The Richler Library
Nonprofit organization, Browse similar opportunities
en
Nonprofit organization, Browse similar opportunities
A free-to-attend conference
12-14 June 2018, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada
What is a collection? As a concept that signifies both an action (of gathering things together) and an entity (the things gathered), the collection raises important questions about how we create meaning through acts of selection, arrangement and description. The idea for this conference originates in a project that considers the literary historical and cultural significance of the author’s personal collection (of books, papers and ephemera) as a repository of materials with culturally-informed organizational structures. Using such a hybrid collection of books, archival materials, furniture and personal memorabilia as a conceptual starting point, we invite scholars, archivists and librarians of all disciplines to choose their own examples and case studies of collections that will help us think about the nature and meaning of collections within their broader social and cultural contexts of creation and use.
Collections of all kinds and scales are created, held, contained, preserved, stored, and consequently record the instantiation of something of value to an individual or a community. “Collection Thinking” has us ask, in the first instance, under whose terms has a collection been made and to what ends? Further, within our present context of networked digital media, collections have become as much associated with recirculation and consequent reinterpretation as with material location. As Gabriella Giannachi explains, “over the centuries, archives started to be considered not only as locations or objects but, as media, and communications strategies.” Archives and libraries that house collections in this iteration function less as places that determine a singular form of authorized value than as sites for the possible production of multiple and diverse systems of value. They become subject to what Hal Foster has called an “archival impulse” among artists “to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present” in ways that run counter to the original terms under which those archival records were initially housed, through acts of resituating, reordering and re-presenting.
From this perspective, the meaning of the collection may be discernible in the acts of structuring, arranging and cataloguing that give it shape. The record we produce to identify an object within a collection represents an event that transforms a fugitive thing into a piece of a larger, meaningful whole: a collection. The methods and records used to organize and describe collections, whether in established memory institutions or personal collecting activities, have their own histories and underscore the implication of descriptive and structuring methods and actors (the collectors) in the process of collection as a cultural phenomenon. In her discussion of unofficial collections or “rogue archives” created, usually online, by “amateurs, fans, hackers, pirates, and volunteers,” Abigail De Kosnik stresses the productive, eventful aspect of archival enactment and collection. This suggests that we can learn a lot about collection and cultural preservation by studying not just the materials collected and preserved, but the collection and preservation practices of the individuals committed to such work. In describing the practices that keep certain traces of events and people preserved in collections, and thus in play for use in the present, we may account for the repertoire of concepts and labour practices that produce and gird the meanings of the cultural/conceptual entity that motivated the collection in the first place.
We are excited to read your own proposals about how we can productively think about collections as social and cultural entities and activities. We are calling for proposals for individual papers, or, full panel sessions that pursue your approach to “Collection Thinking”. Further, we have listed a series of special session topics to which you may propose an individual contribution.
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