This presentation was based off of an independent study that I completed in Summer 2015 at the University of Western Ontario. I was supervised by Prof. Sarah Roberts, who does excellent research on hidden digital labour. Check out her research at: http://illusionofvolition.com/

This past summer, I conducted an Independent Study on Material Culture Studies and Librarianship, which informs my lightning talk today. Specifically, I’d like to talk about critical theory concerning objects in the library context. I won’t pretend that this isn’t an odd topic. There are probably a few of you wondering - objects?

Like, objects? Things? Whatever you call it, I mean that which is non-human but which interacts with humanity. Our stuff. To be more specific, material culture is a term deriving from anthropology, meaning the material remnants of a culture.

For instance, an anthropologist might say “we have these clay pots from a previous civilization - what to do they mean?” From research about the clay pots, we might discover cultural practices about cooking, or olive oil production. Looking at material culture is a way to learn about the culture that created it. Contemporary material culture studies asserts that contemporary objects can be used in the same way.

For instance, what kind of culture created objects like these?

And yes, some theorists do refer to objects as “non-humans.,” but that always makes me feel like they’re more sinister than they are. Oooh, right now we’re surrounded by non-humans.

Well, of course we are. We always are. Things give shape to our world and to our lives. There’s the newspaper that informs you of daily events, the coffee you had this morning, or the ugly OLA vests that volunteers wear so that they can be identified.

Or - the library book you pick up to read. Of course, libraries do much, much more than just lend out books. But, the collection remains the core of the library. Librarians connect patrons with information through the medium of objects - whether it’s a book or an electronic file.

I’d like to point out here that just because information is stored electronically that doesn’t mean we somehow avoid physical objects. To quote Marlene Manoff: “electronic objects are as dependent upon material instantiation as printed books” (311). In other words, everything has a physical form, whether we’re talking about paper and ink or a screen composed of glass and heavy metals.

Manoff, Marlene. "The Materiality of Digital Collections: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives." Libraries and the Academy 6.3 (2006): 311-25. Web.

Now, all of these objects I’ve just mentioned - newspapers, cups of coffee, books - they function as partners that work with us. Now, I don’t mean partners in the same way that humans might partner off with one another. Instead, partnerships between humans and objects occur on such a regular basis that we barely register that they exist.

They partner with us like tools, and clothes, and food do - fitting so neatly into our lives that we barely notice them except in how they suit our purposes - like how a cup of coffee fits a hand.

During my independent study I came across several terms to describe the phenomenon of human and object collaboration: they are companions; we collaborate with them. When a human pairs up with a machine, he or she becomes a cyborg - this encompasses everything from a car and driver (with the pedals and wheels acting as an extension of the driver’s legs) to computers and internet users.

Donna Haraway "A Cyborg Manifesto":
http://www.sfu.ca/~decaste/OISE/page2/files/HarawayCyborg.pdf

My favourite is term is hybrid, which comes from the work of Bruno Latour and his critical works on Actor-Network Theory. Latour sees humans and non-humans as inextricably bound together in a network, where one actor impacts another, which impacts another, and so on. The internet is a perfect example of this - imagine that this is a person, on a computer, connected to a the internet, connected to another computer, connected to another person, and so on.
When I send you an email, that’s two humans communicating - but there are an awful lot of objects in between doing work for and with humans. All of the actors here are interconnected - hence, Actor-Network theory.

“Latour is indispensible to an understanding of humans, technology, and information society” (xiii).

Leckie, Gloria J., Lisa M. Given, and John E. Buschman, eds. Critical Theory for Library and Information Science. Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2010. Print.

Latour, Bruno. “Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” Candlin and Guins 230-254.

So, that’s the big, overall picture of the network. On a smaller level, we have individual collaborations between humans and objects that happen all of the time. These are hybrids. Humans are hybrids every time that they interact with information sources.

To get back to libraries: how would the library change if we were to take the concept of objects seriously? I can think of three ways:

Bleecker, Julian. “Why Things Matter.” Candlin and Guins 165-174.

