J.J. could bring up Second Life on two windows on his laptop, “and I sometimes run one on the laptop and one on the desktop,” J.J. explained. “I have a friend here who tells me she can run four Second Life clients at once, on her laptop. Shall I show you?” Soon the little sidewalk was crowded as we were joined by a tiny lisping ferret (“the wibwarian of Cawedon, Mr. Dwinkwater”) and Cuthbert Snook, a tall, bald male in a Renaissance doublet over tights. Everyone there, except me, was an incarnation of J.J.
“I think you’re probably familiar with the way certain authors fission themselves off into two ‘voices’ and argue with themselves? Yeats, I think, in some of his poetry. Wittgenstein, certainly. Well, here you can do it literally. I can let Snook be one part of myself and this ferret be another, and converse with myself. Which, of course, we do all the time, no?”
The ferret scooted off. Cuthbert bowed and offered to dance, and twirled me around the sidewalk in front of Tinyville, while the librarian in the purple-frilled jacket, long hair cascading over his shoulders, stood by, smiling and making occasional notations in an old ledger.
Craig Anderson (also known as as Draconius Merlin) wore a fedora and stood on a street corner outside a popular bar in Center City, Philadelphia, as promised. Like Steven Harris (Stolvano Barbosa), who showed up on the corner, too, his human form was tall, cute, outgoing, and a bit fey—a library guy. Anderson welcomed me and the woman I knew as Ms. Q., who appeared at the Alliance parties in Second Life in the form of a fox avatar, and we were joined by Jeremy Kemp (Jeremy Kabumpo), who trained his San Jose State students in the fine points of virtual reality, then hired them to design and rebuild the ALA’s island on Second Life. We were all waved into the bar and, disguised as mere humans, settled upstairs among the young professionals of Philadelphia. A pink-cheeked woman interrupted us before the bruschetta came. “I hope this doesn’t sound odd, but I’m looking for some people I know but haven’t met.” And so another librarian in both real and Second life squeezed into the booth.
We were attending the ALA’s mid-winter conference in Philadelphia, January 2008, where the exhilarating first meeting of the member-initiated group Virtual Communities and Libraries had just taken place. Librarians had been slow to jump into the Web in the early days; they wouldn’t make that mistake again. They took pride in the fact that they were early adopters of any number of technological innovations, particularly virtual worlds, and the room where they met that afternoon was crackling with something I’d rarely seen in a librarian gathering—palpable excitement. I had sat next to Joe Sanchez, a young linebacker-sized librarian from the University of Texas at Austin, who was conducting ambitious research projects in Second Life with his library science students. We traded notes, and he showed me his maxed-out MacBook Pro. “It’s a little hot-rod,” he bragged.
Now the wine flowed and giddiness took over. “Who else have you met?” everyone wanted to know. One of the assembled had attended the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey, California, and met J. J. Drinkwater. “And he’s just as courtly and gracious a gentleman as he is in Second Life.” There were many exclamations of admiration for J.J. and the community he has helped foster online. “But isn’t J.J. a she?” I said. “Oh, no!” I was told, forcefully. Had I misread J.J.’s transformation?
Kemp ran off to find us a bigger and more comfortable spot, and called minutes later; he was down an alley off Spruce, at a Tudor-style bar with a great long table like something from Beowulf. Rhonda Trueman (Abbey Zenith) and others were waiting there. Another crackpot tea party, this one with humans.
We ordered food and wine and drank toasts to the avatar-friends who couldn’t join us for this jolly evening, like Lori Bell, who would have loved to hear her efforts praised in person but was sidelined with a sprained ankle. The bar began filling up with other patrons, the noise level rose. I realized something was strange when I went to look for the ladies’ room: there wasn’t a ladies’ room. The waiter grabbed my hand—“No trough for you, darling!”—and led me through a serving station to a broom closet with a toilet. When I rejoined the table and looked around, I saw only men at the other tables and on the bar stools, and a transvestite lurching past on high heels. I caught Trueman’s eye. “I was wondering when someone was going to notice,” she drawled.
It was all…well, forgive me, but it seemed like a scene from Second Life.
In the alley afterward, we milled around the steps of the bar, loath to end the fun. One of them grabbed my sleeve, the one who had so firmly set me straight about the great librarian of Caledon.
“You were right about J.J.,” I was told. “But we never say that. Ever.”
All right. Deep breath. J. J. Drinkwater, the avatar, was clearly a mister. But J. J. Jacobson? For two years I had e-mailed and chatted with the librarian via computer without knowing, or feeling the need to know, the “real” sex of my correspondent. When I absolutely had to have a pronoun, I wrote Jacobson directly, who fired back a joke: “Mixed. Or the increasingly popular ‘It’s Complicated,’” then relented and gave me what I needed—a pronoun. In this case, a she.
“It’s Complicated” is much more interesting than she, but I can’t get hung up on this. What’s important is not which pronoun gets attached to this librarian, but what she has done. Jacobson has created a librarian-avatar who is not only useful to the community but also emblematic of its patrons’ intellectual aspirations, and a badge of civilized, even courtly, discourse—a status symbol that demonstrates the value they placed on literature and history.
