Transcript:
As a librarian and poet, it’s long been of interest to me to find
new ways of providing and sustaining democratized access to
poetry. So – when I found myself in my final year of my MLIS
enrolled in collection development while simultaneously
volunteering at the Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives
at San Francisco State University, synapses ignited. I
began to consider the inherent vulnerabilities of cultural
agency within poetry as a network of ideas reflecting
currencies of our time and began to wonder who
decides what gets saved to tell the stories we leave behind.
Along with digital preservation threats like data loss and bit
corruption, I considered the ephemerality &
vulnerability of poetry chapbooks produced by small presses.
I also sought means of reinvigorating stale & arcane
poetry collections I had found in many public libraries, and
desired a new method of expanding access to socially &
culturally diverse poetry along with promoting work of local
poets in the community. The confluence of my studies and
passions for poetry and librarianship catalyzed my creation
and development of an open-access digital chapbook archives:
The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange.
The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange is a communitycurated
archive created and developed for poets to convene,
correspond, and collaborate via chapbooks: the
currency of the poetry community. Our mission is to engage
our poetry community by sparking dialogues between the
chapbooks in the interest of collaboratively building
a community archive.
As a cooperative model, it has facilitated the compilation of a
diverse and innovative collection of poetry chapbooks for
public access. We began by inviting a select group of
core contributors – and grew our collection in just a few
months to feature chapbooks from over 40 contributors.
The Process
Contributors are invited to share their chapbooks via upload
and as such gain access to the chapbook repository. They are
also invited to recommend another poet to contribute to the
exchange. The model is “take a chapbook, leave a
chapbook.” The chapbook exchange is a contributor-driven
peer-to-peer environment that allows users to exchange
chapbooks as a variation on the pay-to-play theme in that in
this case, poetry is the currency required for participation.
Deploying Chapbooks as Community-Bonding Tools
Chapbooks have a long history of communicating impelling
messages to communities. “From the 16th to early
19th centuries, chapbooks were mass-produced, cheaply made
booklets sold hand-to-hand by traveling salesmen, or chapmen
in Western Europe and North America.” (Craig, 2011) Today’s
chapbooks are regarded as essential to the evolution of
ongoing dialogues around poetics and poetry.
“…[They’re] part of ongoing poetic conversations, as well as a
practice of exchange that is ever present in the maintenance of
community” (Craig, 2011). They are often handmade
and sold cheaply or given as gifts. The message within often
outweighs financial compensation for the author; often, what
fuels their tenacity is a desire to contribute to a powerful
lineage of poets as well as a commitment to correspondence
and collaboration with peers.
The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange has made
available virtual hubs for collaboration and exchange. The
open-access format is conducive to quick and efficient
chapbook sharing, and can serve as a forum for writers and
other patrons to communicate and share ideas. Our
desire is for the site to act as a nexus; a lively and vital
cooperative space for poets to practice the continuum of
reading and writing in the creative process. Contributing
creative works in this forum also allows users the opportunity
to generate creative responses to extant works in the
collections.
As a community-curated project, Poetry Center Chapbook
Exchange participants are actively involved in the process of
archiving their own work. Once they become active members,
they are also able to assign metadata to their books with
pertinent descriptors to make their works more findable. In
doing so, they become agents in the shaping of our shared
history for future readers. Contributors also choose their own
creative commons licensing attributes and permissions, and
can permit or decline use in any number of ways.
The site was built using Omeka: “a free, flexible,
and open source web-publishing platform for the display of
library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and
exhibitions.” (Ray Rosenzweig Center for History and New
Media, 2014). We chose Omeka as our trial platform because of
the Roy Rosenzweig and Center for History and New Media’s
great reputation for preserving and archiving creative works.
Omeka enables participants to control how their
work is presented, and offers tutorials to facilitate the user
process.
This type of peer-to-peer crowdsourcing can be a
means of promoting and increasing circulation for existing
poetry collections while directly engaging with local and
global communities. Libraries can improve poetry collections
by crowdsourcing chapbooks from local poetry communities
and expand awareness of collections using social media to
share chapbooks. A poetry project of this kind will serve all age
groups, and will be particularly vital for reengaging teens on
the move. Teens are mobile content creators. Libraries
recognize that “if librarians want to attract young adults to
their collections and services, they must become integral
members of the online community.” (Hassell and Miller, 2003)
Libraries have the opportunity to reshape their teen image by
creating virtual spaces where teens will feel free to collaborate,
create, consume, and share content with peers on the move. At
the same time, they can promote intergenerational bonding
between unlikely age groups.
As Tyckoson (2003) writes “The nature of publishing is going
to change and libraries are going to play a greater part in the
process.” Libraries can provide both the tools and the expertise
to help users get projects off the ground. Our communities are
rife with content creators, and the urge to share our creative
efforts has galvanized social media as a primary source of
information and communication. Outreach to local museums,
archives, community colleges, and K-12 schools may also be a
way to develop existing collections reflective of the local
community. By incorporating works by local poets and writers,
public libraries can involve users directly by showcasing
selected works to ensure patron’s continual value in the future
of library service.“Community practitioners need to know how
given communities tell stories and how powerful these stories
can be for either demoralizing or strengthening
community.” (Collins et al, 2004)
Flexibility
Like any project, the initial concept for the chapbook exchange
went through several iterations requiring flexibility and
patience. Initially designed for public libraries & later
conceptualized for an archives within an academic institution,
it was necessary to consider how this might change the target
audience and/or create a more insular reader community,
thereby possibly inhibiting access to the “average public
library user.” While the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange is
publicly accessible via URL: poetrychapbooks.omeka.net, the
predominant audience is largely comprised of other poets.
How I hope to mitigate this problem & expand access for nonpoets
is to recommend the chapbook exchange as a discovery
tool teachers can employ in the classroom to promote active
learning, collaboration, and creative problem solving through
reading & writing poetry along with navigating new
technologies. Creating student collections in Omeka can also
help learners discover primary resources along with growing
their interests in history and technology. I’m interested in
encouraging & teaching information & media literacies
through diversified tech tools to augment, support, & partner
with local schools to best serve youth in our community.
Connecting learners with the right tools is critical to their
academic success.
In creating, developing, and managing the digital archive that
became the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange, I was able to
gain project management skills that prepared me for my role as
the new Teen & Adult Services Librarian with Mendocino
County Libraries. Along with creating engaging programming
and services for teens and adults, managing projects effectively
is key to my ability to provide energetic and efficient services to
all our patrons.
A Poet Librarian 