I can see clearly now

During this past week, I attended the annual meeting of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN). The organization came into existence just over a decade ago for the purpose of leveling the playing field with respect to providing access to scholarly journals for academic researchers and instructors across the country. The primary mechanism for attaining this goal was through negotiating subscription packages with journal vendors as a national consortium. Of course, since its inception, several key variables have changed. The economic well being of Canadian universities, large and small, is not what it once was. The percentage of journals available in electronic form rather than paper has increased dramatically, as has the actual number of available journals. Major vendors have acquired most of the small specialty publishers, thus creating super packages of journals that cover a broad spectrum of disciplinary output. The list goes on. Needless to say, a major assessment of the future value of CKRN needs to take place. However, this is not my immediate concern.

It is commonplace when attending conferences and meetings to acquire various promotional mementos such as tote bags, binders, key chains, and pens. These are usually accompanied by session handouts, tourist maps, discount coupons, and evaluation forms. This year, perhaps as a means of demonstrating fiscal constraint, CRKN decided to provide everyone with a simple name tag and a lens cleaning cloth. No great reams of paper or other clutter to take up room in your suitcase; just a lens cloth.

Here it is, in all its glory, being put to its most obvious of uses. Looking beyond the obvious, and reflecting a more tech-savvy worldview, a colleague pointed out that the cloth was perfect for cleaning the screen of a smartphone or tablet. It's not the usefulness of the object that bothers me. Rather, I'm disturbed by the deeper meaning it potentially conveys.

At the most mundane level, this small token of appreciation could be interpreted as a sympathetic acknowledgement that the vast majority of members attending the meeting had spent decades working as academic librarians, with all the attendant eye strain that such a vocation suggests. While this may amount to forgivable stereotyping, I read a bit more into it. Perhaps the staff of CKRN anticipated that members would be wondering if they were seeing things clearly, as the harsh realities of our current situation were presented to them in various charts, graphs, and lists.

Perhaps the cloth is a metaphor for CRKN itself. In order to see clearly through the great morass that is scholarly publishing, in order to give Canadian researchers and instructors any hope of competing with their international counterparts, in order to prevent the inevitable balkanization that will emerge as rogue institutions decide to fend for themselves, either because they think they can do a better job on their own or because they can no longer afford to do much at all, it is only CRKN that can provide the clear way forward.

To quote Shelley, way out of context: "Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!"

Libraries, Donations, and Collectors

I was recently flipping through the final volume of the New Colophon (1950), a sadly short-lived quarterly for book collectors, when I came across this image of a label in one of the articles.

The label had been designed by Elmer Adler, a Pynson Printer and the originator of the quarterly in 1930, for insertion into books donated to the libraries at the University of Michigan. The article by Randolph G. Adams, who, at the time, was the Director of the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, was entitled: "How Shall I Leave My Books to a Library?"
Like the majority of articles in the quarterly, this one is full of historical and literary tidbits, anecdotes, and asides, of great interest and amusement to bibliophiles and, of course, of no small interest to many librarians. One particularly entertaining quip that caught my attention, as we are in the midst of a major renovation at my library, states: "Librarians are, after all, people, and in recent years even the architects who design libraries have taken to consulting them."
The bulk of the article is devoted to an explication of six rules for potential book donors, the first of which is to select the proper library, whether public, private, academic, or what have you. Next is to select the appropriate librarian, here tellingly referred to as the curator - the one who will cherish and protect your books. Third is to consult a lawyer and "get your wishes translated into the cold language of the law."
The fourth rule, and the one that provides the context for the label pictured above, concerns the proper use and exploitation of donated works, with an emphasis on two points - adding new works, and eliminating duplicate holdings. Regarding the latter, Adams suggests that any potential curator must possess adequate "knowledge of provenance, binding, and association." However, the cautionary label suggests that this is not always the case, and the label was deliberately inserted in books not only to give librarians pause but to give potential donors a sense of comfort. Risk always abounds and as Adams observes: "There is no protection in a rare book library against disloyalty or stupidity on the part of the staff."
Coverage of the final two rules is woven into the discussion of the other four, emphasizing the timeliness of donating (don't leave the handling of such a delicate and weighty matter to the executors of your estate), and the importance of providing an adequate monetary gift to facilitate "the intelligent arrangement, handling and administration of your collection," even to the extent of "endowing your curator."

Gray Literature Curiosity

Along with books and serials, libraries often have substantial collections of print materials referred to as gray literature; that is, items such as brochures, pamphlets, and reports, which are not assigned an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) or International Standard Serial Number (ISSN). Here is a curious example from the library at Cape Breton University.

Yes, this is a hockey card. Why would a hockey card be kept in an academic library collection? Well, I can think of a couple of possible reasons. The player might be a former student, he might have been born and raised in the local area, or perhaps he donated money to the university for an athletic scholarship. In this case, however, there is no discernible link between the player and the university, or with the broader community.
No one can remember, or at least no one is willing to admit that they remember, how the card made its way into the collection. The best guess is that it was in a box along with other materials to be entered into the database, and a summer student assigned to the data entry task just added it without questioning why.
Even more curious, however, at least to those interested in the way that information is classified, is the number assigned to this item. One of the simplest ways to make gray literature accessible is to assign sequential whole numbers to items, and then use these numbers as a means of locating these items in a searchable database and on the shelf. The fact that the number assigned to this item contains a decimal point and a number after the decimal point would generally indicate that the item was somehow related to the item with the base whole number. However, when we look to see what item 4662 is, we find that it is a consulting engineers report on the water supply to the Point Edward industrial park, in no way related to the player, or to hockey. The number also seems to suggest that there is another related item with the number 4662.1, otherwise why would this card not have that number?
All of this remains a mystery, and the only reason it came to light at all is that the card fell on the floor when we were doing some re-shelving of the collection.