WARNING: LONG and WINDING Post Ahead

While perusing my normal collection of links to friends’ and friends-of-friends’ blogs last night, I remembered that my brother, during a Thanksgiving phone conversation, told me I should send him the link to mine and he’d do the same. Not to disappoint the potential audience (because we all know how narcissistic I already am) I obliged.

From my brother’s blog came links to blogs of one of his best friends from junior high through today, the best friend’s sister, who graduated high school with me, and the best friend’s father, who, in an interesting “small town Iowa City world moment” was also my junior high school principal a few years back. (Okay more than a few years back, but really, I’m only nearing a quarter of a century here folks.) Regardless, having not so much “stumbled” as “been directed” to these sites of other people I know, who probably have no idea I’m now clued into their journalings, (unless they are also, in turn, via Steve’s site, clued into my OWN postings), I am now convinced that there is at the very least a sense of voyeurism associated with reading the blogs of other people that don’t know you read them, OR with reading blogs of people you’ve never met.

Online journaling, for those of us who maintain sites, and occasionally actually bother to update them (unlike certain Cubs baseball fans), is a really good way to catch a snippet of what other people are recommending and experiencing, on a daily or infrequent basis. For example, the best friend’s sister’s boyfriend (oh ya, we’re talking six degrees of Kevin Bacon here) recently posted about a book that he found worthwhile. While skimming their joint blog, I was intrigued, because the book is also tangentially related to my field of study. His post included enough tidbits about the contents of this monograph that I checked it out while at Barnes and Noble last night. Since my future career will hopefully involve, at least in the minimal sense, the understanding of how people perceive and interpret optical illusions, digital images, and art in general (as either a Visual Resources curator, or an Art librarian) I found it particularly interesting.

Now, the point I’m trying to make –yes there is a point –surprised? is that without actually having ever met this individual, and without knowing much about his personality, his like or dislike of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or his thoughts on God, I still took his reference to a book, and was motivated to scope it out in a bookstore.

How is that for the power of a relatively new phenomenon called bloging?
Consider also that I frequently check my friend’s blog, because he’s a production assistant at a big network news branch – and I check this because he finds and links many blogs that are watchdogs of the media industry. Consider also that I found out one of my fellow SLISARDS had tied the knot, first through a facebook.com name change, and then through reading his blog, long before I ACTUALLY ran into him at SLIS to congratulate him in person. In fact, people with in my program are researching blogs and blog activity and the social aspects of this phenomenon as well. Obviously there is some thing to this form of communication.

I was sitting in class today (my last class of the semester, so one where I’d most often zone out and think with finality on the course and the evaluation) and the speaker is a contemporary art historian here at IUB. He was discussing how his research has taken him all over the country to locate various papers/pamphlets and smatterings of information about an artist he wrote his dissertation on and continues to write about. He was also telling us how the web has made the access to research and information a very different arena. Well, this artist is living, has her own website, and so does a gallery she deals with. He was describing ephemeral documents that he’d located through physical archives, and via pdf files found on the web, such as handbills for protests, exhibit checklists, and personal correspondences.

The thought of personal correspondences made me stop a moment. In this age of blogs, when does the personal correspondence of the intended audience that a “bloger” knows reads their postings, become the public correspondence they have with people whom they’ve never met in person, but that leave comments on their blogs? Or in fact, people who read the blogs of others, and these writers have no idea that the people have read their postings, or have taken their recommendations for books to heart?

My other thought during this lecture was: Are there any contemporary artists that blog about their work? They might contain the problems they are trying to solve, or the statements they are trying to make with each piece, or their manifestos? Because, if this is occurring in the web arena, then who should be responsible for archiving and organizing all of this information? Obviously, these thoughts, mutterings and postings of contemporary artists will be worth preserving for future art historians and scholars. Where would scholars be without the collected letters of Van Gogh to his brother? While most of the archiving falls simply to the artist themselves, and their journal hosting site – why shouldn’t art librarians take on the responsibility of collecting print copies of pertinent and relevant artists’ postings for vertical files? Has anyone bothered to do screen captures of artists’ websites, or pull the information from these sites to include in a vertical file in a library?

Part of my internship this summer focused on the cataloging of artists file folders at the University of Iowa, in order to make these files accessible to students, because, these “ephemera” could be useful for research purposes. The New York Public Library has an extensive collection of artist files that have been microfilmed and distributed for purchase by other libraries, in order to facilitate this type of archival research.

Perhaps, such an endeavor should be done with artists’ blogs also? Maybe, a rudimentary print format, or some web-based archival product or system could accomplish this, and a librarian familiar with authority headings and classification systems could organize the content? So long as these sources of information, which resemble a mix between a self-edited artist DAILY autobiography or “memoirs,” meshed with such basic details as where they went for dinner, or with whom they spoke at a gallery opening, could very quickly become important for future scholars trying to trace inspirations and associations of today’s contemporary artists.

For my part, these are just the musings of a library science student, who spent the last two days mulling over the tip of the iceberg of blog culture and the tip of the vast potential of such technology on future archives and research methods. Talk about a can of worms…
Oh yes, and for those of you interested, I will be buying the book and I will be checking these other blogs regularly, with all manner of voyeurism that I suspect to feel from glimpsing the lives of known and unknown persons.