EBSW Wrap-up Discussion: Terminology

Catalogue vs. inventory: is a catalogue a special inventory?

Users of documents: Dual documents demonstrate multiple purposes. Audiences play into these registers?

Future entries: how do you list something in a catalogue that doesn’t exist yet? “Ghosts of catalogue futures”

omissions vs. expectations

collectives and the total archive

coming up with your own classificatory system isn’t a disaster, but perhaps a mode of thinking

time bound collections create meaning through that boundedness: the temporality is part; “hope is more beautiful because it is brief”

future proofing?

empires of constraint: social, familial, national, registers, lists(?)

lexicon, desiderata, stories? Are these the outputs?

universal particular: example of binary; info-data; static-circulation;

Pleasure and knowledge: “If there were an intellectual heaven, this would be that kind of space” “Knowing everything is its own kind of hell”    

Recent​​​​​​​re libraries! in institutions!

Personal collecting, libraries, registers, and catalogues versus institutions

“The Library (specifically Heritage Collections) is a laboratory for the arts and humanities”: Daryl Green, UoE, 2020.  This status allowed the entire Main Library building to be reopened during the pandemic, allowing a service for both Heritage and General Collections to be continued during the later stages of lockdown.

digital democracy, possible? Or horrible ways of excluding people?

watching “the physical Google”: teach people how to navigate archives

see how other people work: learning from that

Rights of ownership- Johns on registers, etc.

(aides memoire) 

Hartlib’s ephemerides: narrative, unstructured growth

embodied experience of libraries: mental channels for accessing physical space

WHY does library data become so much more formal? Volume? Who are the records for? Are they neutral and persuasive?

layers of meaning–objects across time and space: “we can see the objects relating to themselves [across space and time]”. this also allows us to relate to the human creators of the catalogues (when we encounter challenges). we realise these things are not so far removed from our human experience.  

forms of dialogue within registers and catalogues: people respond or not

moral responsibility to the creators of the items we use

using older catalogues to study older things: i.e. c17 Aristotle, why not use c17 catalogues? What is gained or lost by a modern catalogue?

A lot of comments on how knowledge is spatial and temporal. :-)  (catalogues manifest this by documenting space, but also by us engaging with them on physical levels in a specific space and time). Books also reveal the bridges/links between many fields of knowledge, even when unexpected. 

Cataloging and registers with circulation: how we become aware of infrastructural limitations

<tactical ruins!>

institutions that tactically choose NOT to support certain infrastructure. 

<calendars and almanacs as documents that are born to be reborn> 

bibliographical shrines vis a vis ruins

“We are something like the Manhattan project” everyone else: “Oh”

Discursive interruption and discursive eruption. 

Postmodern texts commenting on the early modern work and text

Phenomenology of the catalogue. 

What do I feel when experiencing the catalogue? 

“how do I know I’m looking at a catalogue?”

Cabinetry of curiosity: making and physical, order and space, and pleasure, and experience “what are the handles and drawers of a catalogue? What kinds of finishes do we put on it?”

textual churn: eating itself, looking for new terms, how to keep track

    

Do we have egress points? When do we know we’re done? How do we know when to leave?  “How can you tell when you’ve found what you needed?  Did you do the extra work to find all the right places?”

What worked then? DID IT WORK THEN??

sale catalogues, probate inventories, transfer of inventories, binding instructions, side letters in wills, lists of books for disposal to friends, booksellers’ catalogues: genres of inventories-catalogues

TER gaps vs. “open entries”: where the future goes

“ordering structure” umbrella term for notes, catalogues, registers?

formidible induction (MB will like this as a pun) vs. busking

“are we happy that there has been clarification?”

adversaria versus marginalia: term for writing against the text

florimental: extra little notes

florinalia: the notes in the margins of a flora

modelling hope so people can do real work, when real work is sidelined by headlines: catalogues and listing is FOR this. Making someone for the next century.

What is lost, what was not written down, why not, can we untangle that and why does it matter to untangle that in context of that specific source? 

what are the reasons for creations of ghosts? 

Reeling, writhing and ‘rithmetic.  

Binaries: universal/particular, structure/disorder, info/data, static/circulation, constraint/freedom, growth/decay (and several others) 

People, whether named or not, regimes of information control, social pressures and constraints, relationships […] Ecosystems, geographical, political, economic, 

Modelling hope. (value of work in a time where real work is being devalued and made meaningless)

An act of hope from one generation, to make something that a next generation can pick up and use. 

We’re not storing stuff for nameless posterity. 

Anachronisms. 

How the way in which you access materials influences the materials you have access to (what if you access an older document, using a more modern/digitised catalogue because the older catalogues are not always available). 

Tension between the local and the universal. 

Libraries and archives as power structures that are extensions/expressions of capital. 

Catalogue, conversation and circulation. 

Thinking about expertise. Find the person with relevant expertise and figure it out from there. 

Collections as time-bound, bound by systems that create meaning (in that space-time context) 

* essay ‘on intellectual craftmanship’ C Wright Mills

The ways in which scholarly communities organise their own resources. 

Fighting against the [C Wright Mills] ideology of individual achievement

What other forms of collective identity could we create? 

BACKLOG (cf ’too much to know’ and the historiography of information management)

relationship between piracy and exemplarity (JP will have to elaborate on this)

“probably technically” as a status modifier in archival processing

what is a backlog without a “log”?

archives are people (archivists, etc) – access, process, trust, expertise

If you see something of interest, stop and read it. 

Importance of indexes. 

The importance of rich cataloguing in creating indexing of features which people want to know about, but which have often traditionally been ignored - advertisements, provenance