Picked up the bound volumes of my thesis today and began researching materials to help me prepare an application for an MSc in Information and Library Management. By way of an inaugural post on the topic, here's an, umm, exciting MIT video on metadata.

What I hope to do is to find ways to bring issues raised in information management into contact with issues in the practice and meaning of artists' books. As I've shown in my thesis, the sorts of things we use as descriptors capture a sort of formal essentialism that's entirely appropriate to cataloguing, but it doesn't come close to saying what they actually mean. This is no mean project, and it will have multifarious means of extending its arguments across all sorts of interdisciplinary poking around. So perhaps it's best to see it as a series of recces into and around the issue of how libraries might share "the meaning of the artists' book field", as well as the books themselves. That phrase in quotation marks is probably not quite what I mean. It's something like – how can institutions impart some of the "added value" that the field itself contains, or "feels like"? (And this is just as true of fiction genres etc, except that I have a special interest in artists' books.) You get inklings of it sometimes in exhibitions. Or is it something only makers get to experience? And is there any *point* in looking into this for libraries?

To probe that last point, I think that the information professional could be involved not only in the pursuit of systemic ordering, but of methods of understanding. There might be something hermeneutic, something pedagogical about the future librarian, who would not only help us to fish the sea of data, but help us to fully appreciate what we have caught. Something that helpud us to impart methods of understanding as well as simply information, could be of use. I think typically we see this 'baked-into' the narratives that inform our cataloguing systems. One of the great things about new ways of including metadata, though, is that our material can belong at the same time to many different hierarchies and structures. The task of the librarian becomes not so much to show how the structure works (though that is indispensible), but further to show how we can use that structure as a path to create or choose our own narratives. I'm 'thinking aloud' here, but I think what I might be proposing is a pilot into reader's 'interpretive narratives'. How they make their sense of the artists' books field. And what I can do as an information professional to facilitate that.

I suppose typical methodologies might include analysis of a 'folksonomy' or studying other's research habits, or conducting interviews that probe researchers'  means of understanding.

Come to think of it, this really sounds like another PhD. Hmmm.

Edit. I've just watched the first thirty seconds of the film, googled Henry Jenkins, who is mentioned in his absence, and decided that I nedd to investigate his theories of world-making and fandom in relation to the, perhaps parallel, notions of making-reading and the shared world of reading (which for me come out of book history, typically Darnton). I probably should've known about Jenkins, but I can't be everywhere. Anyway. Darnton says something interesting about all authors being readers, and that's true also of book artists. The sense of community, of building a world *together* (with perhaps a few hardcore canonical underpinnings) prevales strongly in artists' books. If one swaps out 'fandom' for 'republic of letters', we get some interesting correspondences. And "bookdom"'s ambivalence about canonical sorting might be looked at as symptomatic of its interpenetration by its producer-fans. Perhaps the 'democracy' of the artist's book is another telling sign here. (And of course that implies a democracy of art, which gets us into fairly deep art history waters, bobbling along with Beuys and his inheritors and critics). I haven't, um, actually read any Jenkins yet, I should add.