J. J. Jacobson had teamed up with another librarian from Second Life to make a presentation at the ALA annual conference in 2008. “Those who stopped by were most interested and curious,” she told me afterward, “but the thing our visitors had the hardest time wrapping their heads around was that our libraries are not the in-world presence of some brick-and-mortar library but have an independent existence.”
It was hard to fathom that you could go to the Human Sexuality collection in the Alliance Virtual Library and immediately have at your fingertips the distilled resources of the Web on the topic of gender; or that the most useful collection of instant reference sources, from dictionaries to news outlets, had been gathered by Rhonda Trueman at the plaza on Info Island. These collections—assembled, defined, and used within Second Life—shared the additional advantage of the real-life library: they existed in a community of patrons and librarians. It’s just that the Second Life patrons and librarians happened to look like Miss Universe, Fritz the Cat, Mr. Clean in Renaissance garb, and Prospector Pete.
There were several academic degrees in J. J. Jacobson’s pocket, including a master’s in information science, and an endless enthusiasm for librarianship. But what made her special was an aspect of the job that is not much called for in a brick-and-mortar setting, though it can make or break a librarian in Second Life. “Harmless role-playing” was how she described it. “If I talk to people in a serious and encouraging way about their research interests, and if I can get excited and find them resources, that invites them further into their research. I try to get them to volunteer for the Caledon library. I notice I can make them feel that they have something to bring to Caledon. That goes hand in hand with what a community library can do: reflect back to a community its culture, show them how rich it is, and how they’re connected—which is what archives have always done: they show a society its culture, its heritage. They say this is who you are.”
Got that? J. J. Drinkwater is the metaphor and front man for an active librarian who researches and creates exhibits, conducts book discussions, and serves patrons, just like a regular librarian, though with an exaggerated flourish. Behind the scenes, while busy with bibliographies and programs and consultations with colleagues in various real-world work spaces, the real librarian keeps her computer screen open to Second Life and Drinkwater’s Caledon office, a glassed-in aerie furnished with an antique desk and tools. It acts as her visual wallpaper. “Somehow it’s a great
environment for working.” She has almost daily conversations with her frequent collaborator, Gabrielle Riel of Radio Riel. “Her human and my human talk on the phone.” The librarian and the radio director are “two small business owners, trying to run professional-style businesses on people’s TV time.” Jacobson admitted there might come a day when she would move on from Second Life, though I couldn’t picture it. There were other virtual worlds out there, and still more in the planning stages. For a while, there was a prototype of a virtual world of Shakespeare. “My God, a virtual world of Shakespeare!” Jacobson enthused. “‘If it were now to die/’Twere now to be most happy’!”
Meanwhile, when a full-time consulting job in Ann Arbor sidelined Jacobson briefly, she complained that “trying to run an imaginary library is kicking my pixilated butt with a pixilated shoe.” But she knew that I knew that she was joking about that “imaginary.”
Dave Mewhinney told me he was sick. I had talked to him many times in his avatar forms: as Haldin Koba, holding court at Info Plaza or the librarian parties, and as Lena Kjeller, in a bustle and lace-up boots, pointing proudly to the billboard that proclaimed her volunteer librarian of the month. Mewhinney’s wife, Holly Peters (her avatar was Hollyjean, the Infomaniac and ebullient hostess), had dragged him onto Second Life shortly after his diagnosis. The couple had been looking for cancer resources when they stumbled on the reference librarians on Info Island. Within months, Mewhinney had thrown himself into reference work, meeting Hypatia Dejavu’s exacting standards and putting his time and research skills to satisfying use. Then the Deadwood sim opened, and Mewhinney discovered his inner Lena. The last few times we met, we talked about Deadwood and its library. I was going to visit the historic sim, dress in frontier costume, and sit with Lena Kjellar at the library for an afternoon. Perhaps one of the Deadwood residents, pretending to be illiterate, would wander in and ask the librarian to look something up. That would have been sweet.
But late in 2008, Peters sent word that her husband had been hospitalized and was in intensive care. The cancer he’d managed for two and a half years was no longer responding to treatment. One of the Second Life librarians organized a site near the reference plaza dedicated to Haldin/Lena, where we could leave messages and gifts, so Peters could take a laptop into his hospital room and show him the best wishes and farewells from his many friends.
I called him a friend twice, as Haldin and as Lena, the way social networking sites have you “friend” each other to be in the same network. He and Lena were valuable sources, and I was fascinated by Mewhinney’s story. It’s funny, isn’t it, that an older man, an electrical engineer and railroad freak with a basement of model trains, could turn himself into a frontier librarian, complete with curls and a bustled gown? And not just because a twenty-first-century male engineer was inhabiting the skirts and spirit of a nineteenth-century female librarian. Mewhinney had turned his search for health information into a position on a triple frontier—in the fictional frontier library of Deadwood, on the frontier of Second Life, and at the front of cyber-librarianship.
Surreal as it seemed, the digital avatars, Lena and Haldin, would die along with the man who animated them—evidence that the virtual world is also real and, however malleable, subject to some of the same, distressingly real, limitations.
