Capturing 19th century China
The 19th century Scottish photographer John Thomson was one of the first to explore China and South East Asia in the 1860s. He travelled extensively across China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Cambodia, documenting the people and places, both exotic and mundane.
His photographs, to modern eyes, have a dreamlike quality and show a world so far away. Here are some of my favourites:
The Wellcome Library in London now holds some 700 of Thomson’s original glass negatives in its collection, which have recently been lent to the Beijing World Art Museum for a major exhibition entitled China Through The Lens of John Thomson, 1868-1872. I hope that the exhibition, when through touring China, will make its way to the UK.
For more images, check the BBC’s feature on Thomson and the 10 Chancery Lane Gallery.
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Wednesday’s CILIP open council session on web 2.0 generated a storm of interest in the Twittersphere and I’m impressed that a discussion primarily amongst UK information professionals about the role of CILIP and its use (or non-use) of Twitter could “trend”, overtaking Wolverine and swine flu at the height of its activity!
I was able to attend the actual meeting In Real Life, as well as following and contributing via Twitter, and it struck me that the physical session was more a means to start the online discussion. It certainly seemed that the Twitterers were having a more interesting conversation than the people in the meeting room at times.
I enjoyed the insightful presentations given by Phil Bradley and Brian Kelly but couldn’t quite understand why CILIP was asking the question on how its council could, or should, be using web 2.0 technologies. Maybe that’s because, like many librarians out there, I’m just doing it and seeing what works for me, for what task – play, experimentation, learning through failure and learning through doing are all ways of approaching the new that perhaps the younger generation are more comfortable with.
Today we participate in shaping our profession online, through conversation and sharing, and not through official committees and councils. CILIP, as an organisation, needs to take care that it is not left out of the conversation, that it works to make itself worth including and, as Phil pointed out, that it goes to where the conversation is happening.
For me, web 2.0 is all about putting people in touch with each other, making connections, and all this #cilip2 activity certainly has done that. I am now much more interested in getting involved with CILIP and feel like it can be done from my desktop (fingers crossed).
See Brian Kelly and Tom Roper’s blogs for good summaries of the events.
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The 1947 librarian
I came across this US careers guidance film entitled The Librarian thanks to the knitting librarians on Ravelry. Though it is from 1947, much of what it says about librarianship still holds true, especially about the ability to work with people being a prerequisite for a good librarian and about the importance of solid cataloguing and classification.
Obviously it’s also pretty amusing to see all the masses of card catalogue records and the old skool stuff. Plus the bad acting! It makes me wonder whether the participants were real librarians.
The film is part of the Prelinger Archives collection of advertising, educational, industrial and amateur films now owned by the Library of Congress. I’ve always been a big fan of the archives and love its attitude towards the sharing and remixing of these amazing works – it’s all free, online and in the public domain. Hooray!
Note: I embedded the version on YouTube since the Prelinger one didn’t seem to do it properly.
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Soap on a rope
So apparently downloading music illegally is the same as taking home those little soaps from a hotel room. That’s according to David Lammy, the MP in charge of intellectual property, as reported in today’s Guardian.
While I am a fan of illegal filesharing, I’m not sure if the soap analogy really holds up since it implies that the files are all there for the taking. What it fails to take into account is the sharing part – the fact that people, fans, have to take the trouble to get hold of the music in the first place, then rip it and share it (either actively or passively) using special sites or software. Most people in the filesharing community take a dim view of leechers, those people who download things but have none to share with others – honour among thieves and all that. I particularly admire those industrious folk who rip impossible-to-find and impossible-to-buy vinyl, carefully scanning in record sleeves and liner notes, making free what was once consigned to the dustbin of music history for no gain and very little glory.
Is filesharing hurting the music industry? I would say a definite “no”. Music industry practices are hurting the music industry. Filesharing is empowering music fans. It’s all about community and sharing a love of music, or film or gaming or whatever, and without those who subscribe to such values there would be no such thing as filesharing. And without filesharing, my world would be a great deal smaller and much less vibrant.
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Exploring the World’s Knowledge
On Monday I went to a workshop at the British Library, normally aimed at schoolchildren and students, called Explore the World’s Knowledge.
Initially I was surprised that the library ran any events for children but apparently a whole variety of regular workshops and visits are on offer and they’re rather popular. Of course, as a national institution, in the literal sense, the British Library obviously does have a responsibility to reach out to and serve all members of the community, not just academic researchers, but I’d wager that most people would have been surprised too.
