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Library to Digital Disneyland?

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This morning I was putting the finishing touches on my anatomy illustration essay — adding high quality digital images from the Wellcome Collection and the National Library of Medicine to demonstrate many of the points I’d made in writing.  During my research I’d used these online galleries to scope out primary sources before tackling the originals, and I was grateful that they were available for research and that the images could be downloaded to add visual impact to my completed text.

Adding images to a Word document can be a bit tedious, though, so when I finished I took a quick break to scan the news online, including Stuff, the web portal of New Zealand’s Dominion Post.  Between 2006 and 2007 I lived in Wellington on a working holiday visa, and I was dismayed to see the headline ‘From Library to Digital Disneyland‘ alongside a picture of the National Library.  The beauty and mystery of the internet: in just a few seconds I had moved from the productive, academic use of a digital library to an op-ed piece attacking a digital initiative.

The article is by Jim Traue, a former chief librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library, a specialized collection within the National Library.  The piece is in reaction to planned changes to the library, particularly a new emphasis on digitization and access to digital materials for visitors on the ground floor.  But rather than a thoughtful critique of the plan’s details, or suggestions for changes and improvements, Traue has written a reactionary spiel.  He seems to be trapped in an antiquated mindset that sees digital technology as a threat and national librarians as the guardians of cold, inaccessible buildings housing materials for the use of specialists.

One of Traue’s arguments is that it is too costly for  libraries to work directly with digital technologies:

The division of costs between the research library and the researchers and publishers is being eroded. Traditionally, the research library gathered and preserved the original documents, and the staff organised them for use by researchers, courtesy of the taxpayer.

It was up to the researchers to invest their time to convert the raw materials in the library into finished products, and for the publishers to find the money to publish and distribute them.

Now the National Library is becoming a major publisher, at an increasing cost to the taxpayer, and staff will find themselves more and more involved in the time-consuming work required to get material prepared for digital publication.

Traue seems to think that that digital imaging should be a side agenda for national libraries, rather than a driving mandate.  He needs to catch up with modernity.

Major libraries around the world are embracing digital technology.  And these libraries are joining together for mutual support and the expansion of access, as we have seen with recent programs such as Europeana and the World Digital Library.  There are important challenges associated with digitization (such as cost, access to technology and talent, and managing digital preservation) but there are also many reasons to embrace this movement.  Digital materials dramatically increase the number of people who have access to documents without the damage that accrues through handling.  They offer sophisticated new methods for approaching material, such as software assisted text and image analysis and advanced search capabilities.  Accurate digital copies can be made and circulated amongst scholars in the blink of an eye, and connections may be discerned between isolated documents that an individual researcher would never have seen side-by-side in the past.  From a preservation standpoint, high quality images can be compared to judge an item’s rate of decay and to determine if it needs conservation work, and what type.  Digital copies of rare material mean that, should the unthinkable happen, there will still be a valuable record of lost, damaged, or destroyed items.  Today, digital librarianship is not the ‘cherry on top’ that an institution can choose to explore if it has some extra cash.  It is part of the main course alongside traditional library and archival methods.  It is to the credit of the leaders at the National Library that they are not letting New Zealand fall behind the rest of the world.  (As to the ridiculous notion that it should be for-profit publishers managing the dissemination of cultural materials, I would refer you to the on-going Google Book Search controversy.)

Traue’s dismissive and uninformed attitude toward digital librarianship is annoying, but not unexpected at a time of rapid technological change.  The truly troubling part of the piece comes with his blatant derision of the public.  You can practically see the sneer on his face when he states:

Chris Szekely, the Turnbull’s chief librarian (who also holds the new position of deputy national librarian), is assuring the public that the building makeover, mass digitisation and the restructuring of the Turnbull’s services will improve access and services for researchers.

Yeah, right. Instead of the Turnbull’s staff concentrating on building and organising comprehensive collections to provide total immersion for researchers creating new publications, their time and expertise will be diverted into preparing material for digitisation in order to feed the visitors clamouring for entertainment on the ground floor Disneyland.

Traue seems to have forgotten that a national library is the repository for a shared public heritage.  Even though it is not a lending library it still has a mandate to provide, even encourage, public access, and not just for intellectuals.  In the past this was understandably difficult because the main goal is always preservation, which conflicts with access.  But technology has dramatically expanded our ability to share cultural objects.  This has worked with resounding success at the British Library, which has a public lobby and galleries complete with touch-screen monitors for the Turning the Pages initiative, allowing anyone to interact with digital facsimiles of important and beautiful books.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked through the lobby of the British Library and seen someone blissfully examining the Diamond Sutra or the Lindisfarne Gospels.  Other libraries, including the US Library of Congress, have similar programs.  It sounds like this is the model for the changes in New Zealand, and I find it difficult to comprehend how this would be ‘Disneyfying’ the library.  Surely anyone visiting a library in the first place would be seeking education and enlightenment, rather than mindless entertainment as Traue seems to imply.

