DIYnamic: Librarians in Motion - CLA Be the Change 2014
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
0 likes•836 views
Melissa Eleftherion Carr discusses the creation and development of the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange: a community-curated digital archive she designed and built for poets to convene, correspond, and collaborate via chapbooks.
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to DIYnamic: Librarians in Motion - CLA Be the Change 2014
Similar to DIYnamic: Librarians in Motion - CLA Be the Change 2014 (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
DIYnamic: Librarians in Motion - CLA Be the Change 2014
- 1. DIYnamic: Librarians in Motion Melissa Eleftherion Carr apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com poetrychapbooks.omeka.net
- 6. Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange poetrychapbooks.omeka.net
- 10. Chapbooks
- 11. The Page: Out of Print & Created for the Screen First Love (created for the PCCE) NonStop Pop (Bloof Books)
- 12. Chapbooks as Community- Bonding Tools
- 13. Affordable Means of Communicating Messages to Communities
- 14. capture current conversations in poetry and poetics
- 16. Viewing the Collection poetrychapbooks.omeka.net
- 18. Omeka
- 19. Getting Started w/ Omeka
- 22. References American Library Association. (1996). Library Bill of Rights. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill Collins, K., Furman, R, & Riddoch, R. 2004. Poetry, writing and community practice. Human Service Education, 24(1), 19-32. Craig, Ailsa. 2011. When a book is not a book: objects as players in identity and community formation. Journal of Material Culture, 16 (1), 47-63. Dymoke, S. & Hughes, J. 2009. Using a poetry repository: how can the medium support pre-service teachers of English in their professional learning about writing poetry and teaching poetry writing in a digital age? English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 8 (3), 91-106 http://bit.ly/12cW6so http://bit.ly/1rEBBM6 http://bit.ly/15IgBiV
- 23. References Grotke, A. 2011. Cooperative archiving: Event harvesting in perspective. Annual meeting with Library of Congress and National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. Retrieved from http://search.loc.gov/digitalpreservation Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. About CHNM. Retrieved from http://chnm.gmu.edu/about/ http://tsukinohikari20.deviantart.com/art/Lightning-Strike-Vs-Dark-Sky-51926455 http://leafhansen.blogspot.com/2011/11/woods-are-lovely-dark-and-deep.html http://bit.ly/1FD6atE http://bit.ly/1rCmOHq http://bit.ly/1tyU4t2 http://bit.ly/1vWCSVS
- 24. Melissa Eleftherion Carr apoetlibrarian.wordpress.co m poetrychapbooks.omeka.net
Editor's Notes
- As a librarian and poet, it’s long been of interest to me to find new ways of providing and sustaining democratized access to poetry. So - when I found myself in my final year of my MLIS enrolled in collection development while simultaneously volunteering at the Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University, synapses ignited.
- I began to consider the inherent vulnerabilities of cultural agency within poetry as a network of ideas reflecting currencies of our time and began to wonder
- who decides what gets saved to tell the stories we leave behind. Along with digital preservation threats like data loss and bit corruption, I considered the
- ephemerality & vulnerability of poetry chapbooks produced by small presses.
- I also sought means of reinvigorating stale & arcane poetry collections I had found in many public libraries, and desired a new method of expanding access to socially & culturally diverse poetry along with promoting work of local poets in the community. The confluence of my studies and passions for poetry and librarianship catalyzed my creation and development of an open-access digital chapbook archives:
- The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange. The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange is a community-curated archive created and developed for poets to convene, correspond, and collaborate via chapbooks:
- the currency of the poetry community. Our mission is to engage our poetry community by sparking dialogues between the chapbooks
- in the interest of collaboratively building a community archive. As a cooperative model, it has facilitated the compilation of a diverse and innovative collection of poetry chapbooks for public access.
- We began by inviting a select group of core contributors – and grew our collection in just a few months to feature chapbooks from over 40 contributors.
- The Process Contributors are invited to share their chapbooks via upload and as such gain access to the chapbook repository. They are also invited to recommend another poet to contribute to the exchange.
- The model is “take a chapbook, leave a chapbook.” The chapbook exchange is a contributor-driven peer-to-peer environment that allows users to exchange chapbooks as a variation on the pay-to-play theme in that in this case, poetry is the currency required for participation.
- Deploying Chapbooks as Community-Bonding Tools Chapbooks have a long history of communicating impelling messages to communities.
