An interview about Special Collections and The Caledon Library

An interview by EppieBlack Wheatcliffe

The Original Question

[2009/07/24 15:29]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: I'm writing a paper this semester for one of my Library Sci. classes about the possibilities of using New Media to make Special Collections more accessible and therefore valuable. Do you think I should work in any of my experiences with this exhibit. Or do you think my teacher will think I'm kooky?
[2009/07/24 15:30]  JJ Drinkwater: Well, my colleagues sometimes think I'm kooky....but what we do here is very good at making collections accessible...not in terms of the mere technology of access to materials, but in giving people more ways to get interested in the materials, and both helping them and inspiring them to learn more
[2009/07/24 15:31]  JJ Drinkwater: So, yes, I think you should work in your experiences with this exhibit

Explanation: We've been working on an exhibit on "The Great Ladies of Cookery"  It explores the lives and cookbooks of 6 British and 6 American female cookbook authors, from the mid-18th to the early 20th century.

Here's the announcement for the opening event:

Caledon Library Exhibit Opening - Great Ladies of Cookery, Tea and Conversation with the Curators
Sun, August 2, 1pm - 3pm
Whitehorn Library, Caledon Victoria City
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caledon%20Victoria%20City/55/202/23

Come discuss old cookery books and their intriguing authors with curators Eleanor Anderton, EppieBlack Wheatcliffe, and JJ Drinkwater

This exhibit on female cookbook authors in Britain and America, sponsored by Caledon Cuisine, takes the viewer from the kitchens of the mid-Eighteenth to those of the early Twentieth century.

During this period, publishing of any sort by women, cookbooks included, was relatively rare.  While the "glamour cookbooks" of the day, detailing the dishes served at the tables of the aristocracy, were written by men, there is a distinct chronology of vastly popular cookbooks written by women, for the women who, as housewives or hired cooks, were in charge of the majority of kitchens in both town and country.

Roughly once a generation, a cookbook woud be published that would become a sort of standard kitchen manual, going through multiple reprintings.  The authors were a mixed lot, describing themselves variously as "A Lady," housewives, cooks in private service, and cooking teachers. What they had in common was that each captured the culinary idiom of her generation.

Beginning with the 1747 "Art of Cookery" by Hannah Glasse (who never said "first catch your hare, although that's what she's famous for), and the 1796 "American Cookery" by Amelia Simmons ("An American Orphan") we explore the careers and publishing of such figures as Elizabeth Raffald and Lydia Maria Child, ending up with the work of the two Very Great Ladies, Isabella Beeton and Fannie Farmer.  