Instead of insulting the general public, it might be useful to consider what these visitors could do for the library, and the important connections that could be forged between the public and the institution.  A visitor who is able to interact with the materials in the library, who has a pleasant and educational experience, makes a real connection, and comes away with an understanding of the institution’s purpose is much more likely to support library initiatives and government funding.  That is not to say that the public face should be put ahead of other missions such as collection, preservation, and research just for an increase in visitors and funding.  But Traue has offered no hard evidence that the plan will negatively affect other library goals.

I’m not privy to what’s happening at the National Library of New Zealand.  There could be legitimate concerns about the way that change is being introduced or how money is being spent.  But you wouldn’t know that from this piece, which has little to say of substance.  Reactionary diatribes, like futurist theories of digital utopias, should not be given the spotlight.  National institutions, government, and the media need to engage in thoughtful dialogues about how technology is incorporated into the missions of libraries.  And rather than avoiding change, libraries must approach the future positively and explore new ways of interacting with the people they serve, whether they have PhDs or not.

History of the Birds of New Zealand Part II

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I wrote recently about discovering naturalist Walter Buller and his lovely History of the Birds of New Zealand. To find out more, I made an interlibrary loan request for his biography, Walter Buller, the Reluctant Conservationist by Ross Galbreath, and it finally arrived two weeks ago from the Library of Congress. This was really exciting in and of itself because I’ve never borrowed from the LOC before. The downside is that you have to use their books within the library, so I spent a couple of weeks worth of lunch hours reading it.

It was definitely worth it. Galbreath does a great job telling Buller’s life story and setting it within the social, political and scientific contexts of the time. In fact, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in general New Zealand history. It contains a wealth of information about European colonization, including relationships between settlers and Maori, the shady land deals that occurred on a huge scale, and the settlers’ shifting attitudes toward land, nature and the colonial relationship with Britain. The only thing to be aware of is that the author presupposes a familiarity with New Zealand history, including Maori words and cultural concepts that are not well known outside the country.

Best of all for the book historian, Galbreath includes lots of information on the production and distribution of Buller’s books, including a nice explanation of the differences in lithography (used in the first edition) and chromolithography (used in the second edition,) as well as a series of images showing the working process of the artist J. G. Keulemans.

You can see in the following photo some of the differences between the editions, with the more delicate and vibrant hand-colored lithograph at the top and the olive-toned (because of the type ink used in the process) chromolithograph at the bottom.

Takahe Lithography

  • (Apologies to the Library of Congress for posting this photo I took. If it needs to be taken down that’s fine.)

    • As for Buller himself, I was completely unprepared for what I found in the biography. I’d read Audubon’s diaries, so I thought I was inured to mindless slaughter in the name of science, but Buller’s sheer effrontery really blew me away. Part of it was due to the time period. Many Europeans justified the destruction of native species as “survival of the fittest,” the fittest being the introduced species and the Europeans themselves. It is clear that Buller held this view his entire life. He wrote repeatedly that New Zealand birds had no hope of survival, and rather than instituting what he saw as useless protective measures, the only logical step was to take as many specimens as possible before they were all extinct.

    At the end of the 19th century, however, sentiments changed. Activists in Britain and the colonies began to see native flora and fauna as deserving of protection. This became a moral issue, with New Zealand one of the first countries to incorporate the word conservation into the vernacular.

    Buller, always keen to impress the European elite, publicly paid lip service to this ideal while continuing to take rare specimens for himself and as gifts for prominent British scientists and aristocrats, often sending multiples of the same species to one person. Even after hunting bans were imposed he continued to take specimens. When an island nature preserve was proposed he offered to organize an expedition to capture live Huia on the mainland and transfer them to the island. Instead, he sent the birds to a collector in Britain and told the government that the trip had been fruitless. At this time he wrote publicly of his sadness at the loss of native species, but in private continued to argue that the birds were doomed anyway.

    Galbreath argues that, ironically, it was Buller’s own books that helped change the perception of New Zealand wildlife. The beautiful and widely popular illustrations contributed toward the new perception that the country’s flora and fauna were unique and special, and should be considered a source of national pride rather than something to be replaced by European species. New Zealanders whose conservation ideals had been, in part, shaped by Buller’s work now derided his endless quest for specimens and lukewarm support of preservation schemes.

    Buller’s legacy is mixed. Luckily, it was his views of conservation that passed into history, while his book A History of the Birds of New Zealand retains its status as a work of natural history and art. Its approachable text and iconic illustrations helped to shape a culture of preservation that is still an important aspect of New Zealand society.  I’d definitely recommend both the History of the Birds of New Zealand and Ross Galbreath’s excellent biography to anyone with an interest in natural history and the conservation movement.

    History of the Birds of New Zealand

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    A few weeks ago I was browsing around the website of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre when I came across some really interesting bird illustrations. I really like this one titled “The Biter Bit (an incident of bird life in New Zealand).”

