Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Viewers also liked
Viewers also liked (20)
Similar to Seduction of the Innocent: PCA/ACA 2013 presentation
Similar to Seduction of the Innocent: PCA/ACA 2013 presentation (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Seduction of the Innocent: PCA/ACA 2013 presentation
- 1. Seduction of the Innocent How UMBC’s Special Collections found a new audience by opening up its little grey boxes Steve Ammidown, University of Maryland, College Park PCA/ACA National Conference, March 28, 2013
- 2. • 6,000+ comic books and graphic novels • Books about comic book art and culture • Original art The UMBC Comics Collection
- 3. • UMBC founded in 1966 • Collecting the uncollected • Science fiction • Pulp magazines • Novels • Fanzines • With the science fiction came the comic books! Why Comic Books?
- 5. • Originally catalogued as individual books • Re-catalogued using ANSI/NISO Z39.71 2006 (R2011) standards Action Comics Action Comics Action Comics #415 #416 #417 Project One: Re-Cataloguing
- 6. • Wrong volume number • Title change • No volume number • Issue number reset • Wrong issue number • Volume number reset • No issue number • Variant covers • Nonsensical issue • Free hand-out issues number • Magazine vs. comic • Torn out splash page book • No cover • Spinoffs • Change of publisher • “Giant-Size” collections They Don’t Want to Be Catalogued!
- 7. • Seeing the collection as a whole • Adult view of children’s culture • Cover art, advertising, social themes There Are a LOT of Comic Books…
- 8. • Teasing out a theme • The Comics Code • Doing the research • Dr. Wertham • Senate hearings • Modern reinterpretation Putting on a Show
- 11. • Increased profile among students AND faculty • More exhibit visitors than in recent memory • Increased traffic for the Comic Book Collection What Did We Accomplish?
- 12. • Michael Frisch: “the interpretive and meaning-making process is in fact shared by definition- it is inherent in the dialogic nature of an interview, and in how audiences receive and respond to exhibitions and public interchanges in general” (2011,127) Shared Authority
- 13. • Special Collections as a “kitchen” where meaning is made • Blending institutional knowledge with subject knowledge • Drawing attention to underused collections Shared Authority in this Context
- 14. • Archives and special collections cannot afford to be static • We have the tools to make meaning of our own collections • If someone is passionate about a collection, there’s an audience they can help you reach Takeaways
- 15. Steve Ammidown sammidown@gmail. com twitter: @stegan Thank You!
- 16. • Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Reinhart & Company, Inc, 1954. • Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic- Book Scare and How it Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. • Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval: History of the Comics Code. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. • Adair, B., Filene, B., & Koloski, L. Letting go?: Sharing historical authority in a user-generated world. Philadelphia, PA: Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, 2011. • Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. www.cbldf.org • Comics Vine. www.comicvine.com Recommended Sources
Editor's Notes
- Your average special collections possess a vast variety of materials, and it’s not possible for your friendly neighborhood archivist or librarian to be a subject expert on all of them. This can end up creating a barrier to access for researchers, especially with unusual materials that may not be not indexed or displayed in a way that makes the content and scope of the collection apparent. It’s an evergreen problem, right- we’ve got this great collection, how do we make some sense of it to get people to come see it?
- The UMBC Comic Book Collection is a prime example of this. There’s more than 6,000 comic books and graphic novels, books about the art and culture of comics, comics criticism, how-to books, and even original art. In short, it’s a big collection, and hardly anyone ever comes to visit it.
- The collection was accumulated through donations dating back to the founding of UMBC in the late 1960s. As a new school, the mission was to collect the uncollected: and in the 1960s, this included science fiction novels, pulp magazines dating back to the turn of the 20th century, and some of the original fanzines. Lo and behold, as the science fiction collection grew, the number of comic books that came along with each donation did as well. Some additional comics were acquired to bolster the collection early on, but for the most part, it has grown organically.
- The more than 6,000 comic books were grouped alphabetically by title and placed in their little grey boxes on shelves in the back room, where no one would ever find them. Individual comics were entered into the online catalogue as just that- individual books. The problem with this was that while a researcher would be able to find Fantastic Four #76 in the catalogue, they wouldn’t know that Fantastic Four #77 was also in the collection unless they went back and did another search for it. And all of that depends on the researcher knowing about the collection to begin with.
- Faced with this relatively inaccessible collection of 75 linear feet, Susan Graham, the special collections librarian at UMBC, sought to alleviate at least one of these problems. She asked myself and another student to begin going through the comics one by one and re-catalogue them according to the ANSI/NISO serials standard instead of as individual books. While not a perfect solution, it would at the very least made the collection accessible.