The workshop was run by a lively and extremely capable young woman whose name could have been Geffen but probably spelled differently. The workshops are all delivered by creative practitioners, non-BL staff, who are contracted specially to create and run the workshops; this definitely gave ours a much more playful and philosophical air than the solid information literacy class that I had imagined.
Getting the preamble and the doling out of worksheets, pencils and clipboards out of the way, we went upstairs to sit on the floor in some open space by the Reader Registration room. We each selected a box from her plastic bag of bits and bobs to look at and, as a group, talked about the nature of boxes and the kinds of associations we make about objects. Geffen strongly believes in the power of handling objects to encourage discussion, response and thought and had many artefacts up her creative sleeve.
She brought out a huge banjo-shaped case and challenged us to guess what was inside. Musical instrument? Banana? A snake? A key? Some fabric? We went down to the special collections display on the library’s ground floor and she revealed the case to be a kind of modern art cabinet of curiosities. Each item, beautiful and evocative in its own right, fit exactly into its own little place inside the banjo-shaped case: a wood-covered portable DVD player, a skinned rabbit robot that played a Beatles song and danced, a leather sign, an old hole punch, a bottle with a propeller attached, a square of silk, a fossilised potato. And there were many other things besides that I didn’t get to see.
As in the exercise with the boxes, we each chose an object (coincidentally, mine is the one in the picture above) and jotted down some thoughts about it, what it looked like and where it pointed you. Then we were told to use our object as a compass and let it guide us to one thing on display and to describe the connection. In five minutes.
Geffen compared our little treasure hunt to research – the panic, the freedom to explore and the feeling that you have to leave without seeing everything. Personally, I found the experience inspiring when couched in those terms; it was thrilling to be able to make my own connections between things and to engage my own knowledge and intuition instead of plodding down the same prescribed paths as everyone else.
Perhaps this workshop wouldn’t help a class hit any exam targets but it might make the participants reassess the objects around them and bring their own thoughts and experiences to the treasures of the British Library. I definitely left having explored a tiny bit of the world’s knowledge.
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Lazy, lazy
So what have I been doing for the past five months? I quit my job; I enrolled on the MA Library and Information Studies course at UCL (one term down, two to go); the band appeared on a Brazilian jeans compilation CD; I learnt how to make a really good risotto.
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The long fail
It seems that the long tail, the concept of selling less of more, is not going to be the saviour of business profits after all. Anita Elberse writes in this month’s Harvard Business Review that:
success is concentrated in ever fewer best-selling titles at the head of the distribution curve. From 2000 to 2005 the number of titles in the top 10% of weekly sales dropped by more than 50%—an increase in concentration that is common in winner-take-all markets. The importance of individual best sellers is not diminishing over time. It is growing …Although no one disputes the lengthening of the tail (clearly, more obscure products are being made available for purchase every day), the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow. It is therefore highly disputable that much money can be made in the tail. In sales of both videos and recorded music—in many ways the perfect products to test the long-tail theory—we see that hits are and probably will remain dominant. That is the reality that should inform retailers as they struggle to offer their customers a satisfying assortment cost-efficiently. And it’s the unavoidable challenge to producers. The companies that will prosper are the ones most capable of capitalizing on individual best sellers.
Now, I’m a big fan of the long tail theory because it appeals the shopper in me who prefers the obscure and niche to the ubiquitous bestsellers; companies like Amazon and Lovefilm can always win my custom by stocking the stuff that high street retailers do not. But perhaps in a world of increasing choice, and increasing ease of access to this choice via the internet, people are bewildered. How many times have I gone into a record shop only to have my mind go completely blank in the Music I Like category and just ended up browsing the displays? When there is too much choice presented to people, they seek recommendations – from the media, advertising, friends, charts, lists, anywhere.
So it isn’t that surprising that the blockbusters still turn the biggest profits really. After all, how can even one million Ian Svenoniuses (Svenonii?) beat the presence, the push behind, a single Alexander McCall Smith? And let’s not even go into the pricing of blockbusters.
Edit: There’s some thoughtful discussion about Elberse’s article from Chris Anderson and others on the HBR blog, with some very good points being made. I still believe that retailers should try to exploit the long tail, that it can be profitable but, at the end of the day, people are just a bunch of idiots.
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Never Forever
Informationoverlord points us today towards an interesting article, Never Forever: Why Extending the Term of Protection for Sound Recordings is a Bad Idea, in European Intellectual Property Review.