    The Biter Bit

    The illustrations, by J. G. Keulemans, are from the second edition of A History of the Birds of New Zealand by Walter Buller, 1888. They’re all available at the NZETC along with the full text of the book.

    I checked at our local college library and was surprised to find that they had a lovely edition from 1967, edited, annotated and renamed Buller’s Birds of New Zealand, with an introduction by E. G. Turbott that discusses Buller’s life and work. (All quotes in this post are from this copy.)

    I was also advised by Alison Stevenson, director of the NZETC, to read Walter Buller: The Reluctant Conservationist, by Ross Galbreath (1989), but have had trouble locating a copy. The cheapest available online would have to be shipped from New Zealand; copies in the US are going for $60 to $200. I made an inter-library loan request, but it might take a while before I have the book in my hands, as the closest copy is in Chicago.

    I’m looking forward to it arriving, though, because from what I’ve read Buller sounds like a really interesting character. He was one of the first to compile serious field information on New Zealand bird populations and habitats, and his work was widely praised by the European scientific community. The most important aspect of his research is that it occurred at a time when European colonization was first beginning to impact the avifauna of the islands. Buller carefully documented these ecological changes and related them in prose that was entertaining and equally accessible to amateurs and professionals. A good example is his discussion of the introduction of the rat, from the chapter on the Bellbird:

    The cause of the rapid disappearance in New Zealand of some species of birds, and absolute extinction of others, is a very interesting question… As the result of long observation, I have come to the conclusion that, apart from the effects produced by a gradual change in the physical conditions of the country, the chief agent in this rapid destruction of certain species of native birds is the introduced rat. This cosmopolitan pest swarms through every part of the country, and nothing escapes its voracity. It is very abundant in all our woods, and the wonder rather is that any of our insessorial birds are able to rear their broods in safety. Species that nest in hollow trees, or in other situations accessible to the ravages of this little thief, are found to be decreasing, while other species whose nests are, as a rule, more favourably placed, continue to exist in undiminished numbers.

    Not all of Buller’s assertions have been borne out by further research, but as of 1967 the work still retained “its place as one of the essential works of reference on the bird fauna of New Zealand.”

    Buller, born 1838, became interested in ornithology as a young man living in Wellington, where he met the naturalist William Swainson. By the mid 1860s he was writing well-received essays on ornithology, and the first edition of his History of the Birds of New Zealand was published in installments beginning in 1872, in a total of 500 copies. Each copy contained 35 hand-colored lithographs by J. G. Keulemans. “Reviews commending the new work began to appear immediately after the publication of the first part. In the newspapers of the day and the leading scientific periodicals the work was acclaimed as a notable contribution to science…”

    Buller continued to compile information and began work on a second edition of the History which would be of a larger size than the first and include expanded text and new color plates by Keulemans. “Reviews of the time show that the work was received most enthusiastically, and before the book had been issued finally in bound form (1888) subscribers had ordered the entire edition of 1000 copies.”

    One of the major differences in the two editions was in the quality of the lithographs.

    It may be of interest to add that the first edition plates, in addition to being fewer than those of the second edition which are reproduced here, [here being the 1967 edition] differ from those of the second in both style and treatment. Keulemans’s work in the first edition was characterized by delicate lines and often exquisite colouring, the hand colouring accentuating the more vivid portions of soft parts and plumage. Connoisseurs of bird illustration who have not already done so would do well to familiarize themselves with the first edition plates.

    Buller’s final work was his Supplement of 1905 which contained accumulated species information and, most interestingly, an

    exposition of his views on Darwinsim (more especially as illustrated by the New Zealand bird fauna) and comments on bird and forest protection (his enlightened views on the need for forest protection were well in advance of his day.)

    From the little I’ve read, Buller’s view on conservation seem to have been complex. Like Audubon and other naturalists of the 19th century he was a hunter and specimen collector. He wrote of this extensively and the 1967 edition of Buller’s Birds actually edits or entirely omits some passages that “would be sure to offend current tastes.” Buller didn’t just shoot birds; he would take them alive when possible and study their behavior in his home. His casual description of the captivity and death of a Little Blue Penguin really did offend my modern, tree-hugging sensibilities (and was edited out of the copy I got from the library). Unfortunately, Buller’s Birds doesn’t include an in-depth discussion of his views on conservation, so it looks like I’ll have to wait until I can read the biography I’ve ordered.

    In the meantime I’ll continue reading through the text of Buller’s Birds and enjoying the illustrations of some of my favorite species. All those below courtesy of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre:

    • Chick of the North Island Brown Kiwi

    North Island Brown Kiwi Chick

    Takahe

    • Huia male (front) and female (rear) – now extinct. Plant: Titoki.

    Huia

    • Tui young (left) and adult (right). Plant: Kowhai.

    Tui