- “From the 16th to early 19th centuries, chapbooks were mass-produced, cheaply made booklets sold hand-to-hand by traveling salesmen, or chapmen in Western Europe and North America.” (Craig, 2011) Today’s chapbooks are regarded as essential to the evolution of ongoing dialogues around poetics and poetry.
- “…[They’re] part of ongoing poetic conversations, as well as a practice of exchange that is ever present in the maintenance of community” (Craig, 2011).
- They are often handmade and sold cheaply or given as gifts. The message within often outweighs financial compensation for the author; often, what fuels their tenacity is a desire to contribute to a powerful lineage of poets as well as a commitment to correspondence and collaboration with peers.
- The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange has made available virtual hubs for collaboration and exchange. The open-access format is conducive to quick and efficient chapbook sharing, and can serve as a forum for writers and other patrons to communicate and share ideas.
- Our desire is for the site to act as a nexus; a lively and vital cooperative space for poets to practice the continuum of reading and writing in the creative process. Contributing creative works in this forum also allows users the opportunity to generate creative responses to extant works in the collections. As a community-curated project, Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange participants are actively involved in the process of archiving their own work. Once they become active members, they are also able to assign metadata to their books with pertinent descriptors to make their works more findable. In doing so, they become agents in the shaping of our shared history for future readers. Contributors also choose their own creative commons licensing attributes and permissions, and can permit or decline use in any number of ways.
- The site was built using Omeka: “a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions.” (Ray Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, 2014). We chose Omeka as our trial platform because of the Roy Rosenzweig and Center for History and New Media’s great reputation for preserving and archiving creative works.
- Omeka enables participants to control how their work is presented, and offers tutorials to facilitate the user process.
- This type of peer-to-peer crowdsourcing can be a means of promoting and increasing circulation for existing poetry collections while directly engaging with local and global communities. Libraries can improve poetry collections by crowdsourcing chapbooks from local poetry communities and expand awareness of collections using social media to share chapbooks. A poetry project of this kind will serve all age groups, and will be particularly vital for reengaging teens on the move. Teens are mobile content creators. Libraries recognize that “if librarians want to attract young adults to their collections and services, they must become integral members of the online community.” (Hassell and Miller, 2003) Libraries have the opportunity to reshape their teen image by creating virtual spaces where teens will feel free to collaborate, create, consume, and share content with peers on the move. At the same time, they can promote intergenerational bonding between unlikely age groups. As Tyckoson (2003) writes “The nature of publishing is going to change and libraries are going to play a greater part in the process.” Libraries can provide both the tools and the expertise to help users get projects off the ground. Our communities are rife with content creators, and the urge to share our creative efforts has galvanized social media as a primary source of information and communication. Outreach to local museums, archives, community colleges, and K-12 schools may also be a way to develop existing collections reflective of the local community. By incorporating works by local poets and writers, public libraries can involve users directly by showcasing selected works to ensure patron’s continual value in the future of library service.“Community practitioners need to know how given communities tell stories and how powerful these stories can be for either demoralizing or strengthening community.” (Collins et al, 2004)
- Like any project, the initial concept for the chapbook exchange went through several iterations requiring flexibility and patience. Initially designed for public libraries & later conceptualized for an archives within an academic institution, it was necessary to consider how this might change the target audience and/or create a more insular reader community, thereby possibly inhibiting access to the “average public library user.” While the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange is publicly accessible via URL: poetrychapbooks.omeka.net, the predominant audience is largely comprised of other poets. How I hope to mitigate this problem & expand access for non-poets is to recommend the chapbook exchange as a discovery tool teachers can employ in the classroom to promote active learning, collaboration, and creative problem solving through reading & writing poetry along with navigating new technologies. Creating student collections in Omeka can also help learners discover primary resources along with growing their interests in history and technology. I’m interested in encouraging & teaching information & media literacies through diversified tech tools to augment, support, & partner with local schools to best serve youth in our community. Connecting learners with the right tools is critical to their academic success.
- In creating, developing, and managing the digital archive that became the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange, I was able to gain project management skills that prepared me for my role as the new Teen & Adult Services Librarian with Mendocino County Libraries. Along with creating engaging programming and services for teens and adults, managing projects effectively is key to my ability to provide energetic and efficient services to all our patrons.