a little project

On Monday I installed a guerrilla-style zine display in the fifth floor information cubbies. These cubbies are currently unused, and I took them over with a zine I made about my grandfather.

My grandfather, Norman Alexander, was an Associate Librarian at PSU from 1962 to 1966. He didn't actually work in the Millar Library, as it was built in 1966, but from what I can tell from his papers, he had a lot to do in the planning of the new building and its features.

He often made speeches, and liked to insert jokes occasionally to keep people interested. This weekend I spent time at my aunt's house sifting through some of his papers, and discovered a pile of notes he'd typed on the backs of discarded card catalog cards. The zine is a collection of these, with a picture of him, pensive, on the front.

Putting them in the library in a way serves to reinstall his presence in an institution in which he was very active decades ago. I'm excited for the personal ties I have to this library to encourage me to invest more of myself in the projects I'll undertake.

fly er

last night i made a poster for an event that is coming up at the library.at our meeting yesterday with the librarian she mentioned needing help with a certain (boring-sounding) aspect of an upcoming Sierra Leone exhibition and after we declined, i decided to help in a way she didn't even realize she needed: a poster!

meeting with kim

today we met with kim st. claire.
it was an interesting experience. there was very little discussion, which i wasn't happy about. there was also a concession on our part, as she was most interested in one of the ideas we were less enthusiastic about. oh well! we'll pour our hearts into it nonetheless, and i think there's a lot of potential in the space they're going to give us.

today i met three people in the library

Leif works at the circulation desk. I went to him to ask about the University Archives, which is where I was hoping to end up in a lengthy discussion with the eccentric archival librarian I had invented in my head. No such luck. He did give me loads of information, most interestingly that the library is divided up into smaller departments within itself. This makes sense now that I think about it. I might think about narrowing my focus to a particular department. He told me about Library East, a small room at the end of a "long, dark stairway" in Smith, where they write code and make records for all the books in the library. Then we discussed the merits of the Library of Congress System over the Dewey Decimal System, which kind of broke my heart a little.

I met Don next, after Leif sent me upstairs to the reference desk to find out more about the university archives. Don is an old man who wouldn't tell me his name without an explanation, and then only his first name. I discovered his last name after reading his email over his shoulder while he looked for an email address for me. Don was both confused and amused by me, and he tried to discourage my interest in the archive room. ("It's just a bunch of old documents. I don't really understand what you're looking for.") He is the Library Liason for the University Honors department and the Government Documents Librarian. He did not volunteer this information, his colleague Heather did. (whom we will meet in a moment.) He studied at Harvard in the 1990's, and is a self-proclaimed "baseball scholar." Don seemed troubled that I was an art major, and asked me what I planned to do with my degree. I told him Graphic Design, which seemed to calm him. He asked if I was almost graduated and I laughed, which made him laugh.
Heather overheard Don and I talking about the archival librarian and wandered over to get in on the conversation. Heather is the Library Liason for the English Department and University Studies, though I think it's an interim position. She said she's filling in for someone on sabbatical. Heather has a masters in Library Science, which she was sure to tell me about. The people at the circulation desk hold service positions, while the reference desk staff are ACTUAL librarians with degrees and things.

My meeting these three people was facilitated by my search for a way into the University Archives room on the fifth floor. They all pointed me in the direction of one Cathy Alzner, the interim archivalist ("NOT a librarian, there's a difference.") Things I have learned today about Cathy Alzner:

– while she never checks her voicemail, she can be reached by email.
- she is a professor at PCC
- she is a baseball fan and sometimes shares memories of stadium visits with Don


i also found the card catalog. whoa.

making little bits of progress

blurting

so today laura and i went to the library and after asking at the circulation desk where kim wilson-st.clair's office was, we were pointed to the woman who had been in line ahead of us, rushing out the door. we called after her and she graciously turned around to stop and talk to us. i incorrectly assumed she had received my email and quickly spit out, "i'm the one who emailed you! about the artist residency thing?" hardly smooth, and hardly the way we've been discussing approaching people. she was kind, though, and we set up plans to set up plans.

i feel like i've had it easy so far (having an enthusiastic friend of harrell's as my sure-to-be contact person) and maybe that's why i failed to be sly and overtly interested in the department/institution initially. i'm going to bring notes to our meeting so i'll remember to pace myself in approaching the idea of an artist. in residence.

on another note:
on our short walk to the library, laura and i reiterated a bit some ideas we've been talking about. not terribly concrete, just particular aspects of the library that interest us: space, the sterile environment inside, the beauty of the silent and hidden fifth floor. still not sure if we'll end up collaborating or working individually, but hopefully both will be possible. indoor plants were also discussed.

yet another note:
today we visited the theater arts scene shop where young undergrads were hard at work constructing giant books for the set of the upcoming main stage show at PSU. i asked the TA what happened to the sets after the shows and she said they were usually dismantled and the lumber saved for reuse. i couldn't help but think how neat the giant (bigger than you are tall, probably, unless you are eight feet tall) books might look somewhere in that sterile library... installation piece? i dont know. can't think ahead too much.

library session

tonight i explored some of the floors of the library i don't often frequent.

in the basement i found group study rooms, media-viewing rooms, and a completely different atmosphere (due to the lack of windows, i suspect) that felt pent-up in cozy and institutional ways at the same time.

tucked away in a fifth-floor corner is the office of the archival librarian, which i'll definitely be setting up an appointment to see. unfortunately the sign on the door only had summer term hours, so i'll have to investigate that. in another corner of the silent fifth floor are rows of empty shelves with signs on them that say "don't re-shelve anything here leaks!" there were no puddles or trash cans full of putrid rainwater, though. the fifth floor was almost entirely empty and at one point i felt a little unsafe.

the fourth floor has a lot of study desks and books about engineering and hydrology, which is likely why i don't stop on my way to the fifth floor. i never noticed but was pleased to discover windows on the back side of the building facing the football/soccer field which i've also never seen. it's a nice view of the entire field from the top floor.

tonight i really understood how vast the library is. there are secret stacks and entire wings with no one in them, rows of volumes of the same color and stacks of unused chairs in hallways and corners. hopefully by the time i'm finished i'll know every corner of the building.

maybe i'll memorize the dewey decimal system?

approaching strange people in new departments

i think we had overwhelmingly positive experiences approaching departments on wednesday.
the campus ministry woman,
the black studies department,
the math resource center.
everyone was pretty much thrilled to be able to tell us what they do, because i think maybe it's rare that fifteen people walk in looking for information in an obscure basement meditation center or a tucked-away room packed with mathematics periodicals.

sylvia in the math room was particularly inspiring, and i think it'd be neat to do a project examining the crazy reprogramming of her brain that enabled her to miraculously do math to the extent she's now capable of. seeing her masters project, seeing the triangular-hexagonal-golden mean thing she built- this woman should be commissioned to do a math-inspired public sculpture or something. i also liked the idea of having a "former-bad-experiences-in-math" support group.

sylvia was definitely the highlight of my day, even though she did freak me out with all her talk about the fourth dimension.

social practices II

ideas for departments for artist residency:

the library (because it's warm and quiet and offers a plethora of project possibilities)

the bike coop (because it's squished into a closet on the ground floor of a parking garage and i think it needs my help)

a food cart on fourth avenue (the burrito cart with the mural because they are really nice people or new taste of india because they are the first cart i ate at in portland)