Quotes

Situated Knowledges: Prelinger Library

GV: You mentioned “media archeology” and I was wondering if you’re referring to any of Shannon Mattern’s work…

RP: Well, she’s one of the smartest people in the world. What Shannon Mattern does that’s super-interesting is she teaches both urban space and she teaches libraries and archives. And it occurred to me after looking at her syllabi — and I know she’s thought about this a lot, but one model for thinking about archives in libraries — you know, Megan was the creator of the specialized taxonomy for this pace, but in a broader sense, collections are cities. You know, there’s neighborhoods of enclosure and openness. There’s areas of interchange. There’s a kind of morphology of growth which nobody’s really examined yet. But I think it’s a really productive metaphor for thinking about what the specialty archives have been and what they might be. [Mattern’s] work is leading in that position. She teaches a library in her class.

Situated Knowledges, Issue 3: Prelinger Library, Geogina Voss, Rick Prelinger and Megan Prelinger.

FRBR, Before and After: The Work

We live today with an abundance of “product”—there are more books than readers who want them, as evidenced by the copious piles on remainder racks at our bookstores. It wasn’t always thus, of course. Before the advent of printing, each copy was unique and there were few of them. Printing brought exact copies, but it also brought editions, as printers throughout Europe produced their own versions of texts. One European intellectual of the 1500s, Conrad Gessner, felt a need to gain some control over this tsunami of works; he set out to create a universal bibliography of all works in print, but not all of the various editions of the works. Gessner’s Bibliotheca Universalis was in part a response to what he saw as wasteful duplication among printers, and he hoped that a list of available works would lead them to concentrate on new works rather than reprinting works already on the market (Serrai and Serrai 2005). Here it can be said that Gessner obviously did not understand the economics of the book trade.

…

In my research I have not uncovered the tipping point that led library thinkers like Seymour Lubetzky and Eva Verona to take up the question of the work versus the edition. Yet somehow between the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, it appears that the number of different editions in libraries had become burdensome to users. Although it was still essential to distinguish between editions, it also became important to inform the user that a certain group of editions represented the same work. In just a little over one hundred years we had come full swing from presenting users solely with works, then solely with editions, to needing to gather editions back into their work groups.

Karen Coyle, FRBR, Before and After: The Work

Affective Labor, Resistance, and the Academic Librarian

Given the ongoing and increasing machinization of immaterial modes of production, an attention to the affective nature and labor of technology in life and work and the ways in which it also impacts human subjectivity and gender seems a fruitful new line of inquiry for feminist thinkers concerned with labor issues. If we take up a call to arms to think about life and work  and  the  subjects  we  wish  to  become,  how  might  new  technologies  enhance, augment, or limit our feminist political desires for subjectivities free from domination? In the context of the academic library, how does the disruption of the digital library allow us to rethink and revalorize the subjectivity of the librarian?

Sloniowski, Lisa. “Affective Labor, Resistance, and the Academic Librarian“, Library Trends, Vol. 64, No. 4, 2016 (“Reconfiguring Race, Gender, and Sexuality,” edited by Emily Drabinski and Patrick Keilty), pp. 645–666.

The Library As Map

We are careful selectors, nowhere
near the “save everything” end of the
continuum. What’s most interesting
to us is to build our own very specific
collection, and in doing so model
ways of collection-building that could
be useful to other people. We want
to embody the idea that everyone can
be their own archivist. If more people
carefully chose a collection of evidence
to save, then there would be less of
a need for people to save everything.
Libraries like ours can be built by
anyone, anywhere. We do have a
particular collecting strategy, but we
are just two people.

Gov.uk : Digital by Default Service Standard

All new digital services from the government must meet the Digital by Default Service Standard.

All public facing transactional services must meet the standard. It’s used by departments and the Government Digital Service to check whether a service is good enough for public use.

1. Understand user needs

Understand user needs. Research to develop a deep knowledge of who the service users are and what that means for the design of the service.

Read more about point 1

2. Do ongoing user research

Put a plan in place for ongoing user research and usability testing to continuously seek feedback from users to improve the service.

Read more about point 2

3. Have a multidisciplinary team

Put in place a sustainable multidisciplinary team that can design, build and operate the service, led by a suitably skilled and senior service manager with decision-making responsibility.

Read more about point 3

4. Use agile methods

Build your service using the agile, iterative and user-centred methods set out in the manual.

Read more about point 4

5. Iterate and improve frequently

Build a service that can be iterated and improved on a frequent basis and make sure that you have the capacity, resources and technical flexibility to do so.

Read more about point 5

6. Evaluate tools and systems

Evaluate what tools and systems will be used to build, host, operate and measure the service, and how to procure them.

Read more about point 6

7. Understand security and privacy issues

Evaluate what user data and information the digital service will be providing or storing and address the security level, legal responsibilities, privacy issues and risks associated with the service (consulting with experts where appropriate).

Read more about point 7

8. Make all new source code open

Make all new source code open and reusable, and publish it under appropriate licences (or provide a convincing explanation as to why this can’t be done for specific subsets of the source code).

Read more about point 8

9. Use open standards and common platforms

Use open standards and common government platforms where available.

Read more about point 9

10. Test the end-to-end service

Be able to test the end-to-end service in an environment identical to that of the live version, including on all common browsers and devices, and using dummy accounts and a representative sample of users.

Read more about point 10

11. Make a plan for being offline

Make a plan for the event of the digital service being taken temporarily offline.

Read more about point 11

12. Create a service that’s simple

Create a service that is simple and intuitive enough that users succeed first time.

Read more about point 12

13. Make the user experience consistent with GOV.UK

Build a service consistent with the user experience of the rest of GOV.UK including using the design patterns and style guide.

Read more about point 13

14. Encourage everyone to use the digital service

Encourage all users to use the digital service (with assisted digital support if required) alongside an appropriate plan to phase out non-digital channels and services.

Read more about point 14

15. Collect performance data

Use tools for analysis that collect performance data. Use this data to analyse the success of the service and to translate this into features and tasks for the next phase of development.

Read more about point 15

16. Identify performance indicators

Identify performance indicators for the service, including the 4 mandatory key performance indicators (KPIs) defined in the manual. Establish a benchmark for each metric and make a plan to enable improvements.

Read more about point 16

17. Report performance data on the Performance Platform

Why you should report data and how you’ll be assessed.

Read more about point 17

18. Test with the minister

Test the service from beginning to end with the minister responsible for it.

Read more about point 18

Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges

I want a feminist writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision again, because we need to reclaim that sense to find our way through all the visualizing tricks and powers of modern sciences and technologies that have transformed the objectivity debates. We need to learn in our to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name. So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility. The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision. All Western cultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologies governing the relations of what we call mind and body, distance and responsibility. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see.

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives“, in Feminist Studies, pp. 575–599, 1988.