Candlin, Fiona and Raiford Guins, eds. The Object Reader. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.

Hicks, Dan, and Mary C. Beaudry, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.

Knappett, Carl, and Lambros Malafouris, eds. Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. Berlin: Springer, 2008. Web.

1. Focusing on objects might make it seem as though we’re neglecting what’s really important: people, our patrons. But, we’re actually looking at objects in order to improve the human experience of using them. I don’t think that the Mount Pleasant Branch Library, pictured here, took human use into account when these stairs to nowhere were built. Objects are consistently ignored and overlooked - they’re designed to be unobtrusive. When is the last time that you specifically thought of all of the objects around you? A greater focus on objects, and a willingness to see them as partners, can prevent bad design - in library spaces as well as information sources.

2. Number two - granting that objects matter also means paying attention to their material specificity. Is reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from an old book the same as reading it from a new book? How about on a kindle? Materiality and format matter for the reading experience of a text. Collections librarians know that patrons sometimes fiercely prefer different formats - and special collections, microfiche and zine librarians, know the characteristics of the formats they manage intimately. Paying attention to library materials as objects forces us to acknowledge that access to information is mitigated by physicality - a fact that should influence collection decisions - such as buying digital over print, or vice versa.

Eggert, Paul. "Brought to Book: Bibliography, Book History and the Study of Literature." The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 13.1 (2012): 3-32. Web. 15 Mar. 2015. .

Piepmeier, Alison. "Why Zines Matter: Materiality And The Creation Of Embodied Community." American Periodicals 18.2 (2008): 213-238. Web.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York, N.Y;Toronto;: Penguin Books, 1997. Web.

3. Finally, reframing the interactions that patrons have with library materials as a relationship should allow us to better understand what it is that libraries facilitate. Library resources have a meaningful impact on the lives of patrons. These are objects that do things - they are not flat, or lifeless. The more that we understand that a book can change a patron’s life, or online access to a database can affect academics, the better we can work to facilitate this. Libraries create hybrids - patrons are no longer the same after they encounter library materials.

Before I wrap up today, it’s worth pointing out that there are some limitations to accepting objects as important that have no doubt already crept up in your mind.

Seeing objects is very, very difficult, which makes acknowledging them, even treating them as partners, sound absurd. We normally don’t give objects a second thought, apart from the roles that they play in our lives. By all means, it’s okay for us to be biased in favour of people - it’s people that matter. However, we need to acknowledge our biases so that we can compensate for them.

In his book, “Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat,” Hal Herzog discusses peoples’ complicated feelings about animals. He shares the story of a laboratory in England with three types of mice. There are the mice that are experimented on - the researchers handle them with limited emotion. There are the favourites among the lab mice - these are loved. Then, there are the pest mice. They live in the building walls and they’re treated with hate and revulsion. The thing is - the pest mice are likely escaped lab mice. This means that all of the mice are essentially the same mice - but the researchers feel love for some and hate for others.
I know that I find it difficult to be objective about my favourite, battered old copy of my favourite book - it just isn’t the same as a pristine, new copy. Can we characterize how emotions like these affect librarians? How about patrons?

Herzog, Hal. Some we Love, some we Hate, some we Eat: Why it's so Hard to Think Straight about Animals. 1st ed. New York: Harper, 2010. Web.

Evaluating this would be difficult, in part because we’re much more comfortable analyzing how an ancient culture used clay pots that we are looking our own use of objects. We’re too close to objects that we use and care about - to our favourite books, to ipads - to want to do this or to believe that it is necessary. This is a problem that keeps us from seeing objects clearly.

Finally, I’d like to leave you with this quotation, which I believe sums up the interest that I have in objects in the library context. “Objects don’t exist without being full of people” which is why they are so fascinating to critically study, and why looking at them - odd thought it might seem - it really another way to look at patrons, and to try to assess how the library collection can better have an impact in their lives.

http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/384

"The Berlin Key or How to Do things with Words."
Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture. Ed. Paul Graves-Brown. Routledge: London, 1991. 10-21.