- If you’ve been around comic books for any length of time, you may have already noticed a flaw in this plan. Comic books have a great resistance to having order imposed on them. These are just a few of the problems we ran into. Remember Superman issue #1,000,000? Where the heck do you place that? In the end, we were able to make some sense out of it after nearly a year, with substantial help from Comics Vine and Wikipedia.
- One thing I can tell you from this experience is that you cannot put your hands on 6,000 comic books without starting to make some meaning of your own out of them. The more you look at comics, the more cover art, story lines, advertising, and character development start to jump out at you. As a comics fan myself, and a social sciences undergrad, it didn’t take a big leap to see that these themes might be of interest to others outside of the special collections world. I mean, look at where we are right now- we’re practically awash in comics scholarship! The more I talked about the themes with the staff and my coworkers, the more evident it was that we needed to put these comics to some use. So a coworker and I hatched a plan for an exhibit, we presented it to the staff, and we were on our way.
- We built our exhibit around the Comics Code, the notorious self-censorship instrument the comics industry created around the middle of the 20th century. We went back and looked at some of the writings that led to the Code, including good old Dr. Wertham, as well as some of the more modern examinations by writers like David Hajdu and Amy Nyberg. From all this, we tried to tease out items that were interesting, but general enough to create interest for non-scholars.
- The breadth of the collection allowed us to highlight pre and post-code comics, as well as underground comix, magazine length comics, and graphic novels. We were able to cover from Kirby and Simon in the 1940’s all the way up to Chris Ware today. And while this part of the collection was behind glass, visitors were encouraged to engage us in discussions and to take a look at the other comics we had, all in the same space. We tried to keep it as far away from a stuffy experience as we possibly could.
- And oh yeah- there was some original art too. We aren’t sure where this part of the collection came from, but it is a treasure of 1970’s covers and pages. This one in top right hand corner is a Jack Kirby original for the Fantastic Four. So, once we had everything up and running, we used campus social media and some of the local comics blogs to promote the event, and had both opening and closing receptions (because no good college nerd can resist the combination of comic books and free food). For the closing reception, I gave a presentation, as did an instructor from the English department who taught a class on graphic novels. And this was a running theme- we connected not only with students, but also faculty and library staff who could drive traffic to us.
- We ended up having more students visit the exhibit, both for classes and on their own, than any other exhibit in the same space in recent memory. Not only that, but here we are a year later and students are still stopping by to look at some of the comics. I can count on one hand the number of students who I had pulled comics for in the preceding two years. It’s fair to say that this exhibit was a success.
- For me, one of the striking parts of this experience was the shared authority that developed between my coworkers, the Special Collections staff, and me. The concept of shared authority, as coined by Michael Frisch, says that the interpretive and meaning-making process of materials is inherently dialogic. Frisch looked at it from a public history perspective, arguing that the expert interprets in concert with those with the lived experience as well as the audience receiving the material. By actively engaging together, Frisch argues, new understandings are possible. I would argue that this same concept applies in a library/archives environment.
- One of the metaphors Frisch discusses in his 2011 article on shared authority is useful here- that of “the kitchen”. Frisch sees the kitchen as the place where the expert and the experienced meet to create meaning, to take history from “raw” to “cooked”. By inviting me to take on an exhibit in the special collections space, despite my lack of library training and never having done an exhibit before, the special collections staff made their space a sort of “kitchen” for the Comic Books Collection. My knowledge of the history of comic books melded with their knowledge of the collection and its history to create a new sort of meaning for the collection in the form of this exhibit. And in doing so, we coaxed the collection out of its little grey boxes and opened it up to an entirely new audience who hopefully now sees comics as something more than childish ephemera. Maybe even more importantly, we brought in many of UMBC’s STEM students, who might not have otherwise seen the inside of Special Collections in the entirety of their collegiate career.
- My main takeaway from this whole experience, and what I hope you take away from this presentation, is that archives and special collections cannot afford to be static. We have all the ingredients to serve as Frisch’s “kitchens”- unique resources, archivists and librarians, and if we look hard enough, potential subject experts. Instead of sitting back and waiting for researchers to come to us to make meaning out of our collections, we might be better served by looking around internally for those who might know something about our collections, and use the product of that engagement as a way to draw the public in. And while it’s true not every repository has a comic book collection (yet!), I’m willing to bet that each has a collection that someone in the institution is passionate about. And it’s there that the cooking can start.