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The Order of Words—Or How We Search and Find
When we talk about order in libraries, we often think of neatly labeled bookshelves and how the books are positioned on them. The dynamic order of the Kunstbibliothek is no different in this respect: It depicts the physical order of the books on the shelves—but they can be removed from and returned to the shelves at random in ever-new combinations and thus also portray past searches. The personal compilations of books that have been left on the shelves invite visitors to immerse themselves in this research and to encounter not only thematically related titles, but also the surprising and the unexpected.
The act of searching when we want to find a specific title, material, or literature on a particular subject area is structured in a different way. What we find depends not only on the accuracy of the terms entered, but also on the completeness of the information and keywords that have been saved in connection with the objects. How does searching in the catalogue differ from searching on the shelves? What strategies are helpful and productive in what context? On what socially and historically produced orders and hierarchies is the catalogue based?
The Sitterwerk Foundation examined these questions in two series of events in the spring of 2021: the online series of discussions “Finders Keepers: Search”—a continuation and refining of the discussion series “Finders Keepers” from the winter of 2020—and the workshop series “Language of Art Production.”
As a result of the proximity to the neighboring Kunstgiesserei, the foundation is interested in finding a shared language that crosslinks the production processes with its books and materials and depicts and makes the on-site knowledge accessible. The question of a site-specific vocabulary occupied us in particular in the workshop series.
Finders Keepers: Search
As already in the discussion series in the winter of 2020, “Finder Keepers: Search” also made the side of users and their work with collections and archives a central aspect, and as a result of the focus on searching, supplemented this with a self-interrogation: What search strategies truly bring us further in a space filled with books, material samples, and many other objects and distractions, and what are possible alternative search strategies that we as a location can initiate or inspire?
With “Finders, Keepers: Search,” we initiated a search connected with searching. In three conversations, we discussed vocabulary that can make searching more precise, the quality of incidental search results, and selection based on normative, limiting structures in library systems.
Patricia Harpring was the first guest speaker. She is the Managing Editor of Getty Vocabularies and spoke in her presentation about how the Getty Vocabularies were developed and how they are used today. We thus began with an institutional perspective that shows how data is prepared and crosslinked. For us, it was particularly interesting to discuss with Patricia Harpring how new keywords can be introduced and where interfaces between a site-specific and a global vocabulary are conceivable and useful.
Download her presentation here.
The Zurich-based author, historian, and attentive observer Dorothee Elmiger was our second guest. We invited her to speak about the research connected with her most recent novel, Aus der Zuckerfabrik (Out of the Sugar Factory): a book that is explicitly always described as a research report—a distinctive feature in the literature business, in which novels and novellas set the tone. She explained the role played by the various archives and libraries where she found information about colonial Switzerland, the history of gambling, and the history of sugar, broadened her reflections in a poetic text about searching and finding, and described her experience of finding her own books in a library catalogue and suddenly seeing them represented by two or three keywords.
Extract Aus der Zuckerfabrik, 2020.
The information scientist and sociologist Nora Schmidt is currently responsible for the Open Access publication service at the mdw, the Universität für Musik und darstellende Künste (University of Music and Performing Arts), Vienna. Her dissertation, with the title The Privilege to Select. Global Research System, European Academic Library Collections, and Decolonization, was published in 2020. For it, she conducted research on the academic research system and how it distinguishes between center and periphery. A particular focus in her work is on academic libraries, whose holdings, despite the claim to neutrality, elevate such libraries and thus makes them quite exclusionary and limiting.
This research work is the reason we invited Nora Schmidt. Even though the Sitterwerk Foundation’s Kunstbibliothek is not an academic library, its interrogation of alternative forms of producing and organizing knowledge is, so to say, inherent in the nature of the holdings. In her contribution, Nora Schmidt provided an overview of the terms colonialism and de-colonialism in the context of scholarship and presented a post-colonial look at ordering structures and hierarchies in the organization of knowledge, as well as a critical overview of dealing with Open Access.
Her poster presentation is available here.
Überlegungen für die Dekolonialisierung wissenschaftlicher Bibliotheken in Europa, 2021, or more information about Nora Schmidt here.