The authors [of the article] conclude by commenting on the usual rally call – made by the likes of Sir Cliff Richard – that the protection needs to be extended to allow poor musicians to continue to receive sound production royalties for longer to keep them off the poverty line. As they have already established that most recordings have no commercial value after 50 years, the number of performers this would actually benefit is questionable. The authors have a better idea. “If the legislator would want to improve the situation for all performers, the more sensible and effective thing to do would be to scrutinise the contractual terms between performers and music publishers and phonogram producers rather than extend the term of protection of sound recordings for the benefit of only a few”.
And I am in complete agreement about that suggestion!
As a side note, my band has just signed a contract for putting one of our songs on a Japanese compilation release and I can absolutely guarantee that that recording will have no commercial value in 50 years’ time. We’re getting 10 yen per CD sold – that’s five British pence – and not to be sniffed at when you think how little the artists on big commercial labels get per unit. David Byrne’s Wired article from last year, Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars, is illuminating. Let’s just hope the Japanese royalty cheques don’t give me carpal tunnel syndrome.
The EIPR journal is not available online but you should be able to track it down at a decent academic library I’d imagine.
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The Corpse Walker
One of the most beautiful and sad things I have read in a long while, an excerpt from Liao Yiwu’s interview with a mortician in mainland China:
Beauty doesn’t last. It’s bound to be destroyed. So many kind, good-looking people die each day. I work on their bodies, hoping to temporarily preserve and enhance their beauty before they are gone forever. I don’t want to lose anyone anymore. The scariest part of life is not death but the loss that comes with death. My former boss died at the beginning of this year. He was not even seventy. I did the makeup for him. This guy had one hobby when he was alive. He collected wedding invitations when he was young, and when he turned fifty, he began to collect obituaries. His whole room was filled with his collections. He used to say that all obituaries sounded the same and that we Chinese people lack imagination in the use of language. He wanted his own obituary to be unique, so he began to compose it when he was still alive. He printed hundreds of copies and stored them in a drawer with his bank statements and his will. After he died, his friends showed one to Old Wang, the new Party secretary at the funeral home. Old Wang, who was going to preside over the memorial service, read it aloud to several people during rehearsal. Nobody could understand what the obituary was about. It was so archaic, it sounded like haiku. I didn’t know half of the characters. It was handwritten. He must have read it hundreds of times before he died, hoping those would be the last words he left for the world. But the new Party secretary didn’t think the obituary reflected the revolutionary spirit of the new era. So he composed a new one filled with modern political jargon, in a style that our past director had despised. Oh well, what can you do? This is China. You don’t have much control when you are alive. When you die, you won’t have control over your obituary either.
Raul Gutierrez’s Heading East blog drew my attention to this book last month and I promptly added it to my wishlist. I thought I’d share it.
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The law of the good neighbour
From January’s issue of The Believer, an article on German art historian Aby Warburg – his enormous personal library sounds particularly intriguing:
Dedicated to the broad field of what the German call Kulturwissenschaft, the humanities and social sciences, the library’s most striking feature was its principle of organization. Works were not classified by subject, author, title, or even date of acquisition, but instead by what Warburg called “the law of the good neighbor”. Though grouped under such general rubrics as Anthropology or Art History, both the various sections and the books within them were arranged as a function of their ability to engage with the books on either side of them. A line of speculation opened in one volume was attested to or attacked, continued or contradicted, refined or refuted in its neighbor. The constantly changing collection became a labyrinth where Warburg was Daedalus, Ariadne, and Minotaur all at once. Upon first visiting the library in the 1920s, the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, one of the most erudite men of the day, declared that he saw only two options: to leave immediately or to stay for ten years. A systematic man, Cassirer did the one, and then returned to do the other.
Visiting Warburg’s library must have been like going inside his brain! His system is both frightening and wonderful – it expresses what books are, at their core, all about: ideas. Ideas engaging with each other; communication; knowledge as something fluid, not something solid and accumulative. This very much goes back to what David Bade was saying about responsible librarianship I think.
I’m tempted to implement this law of the good neighbour on LibraryThing or something – it’d certainly be a fun little experiment. I can also see it as being a neat system for students to note and share academic reading. Unfortunately, my own personal collection of paperbacks and miscellaneous book-shaped odds and ends are, at the moment, classified, like in the Bodleian book depository, mainly by size.
Filed under: books, classification, libraries, people | 1 Comment