10.
GOTHAM CITY
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, at the intersection of rapid change and financial meltdown, some of its librarians carve out a niche, some get iced out, and some help plan the future of the libraries and how we use them.
David Smith used to recognize writers when he worked at the beautiful old Doubleday Bookstore on Fifth Avenue. He remembered spotting J. Anthony Lukas, author of Common Ground and other award-winning political books. When a job in the periodicals department opened up at the New York Public Library, the big marble edifice with the lions in front, Smith took it, then earned a master’s degree in his spare time and became a librarian. One day Smith was at his post at the reference desk, a burnished-wood structure that lends all business conducted there a solemn importance, when J. Anthony Lukas approached and gave him a call slip.
This library is huge. It encompasses two city blocks, millions of items, miles of shelves, hundreds of librarians, a cavernous storage space beneath Bryant Park, the whole thing humming like a freeway. You locate what you want in the digital catalog, an ever-expanding index of knowledge. You write down your name and the particulars of the item, its call number and title, on an old-fashioned copy slip with a stubby pencil. You have just used the most sophisticated tool in the library and the least sophisticated; the twenty-first-century library embraces both. Smith, or another reference librarian, checks the call number against a map of the library, tucks the slip into one of the 1911-era brass tubes, and sends your request whizzing through pneumatic pipes to a station deep in the building’s bowels. If you’re lucky, the book is where it is supposed to be and arrives at the call desk on a conveyer belt; the slip you sent out like a prayer is answered. If the gods aren’t smiling, or your request is incomplete, you get your slip handed back to you.
Lukas could untangle the complications of the desegregation conflict in 1960s and ’70s Boston and tease out stories from the secretive Nixon White House, but he couldn’t get the book he wanted from the NYPL. Smith returned his slip with an apology and explained what was missing from his request. “What’s wrong? Jesus! One more thing!” the writer muttered as he walked away—so the librarian recalls. “The guy always seemed down.” Smith kicks himself every time he thinks about it. Two years later, Lukas died, a suicide. Surely the failure to obtain a library book isn’t grounds for despair, but “if it were today,” Smith vowed. “I’d go and find the book myself.”
It was his first inkling that writers needed special attention, but at the time, Smith was too young and shy to introduce himself. Later, as a seasoned librarian, he used what he called his “radar for writers” and swooped in immediately. He saw a prominent critic, standing in line with a cane, ushered him to a table, and personally delivered his books. If Smith thought he recognized a name, he Googled it to make sure, then pressed his business card into their hands. “Let me know if I can do anything to help,” he’d say.
A guy in his fifties in rimless glasses and a pullover sweater, Smith seemed like a throwback. He hunt-and-pecked on the keyboard; he didn’t care about blogs or any of that virtual-world stuff. It annoyed him when the NYPL software migrated and wiped out all his old e-mails; that was his filing system for his correspondence. “I don’t even know what migration means,” he grumbled.
But Smith was an indefatigable reference librarian whose skills were particularly suited to this transitional age. He was expert at navigating online sources, and he could wring things out of Google that I couldn’t find. And if the digital catalog said something wasn’t in the library, well, he always regarded the digital catalog as a work-in-progress and checked a print source to back it up, like the eight-hundred-volume “black book catalog,” a compilation of the laboriously copied images of the old NYPL card catalog. He searched everything.
A few years ago, historian James W. Cook was trying to compile a P. T. Barnum reader and was hunting the holy grail of Barnum scholarship—the last few chapters of Barnum’s semiautobiographical novella, Adventures of an Adventurer, which had appeared in serial newspaper installments in the old New York Atlas. The 1841 issues of the paper had disappeared from libraries, but Cook sent a query to the NYPL reference desk just in case. After checking the library’s online catalog, Smith combed the “black book,” finding a reference to the paper that hadn’t made it into the digital record. He located the newspapers in storage, where they had been “forgotten and invisible, for almost a century,” as Cook wrote subsequently in The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader. Smith called the historian when he found them. “You just made my book,” Cook told him.
Smith became so identified as the writers’ librarian that he was profiled in th
e New York Times in late 2007 as “The Library’s Helpful Sage of the Stacks.” He was pictured beaming up from his desk, tucked in a cubby behind the reference area in the Bill Blass Catalog Room, surrounded by a mess of books and papers and a fringe of Post-it notes. An eclectic ring of books had been planted like flags around the top of his partition, the work of some of the writers he had helped: James Brady, Edna O’Brien, Daniel Okrent, David Halberstam, and a host of the less well known.
Smith read them all. He read everything he could by the writers he helped, recommending their books to others, even buying secondhand copies to pass out to friends and random readers. He’d tell the story of any of these books to anyone, the story the book itself told—“It’s fantastic. You’ve got to read it!”—and the meta-story of how he had intersected with it, helped the author find something, or came in on his day off to help pull research. He’d pick up one of these books to read aloud a great passage, or show off the line where he was thanked in the acknowledgments. “‘The peerless David Smith,’” he’d say with relish.
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