Chapter 1 Immigrants being at home in libraries

The first two decades of the twentieth century were formative for the library services for immigrants being established in the New York Public Library. The library’s literacy and citizenship activities were the grounds for the social transformation by which immigrants would become denizens of New York. This essay interprets the material practices and discursive representations of that period in the library’s institutional records that conveyed sanctioned versions of material culture of books and reading aimed at immigrants and contrasting them to other narratives and moral explanations that exposed the frictions and thresholds by which bodies, books, affects, and senses shaped the library as a place for immigrants and their “lived” use of the library. The language evocative of dirt and pollution brought to books and reading in the immigrant neighborhoods transferred the materiality of the immigrants’ tenement dwellings to the library spaces and reveals a contiguity between the library home and the tenement home

Print culture in Croatia: the canon and the borderlands

This theoretical paper explores the theme of periphery and the borderlands and outlines the program for a new and transnational approach to the study of book culture in Croatia. Starting with a problem of fragmentation of Central European book histories, the essay argues how this could be turned into an opportunity to apply comprehensive and comparative approaches, using cultural area and comparing isomorphism of documentary practices rather than following the commonly used linguistic criteria (the national vernacular). European identity has been central to the Croatian construction of identity, and this can provide a broader framework for resolving the problem of how to construct a national history that acknowledges its status as boundary culture. If the European periphery is to claim its own cultural discourse, this will have to be through the controversial, ideological, and difficult task of cultural revision in which it will have to ex-territorialize itself and abandon a dream in which the national vernacular assumes a major function in language and society. This will not be possible without understanding the borderlands and an acceptance of its unique role in which dualities need to be accepted as an epistemology for boundary histories to assume significance within the dominant discourses of culture. In the dualities and multiplicities of the borderlands there arise counter-hegemonic interpretations, and the periphery can be validated by revealing the patterns of the center, connection to other traditions, and its own uniqueness at the same time. The thematic program for the study of Croatian print culture as boundary cultures is outlined as well

Digital library research and digital library practice : how do they inform each other? : an unpublished study

The study surveys two large sets of activities concentrating on digital libraries to examine the following questions: Does digital library research inform digital library practice? And vice versa? To what extent are they connected, now that nearly a decade has passed since they began? Examined were research projects supported by the first and second Digital Library Initiative (DLI), digital library projects listed by the Association for Research Libraries (ARL) and Digital Library Federation (DFL), and selected literature, focusing on the last five years. Methods concentrate only on examination of visible or “surface” sources or records, i.e. information that can be gathered from web sites, open literature, and published data. Limitations of the method are acknowledged; accordingly, caveats are made about conclusions. From this data we conclude that the two activities are not as yet demonstratively connected. A set of differing interpretations and conclusions are included

Mathematics for "Just Plain Folks": The Viennese Tradition of Visualization of Quantitative Information and its Verbal Forms, 1899-1914 (graphics accompanying presentation)

Related Work: Dalbello, M. 2002. Franz Josef's Time Machine: Images of Modernity in the Era of Mechanical Photoreproduction. Book History 5: 67-103. Dalbello, M., and A. Spoerri. 2006. Statistical Representations from Popular Texts for the Ordinary Citizen, 1889-1914. Library & Information Science Research 28 (1:2006): 83-109. Podcast of the talk available at: http://www.sir.arizona.edu/resources/podcasts/dalbello_20061011.mp3This handout accompanies a podcast of invited presentation given at the University of Arizona, School of Information Resources and Library Service Brown Bag History & Philosophy of Information Research Series (Tucson, AZ, October 11, 2006). The talk focused on visual statistics from the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. These popular forms of quantitative argumentation are examined from the point of view of the involvement of print industry in the shaping of and dissemination of public policy and the discourse of rational management and the modern state in the Habsburg empire on the eve of its dissolution. EXTENDED ABSTRACT: Statistical representations in the popular almanacs published at the end of the nineteenth century in the Habsburg Empire are an early prototype of visualizing statistical data for popular consumption and informing the public of an ethnically and linguistically differentiated society. These naturalistic and culturally rich visualizations enabled ordinary citizens to acquire knowledge â using simple visual reasoning skills, reliance on mental models and narrative conventions. The visualization of statistics is accompanied by verbalization, which presents a parallel mode of quantitative reasoning. These verbalizations exemplify the language of practical mathematics: the problem is generated in relation to the setting and located in everyday activities of the lived-in world of the implied viewers. The presentation will focus on these verbalizations of visual statistics, combining cognitive approach with historical and cultural interpretation to examine how rhetorical forms attached to practical mathematical reasoning can be related to cognition as socially situated activity. The connection of verbalizations to visual sense-making in these early statistical representations for popular consumption exemplify the construction of the concept of â informationâ in modernity and explore the effects on the visual regime represented by statistical information of older verbal forms of quantitative reasoning

Digital Cultural Heritage: Concepts, Projects, and Emerging Constructions of Heritage

This paper examines a heritage practice by which memory institutions extend their role as repositories to becoming participants in a broader discourse about heritage with the consuming public. This practice is considered by focusing on two periodsâ the first wave of digital library development, and a most recent trend characterized by engagement of online audiences through social networking platforms

Scholarly Editions, Historians' Archives and Digital Libraries: The Pragmatics and the Rhetoric of Digital Humanities Scholarship

This is a submission to the "Interrogating the social realities of information and communications systems pre-conference workshop, ASIST AM 2006." The development and current uses of digital libraries and digital environments supporting humanities scholarship will be analyzed through the agency of disciplinary communities that are primary users of these resources. The pioneering efforts of individual scholars and digital humanities initiatives are an integral part of the history of the first generation of digital libraries. Significant collections of primary source materials shaped by scholars themselves point to the social nature and disciplinary shaping of technological development, in which domain specialists have become technology innovators. The proposed paper will survey exemplary scholarly editing and archival projects of the first generation from the point of view of their developers. The paper will also present an analysis of the literature of the digital humanities field in relation to that development. Future trends of shaping collections of primary sources for user communities in the traditional disciplines will be discussed as well

Is There a Text in This Library? History of the Book and Digital Continuity

This essay argues for the importance of the study of production, distribution, and the cultural impact of texts for digital librarianship. An argument is made for integrating historical viewpoints in coursework that can prepare master's library and information science (MLIS) students for the curatorial aspects of digital librarianship. Several components of that approach are discussed in this essay. Their application in the classroom using a course on American bestsellers which involved collaborative teaching using the Internet as a case study, is presented as well. This paper reveals how book historians may find new roles as interpreters of the transformation of the library, from a logocentric library, which traditionally provides a fixed physical framework within which texts are accessible to users, to a soft library delivered on distributed servers - as a knowledge continuum. The emergence of new modes of textual transmission, the changing concept of the text, and the need to create new social spaces in which texts are collected and used can benefit from an awareness of the production, distribution, and use of text in traditional media environments