The exhibit runs through October 2009

The Interview
[10:57]  JJ Drinkwater: Okay, so, looking at this exhibit we have here....
[10:57]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: :)
[10:58]  JJ Drinkwater: The materials are drawn from all over...but you can imagine a similar exhibit highlighting a collection of these materials...
[11:00]  JJ Drinkwater: So, suppose this was for a collection that happened to have all of the major works we're talking about...
[11:01]  JJ Drinkwater: In a way, this is equivalent to putting them all oout in a showcase, with little bits of text discussing what they are and how they're related
[11:01]  JJ Drinkwater: Something special collections do all the time
[11:02]  JJ Drinkwater: It's also equivalent to some of the online exhibitions....let me find an example
[11:04]  JJ Drinkwater: http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/food/default.htm
[11:05]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: I saw some of those while I was searching for images.
[11:06]  JJ Drinkwater: So an SL exhibit does essentially what a web exhibit like that does....shows images, gives you explanations and context, points to resources for further investigation if you're interested.....
[11:06]  JJ Drinkwater: ...or so I thought when I made my first exhibit
[11:06]  JJ Drinkwater: I thought it was just like any digital exhibit or resource guide
[11:07]  JJ Drinkwater: But the way people react to these exhibits tipped me off that there was something more to it
[11:07]  JJ Drinkwater: You put it "in the round", so to speak, and it becomes engaging in a different way
[11:07]  JJ Drinkwater: Partly, because you make it a social location
[11:08]  JJ Drinkwater: I mean, in RL we go to museums with our friends
[11:08]  JJ Drinkwater: On the web, we don't much
[11:08]  JJ Drinkwater: When was the last time you sat and looked at the web with a freind?
[11:08]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Not often, although we do sometimes pass links back and forth.
[11:09]  JJ Drinkwater: True...and in IM that can turn into a kind of shared visit
[11:10]  JJ Drinkwater: But here, you can go to one of these exhibits with a freind, or a group of friends...or go to an exhibit opening and meet a bunch of people with similar interests
[11:10]  JJ Drinkwater: So, how is that different than going in person?  Well, here, as with a web exhibit, there are functionalities that allow more layers of information
[11:11]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: I've noticed that---Opening feel very much like real opening, except that people are maybe even more talkative since they are freed from feeling a need to be quiet.
[11:11]  JJ Drinkwater: Exactly
[11:12]  JJ Drinkwater: And there's something very stimulating to your interest in a topic...especially a topic new to you...in getting to look at materials and talk about them in a social setting
[11:12]  JJ Drinkwater: That's how book groups and study groups work, after all
[11:13]  JJ Drinkwater: Materials, such as you find in Special Collections, are bearers of a community's culture...and culture thrives on conversation
[11:15]  JJ Drinkwater: So when I say that here we get to cross-fertilize between library and museum techniqes, what I mean is....
[11:15]  JJ Drinkwater: ...we have what museums do, which is present artifacts and images....or surrogates for them at least....
[11:16]  JJ Drinkwater: ...and we have what libraries do, which is make reams of information about them available
[11:16]  JJ Drinkwater: And we do it in a way a RL museum can't, because you can dig down into the layers of information we present
[11:17]  JJ Drinkwater: So you can just stroll from poster to poster and look...
[11:17]  JJ Drinkwater: ...or you can click for a few notecards and read about what you're seeing....
[11:17]  JJ Drinkwater: ...or you can follow some of the links, and drill down to the full text of the works, or read essays about the authors, etc
[11:18]  JJ Drinkwater: A museum in RL would have trouble making all that info available, because the text would overwhelm the images
[11:19]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: nods,
[11:19]  JJ Drinkwater: So that's what I see.  I'll stop ranting up and let you ask questions!
[11:20]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Okay. Ihave to admit, I'm still at the point in this project where it feels like I'm standing in front a of a big steel wall hold ing all the materials I've gathered
[11:20]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: and on the other side is what the project will wventually look like.
[11:20]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: I'd hoped to get past that stage by today
[11:21]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: but I haven't so my questions might seem a little random.
[11:21]  JJ Drinkwater: That's fine :D
[11:22]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: One thing I was thinking about today was what are the differences between going to a ibrary in SL and going to a brick and mortar library
[11:22]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: and the first thing that came to my mind is that thee are no catalogs.
[11:22]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: No OPACs, no drawers of cards.
[11:23]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Do you have any plans to add a public catalog to the Caledon Library sytem.
[11:23]  JJ Drinkwater: Heh
[11:23]  JJ Drinkwater: We're working on a database, but, yes, currently no SL library has a catalog
[11:24]  JJ Drinkwater: I'm not sure I want to call it a catalog, but, yes, we're creating database of materials
