Reanimation Library is collecting and preserving books that are being lost in the hustle of time, but whether or not we can see a shift in the industry as a whole toward allowing anything truly original to come into print — or any other industrialized medium — at all. How much of what is collected has been pushed out, not just because it’s easier to milk the cow somebody else raised, but also because of the inertia that comes from not wanting other cows to graze in the same field? To me the industrialized media seems to fear its own offspring, and will go to great lengths to suppress new media and new concept, in whatever form it takes.