Hello and Getting Started

Many thanks to the Jean Outland Chrysler Library staff for their welcome in the stacks and blogosphere! It may be cold in the stacks (for good reason) but my reception here at the Chrysler couldn’t have been warmer. Now that I’m settling in, it’s down to business. In my first two weeks I’m starting to tackle the backlog of unsorted and/or un-cataloged material, focusing on traditional art-related monographs. I’m sorting and identifying duplicates in the un-cataloged material and adding catalog records for those books we don’t have. In the coming weeks I’ll start working with smaller exhibition catalogs and pamphlets. Armed with coffee (tightly controlled and un-spilled) I’ll be getting as much material as possible to the shelves and into the catalog where it can searched, researched, and browsed.

Like many archivists and librarians, I face the continuing temptation to fully explore every book I catalog, sort, or work to preserve. In the interest of ever getting anything done, I can only occasionally indulge that urge. Each shelf or stack of un-cataloged material is a treasure trove of interesting material and, as in the case of a book I cataloged this week, that material can sometimes produce personal connections. I discovered and cataloged a book of photography by Joel-Peter Witkin (appropriately titled Joel-Peter Witkin), to whom I’m very distantly related through marriage. The book is dedicated to my second cousin, his wife at the time of printing. I’ve never met either my cousin or Mr. Witkin, but vividly recall a family gathering at which his work was discussed and uniformly criticized as being bizarre, disturbing, and in poor taste. My discovery of the book has not only sparked a shared memory, but also highlighted a challenge often faced by catalogers and the acquisitions staff of a library. Librarians often confront material fully within a collection’s scope which they find personally uninteresting, misguided, false, or even offensive. I don’t share my family’s sense of outrage at Witkin’s art, but personally think his work relies too much on staged grotesqueness as manifestation of his themes. Individual value judgments are unimportant, however, when wearing my cataloger’s cap and Joel-Peter Witkin will take its place beside Joel-Peter Witkin: Forty Photographs on our shelf. His books fall within the library’s collecting policy and, as a cataloger, I’m happily bound to the loftier Chrysler Library missions of fostering research and supporting the Museum’s collections.

Come back for more updates on my cataloging efforts. I’m looking forward to a successful summer!

--John Curtis, 2010 Jean Outland Chrysler Cataloging Fellow