[11:24]  JJ Drinkwater: It will be accessed through our website (and maybe Google-searchable, too)
[11:25]  JJ Drinkwater: 5 of us will be presenting on it at Internet Librarian, in California  this October
[11:25]  JJ Drinkwater: But, really, our collections are pretty small
[11:25]  JJ Drinkwater: Fewer than 10,000 items
[11:26]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: It's funny that ways isn't....almost like stepping back in time to the begining of public libraries.
[11:26]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: How few books there are in SL I mean
[11:26]  JJ Drinkwater: The kind of service we provide harks back to an earlier era, too...sort of
[11:27]  JJ Drinkwater: We don't hold reference hours, because people just IM us with questions
[11:27]  JJ Drinkwater: And everyone in the community knows who the librarian is
[11:28]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Do people come to you with reference questions often?
[11:28]  JJ Drinkwater: Not terribly often....most of the reference traffic that's "Directional" gets answered in the community chat
[11:29]  JJ Drinkwater: "Directionals" like "How to I take a chat transcript"   or "When I want to stretch a texture what do I do?"
[11:30]  JJ Drinkwater: Which are like the RL "Where's the bathroom?" and "how do I make a copy?"
[11:30]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Those two sound familar :)
[11:30]  JJ Drinkwater: Most of those, the community answers
[11:30]  JJ Drinkwater: So the ones we get are the research questions, or requests for materials
[11:32]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Are reference questions usually about the requestors' SL projects or are they sometimes about outside projects too?
[11:33]  JJ Drinkwater: Well....often the people I talk to have projects or interests that span both worlds, so I don't think I can make that neat distinction
[11:33]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Yeah, I thought of that, after I asked it.
[11:34]  JJ Drinkwater: If someone needs interview prep materials in Spanish, because they have an interview to talk to LL about becoming a translator...is that RL or SL?
[11:34]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: LIke if I asked for information about Victorian fashion it could just as easily be for my RL textile projects.
[11:34]  JJ Drinkwater: Exactly
[11:35]  JJ Drinkwater: People who are really interested in some topic here often have a a more pervasive interest in it
[11:36]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Do you get a lot of questions about things that people want to make or build in SL, like clothes or airships, especially since Caledon is a land of builders.
[11:38]  JJ Drinkwater: That, again, is often asked and answered in Caledon chat
[11:38]  JJ Drinkwater: Although sometimes people from outside the Caledon community come and ask about that kind of thing
[11:39]  JJ Drinkwater: Or people come looking for help finding certain kinds of images or textures, as source material
[11:39]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Yes, that was more what I wasd thinking of, especially images.
[11:40]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Not, so much building informations....I'd go to NCI for that.
[11:40]  JJ Drinkwater: Exactly. When people do ask, I send them to the Ivory Tower, NCI, Rockcliffe, etc
[11:41]  JJ Drinkwater: Unless it's a one-off question, in which case I can answer it myself
[11:41]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: This is how I tend to use the Caledon library as a patron :
[11:41]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: I go into one of the branches and browse around.
[11:42]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Maybe pick up one of the books I don't already have in my inventory.
[11:42]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: See whats new, what's posted around.
[11:42]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: And maybe, if the lag isn't bad and I like that atmosphere. I'll sit in one of the chairs and read for awhile.
[11:43]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: I also like to go to openings.
[11:43]  JJ Drinkwater: I think that's fairly typical
[11:43]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: It's kind of a cross between the new book section in my public library .
[11:44]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: and the Reading room and exhibit rooms at a nearby University's special collections library.
[11:44]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: So that is pretty typical. then?
[11:44]  JJ Drinkwater: As far as I know!
[11:45]  JJ Drinkwater: One of the problems with SL is...we can count who comes to the buildings....which we do...
[11:45]  JJ Drinkwater: (anonymously, our counter doesn't give us names)
[11:45]  JJ Drinkwater: but when someone takes a book, we don't really know what they do with it
[11:46]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Can you tell how long people stay?
[11:46]  JJ Drinkwater: And since our materials are free to copy, and have full "next owner" permissions, our stuff is spread all over, and we can't track what's happening with it...so we can't rreally esitimate usage
[11:46]  JJ Drinkwater: We've talked about that...we don't at present although I suppose a script could do it
[11:47]  JJ Drinkwater: We use a lot of qualitative measures
[11:47]  JJ Drinkwater: It's an interesting question for a digital environment!
[11:48]  JJ Drinkwater: All that stuff should be possible to see, but we're using SL in a way LL never envisioned, I'm pretty sure
