Edison labs, Henry Ford Museum, Detroit.  Via gruntzooki on Flickr.

Creating a labs area of the collection online, gives us a chance to play around with some ideas and look at trends we are starting to see, but allows us to present projects in an informal way for discussion and visitor testing.  Some labs projects will only take us a few days to put together, while others might take a bit longer.  Depending on what we find out and how we see things used, we may integrate some of these projects into the collection’s main layout.

To start labs, we thought we’d explore love—hey, it is February after all!  We’ve been sitting on a bunch of data that shows how people are reacting to certain objects online and in the galleries.  This first project, What is Love?, displays top-ranked objects broken down by the ways in which people are showing their adoration. There’s active love:  online Posse members selecting objects as favorites in our collection during their web session or visitors coming to the museum and using our interactive gallery guide, BklynMuse, to favorite objects they like on view in the gallery. There’s also passive love: stats generated from the Google Analytics API to show additional metrics such as objects that are most viewed, when folks spend the most time on page with an object, or objects that are getting the most link love on the internet. All of these things shown together, can start to put together a picture of loving going on with regard to objects in our collection.

What is Love? Our first labs project—go explore the data and tell us your thoughts!

I guess I shouldn’t find it all that surprising that our nudes and the erotic sculpture in the Egyptian collection are all quite popular via the web, but I was surprised at how much variance there is between the categories and how few objects are loved across metrics. We released a sneak preview of What is Love? to our Facebook page last week, one person noted that there seemed to be high percentage of women depicted.  We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments—notice any correlations between the data here?  Want to see more of this kind of thing in labs?

On April 5th we had our second talk in a series of discussions to commemorate the 185th anniversary of the founding of the Library. The well attended talk – entitled What is a book? – was given by Andy Birsh and Davin Kuntze, from Woodside Press, who spoke about the elements of the book format. Their presentation focused on typography, papers, and bindings in use before and since the days of Gutenberg. Mr. Birsh is the proprietor of Woodside Press in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, one of the largest fine letterpress printing studios in New York. Mr. Kuntze is a trained bookbinder, printer, and graphic designer who lives in Crown Heights.

As always, it was a great pleasure to listen and think about the history of books and to see some books that are great examples of papermaking, printing and binding. Books on view included books on papermaking and specimen books with paper samples and facsimiles of codices such as the Codex Mendoza, the Mexican manuscript. The following is part of the catalog entry for this remarkable book published in London in 1938:

“The Mendoza codex is a Mexican pictographic manuscript prepared on the authority of Don Antonio de Mendoza, the first viceroy of New Spain … A Spanish priest, familiar with the Nauatl … was employed by the viceroy to set down in Spanish the explanations of the glyphs as interpreted by the Mexicans themselves.” The facsimile includes the original pictographs in colors and the Spanish explanations.”

This codex facsimile is one of many in this collection that document the culture of Mexico.

Several truly rare books were out for the public to see such as Hori Apollinis selecta hieroglyphica (Rome, 1599). This emblem book (seen below) documents Horapollo’s attempt to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs and offers many woodcut images some of which are supposedly by Dürer. The book was recently on view in the Egypt Through Other Eyes exhibition organized by the Museum Library staff.

Other rarities on view included The First Book of Architecture by Andrea Palladio (London, 1721) and Specimens of plain and ornamental printing types, borders, ornaments, rules, &c. made at the type and electrotype foundry of James Conner & Sons (New York, 1859) A good example of an accordion binding was The Great Exhibition “wot is to be” : or probable results of the industry of all nations in the year ’51. Showing what is to be exhibited, who is to exhibit it; in short,how its [!] all going to be done (London, 1850). This book is a continuous, illustrated strip, folded accordion style.

We also had a few artists’ books out that are exquisite examples of printing such as the Peter Kruty edition of The Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol (Summer Gardens Editions, 1998) with art by Mikhail Magaril. Peter Kruty’s letterpress studio is in Brooklyn and he worked with a team to produce this great example of letterpress and fine binding. The book was included in the Artists Book exhibition here back in 2000. Another artist’s book that was included in the Artists Book exhibition here and on view for our talk is The Corona Palimpsest (1996) made by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese.

I could go on and on about all of the great books we had out on view … if you want a full list of what we all looked at send an email and we will be happy to send the list to you.

Keonna Hendrick, Education Intern for Library Outreach, enjoys looking at one of the many rare books we had
out for the public to see.

National Library Week having just ended, it seems opportune to bring up a topic that was discussed during the talk which centered on the future of the book and the challenges presented by the Internet. There seems to be a notion in the air that “all of this will be digitized” if it hasn’t been already and that we will not need libraries. Perhaps it is so much easier to click at your computer instead of getting up and opening a book. But what a pleasure that is! Touching the paper, seeing images that in many instances are engravings or are hand colored, feeling the binding. I realize I am speaking from the perspective of a research librarian surrounded by books that have a true intrinsic value. As in most art libraries, we have many books filled with tons of images – engravings, photographs, textile and paper samples etc – that have an incredible tactile quality to them. I don’t look forward to the day when I have to climb into bed with a computer instead of a book. I know I am not the only one who feels that we need to speak up for the book as a physical entity and would really like to begin a discussion here about this issue. As far as I can see here in Brooklyn there are two camps of thinking: the book lover who speaks for the beauty of the physical book and the Internet lover who wants everything online and available in a very immediate way. Which camp are you in? Can the wishes of the two camps converge so that we can have everything – the book and the digital version?