[11:48]  JJ Drinkwater: Like, for instance, it ought to be possible for me to say "how many times have copies been made of this object I put together?"
[11:48]  JJ Drinkwater: I mean, the metadata is in the system somewhere
[11:49]  JJ Drinkwater: there's just no way for you and me to get at it
[11:49]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: That seems reasonable, yes,
[11:50]  JJ Drinkwater: LL missed some bets with tracking stuff
[11:50]  JJ Drinkwater: a world where librarians had been in on the design might be different
[11:50]  JJ Drinkwater: For instance, every object I own "knows" I own it
[11:51]  JJ Drinkwater: But can I query for "Where are all objects owned by me?"?
[11:51]  JJ Drinkwater: I can't!
[11:51]  JJ Drinkwater: So who knows where-all I've left my dance sets and things
[11:52]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Yeah, I've needed that feature a few times.
[11:52]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: I also think the search engine doesn't seem very well designed.
[11:53]  JJ Drinkwater: Well, we need to remember that SL is really a test balloon released to see if it would fly...but I do hope some other worlds like Wonderland will be more library-and-education friendly
[11:54]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Have you been to any of these?
[11:54]  JJ Drinkwater: I went to look around OpenLife....but no more
[11:55]  JJ Drinkwater: and I'm sort of keeping tabs on Wonderland, but it's moving very slowly
[11:56]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Although it would be nice to have a Virtual World that was designed with libraries and educational institutions in mind., isn't one of the nice things about SL the fact that it has a large residential population?
[11:56]  JJ Drinkwater: It is!
[11:57]  JJ Drinkwater: And a world designed by librarians would very likely not be as colourful or interesting
[11:57]  JJ Drinkwater: People do the most amzing design and social projects using SL as a platfrom
[11:59]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: I haven't hear of Wonderland before, who is running that project and what do they have planned?
[12:03]  JJ Drinkwater: It's meant to be a VW with better functionalities for education and business stuff...we'll see if it gets the same lively population
[12:04]  JJ Drinkwater: http://blogs.sun.com/wonderland/
[12:04]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: What are the current plans for the Caledon Library? Anything unusual or new in the works, besides an online catalog?
[12:05]  JJ Drinkwater: Heh
[12:05]  JJ Drinkwater: That's a huge project....we've been doing the preparatory inventory for almost a year now
[12:06]  JJ Drinkwater: So this is the culmination of a great deal of effort
[12:06]  JJ Drinkwater: After that, we'll see
[12:07]  JJ Drinkwater: One change is that I'll be less involved in setting the direction of the library...I'm going to let the rest of the staff take more of a hand in it
[12:10]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: You are a special collections libratian in RL, right?
[12:12]  JJ Drinkwater: Heh
[12:12]  JJ Drinkwater: That's my new job
[12:12]  JJ Drinkwater: But I never was before this
[12:13]  JJ Drinkwater: I've done a lot of things... Catalog and Metadata librarian, Digitial Projects, Indexing of scholarly materials, Reference, etc
[12:13]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: Do you feel like your experience in SL has affected your professional development or the direction your career has taken?
[12:13]  JJ Drinkwater: Oh yes!
[12:14]  JJ Drinkwater: Having SL as a place to learn and experiment was a crucial piece of getting me this new job, although they really never understood that part of my resume
[12:14]  JJ Drinkwater: But because I've been in a director's role here, and managed volunteers, and orchestrated an exhibit schedule, and run events...
[12:15]  JJ Drinkwater: ...my professional growth here has been huge
[12:16]  JJ Drinkwater: Also, because I was here near the beginning of the Info Island project, I've been part of this 3-year conversation about what a library is, exactly, in this new kind of environment
[12:16]  JJ Drinkwater: and that's allowed me to think deeply about what libraries are, and have been, and are (perhaps) becoming
[12:17]  JJ Drinkwater: So, you know, when I started in SL I was at my first job, right out of school
[12:17]  JJ Drinkwater: But now, I consider myself a librarian with some experience
[12:18]  JJ Drinkwater: Although not an expert in any aspect of the field, by any means
[12:20]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: I know this could be a whole 'nother conversation, but in you opinion what is the future of libraries in SL and other Virtual Worlds?
[12:21]  JJ Drinkwater: Heh
[12:21]  JJ Drinkwater: in a nutshell?
[12:21]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: yeah.
[12:21]  EppieBlack Wheatcliffe: The spectacular finish, right :)
[12:21]  JJ Drinkwater: Well, part of my answer is here.... http://www.thelibrarymilitant.net/from-the-directors-desk/2009/05/digital-publics-anytime-refere.html
[12:22]  JJ Drinkwater: So I'll let you read that later
[12:22]  JJ Drinkwater: I think the experiments we've made here show us that if people are going to be in virtual world, they want libraries there.....
[12:23]  JJ Drinkwater: So as VWs get more sophisticated and less clunky, I think libraries...as public service organizations, and community-building institutions...can have a big role to play

Gentlebeings, your servant

JJ Drinkwater