NYPL cut-away view of the stacks from the Digital Gallery

http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm

Introduction

Welcome to "Researching a Photography Project," a workshop for ICP Students that will be held on October 20-21, 2012.

This blog is an attempt to have hyperlinked notes and resources for the students to refer to after the intensive weekend tour, as well as provide the instructor with a place to drop all of the content that needs to be added before, during and even after the class.

The photograph, above, is a view of one wall of books in the home office of the late Cornell Capa, ICP's founder, and an exemplar of the practice this class hopes to foster - feeding the brain of the photographer great resources and thereby aiding the value and meaning of the work they do.

Class Schedule

Saturday

10 am - 1pm in DML Class Intro

1-2pm Lunch
2-3:15 DML

3:15 pm Walk around the corner to NYPL Schwarzman Library entrance Fifth Ave & 42nd Street.
3:30 - 5 pm Class in South Court Classroom and NYPL

Sunday

10am-noon Demonstrating resources on the open web
noon-1pm Compiling your results
1 -2pm Lunch break
2-4pm Practical time - pursue some research with your Librarian on hand to answer questions and assist with selecting resources for your journey
4-5pm

Great Researching Photographers/Artists

I am neither great nor a photographer, but, if you show up on time Saturday, I will start with a story I will call, "Why I want to teach this class, or, my boring story about knowledge sustains me and always has." Then, once the caffeine has kicked in, and the other half of the class shows up, I will start getting more serious.

In an effort to demonstrate how valuable research skills are, I will highlight some photographers I admire whose work researching their projects not only provides them with a solid foundation, but adds intelligence to everything they do.

Rachel Sussman

She has spent years stalking the world's oldest living things to photograph them - TED video linked, above.

Taryn Simon

She says it better than I can - watch the TED video I linked to here!

Susan Meiselas

The book In History that ICP has published with Steidl is a testament to fact that Meiselas is a researcher served by her camera. She has also gradually become an archivist of other people's pictures and stories for the very reason that she recognizes the value of preserving information to keep it safe and available to researchers in the future.

Raphael Dallaporta

Dallaporta is a young French photographer who has already made quite a mark by formulating strong bodies of work that each require a considerable amount of research. Anti-Personnel, a project that was recently exhibited in New York at Silverstein Gallery, is an example of a project that weaves together informational and technical details in order to convey a larger, philosophical, message.

He lectured last year at ICP the week he won the Infinity Award - check it out: May 6, 2010.

Larry Towell

Larry Towell is more than a Magnum photographer. He is a multi-media artist and writer whose work is educational without being didactic. Like Meiselas, he steeps himself in his topics, which are as diverse as they are complex.

Jacqueline Hassink

Hassink is a Dutch photographer who is the daughter of a CEO, and has a great head for business and market research. Her conceptual photographic work is often conducted like market research. She does a lot of preparatory studying before embarking upon a project, like studying the Fortune 500 lists, the offices of Silicon Valley, Car Shows, etc.

I see a lot of photography in books, museums, and galleries, and I can tell in a few moments what projects have a strong base of knowledge gathering beneath them. If you want your work to have real credibility and added value, you will become a researcher par excellence.

Joachim Schmid, Tamas Revesz, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Channarin, Philippe Gronon, Ed Kashi, David Maisel, Ken Schles, Christian Boltanski, Vic Muniz, Dieter Appelt, Bill Burke, Ron Haviv, Antonin Kratochvil, Sebastiao Salgado, James Nachtwey, Candida Hofer, Thomas Struth, Gerhard Richter, Jules Spinatsch, Shomei Tomatsu, Josef Koudelka, Danny Lyon, Gilles Peress, and more and more photographers get maximum bang out of their work by being well-informed first. Some of them are ICP Library patrons...can you guess which ones?

I always am pleased to see an artist actually documented working in a library. Here is Josiah McIlhenny on Art 21.

Nowadays, there is a vibrant strain of research-based art which you can learn more about from journals like Cabinet and E-Flux.

There are entities like the Center for Land-Use Interpretation "CLUI" [based in Culver City, California], and its neighbor, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, that may stimulate your artistic curiosity, as well. They are both the result of scholarly inquiry colliding with art practice in a meaningful way.

Great Libraries - Finding them and using them.

The most important lesson of all is to find reliable, sympathetic and knowledgeable librarians and make the most use of them. You met Arezoo Moseni in September and this weekend you will meet a couple more helpful NYPL reference librarians; Brooke Watkins and Laverne Clark. These folks are pros, who help with the research for thousands of queries each year, and no class can teach you where all of the possible places are for finding information, so identify who the best librarians are for your cause and make the time to ask them questions.

One way to find your way to the right library for your needs is to search a "meta-catalog" that aggregates the holdings of many libraries. That way you will find out which libraries contain the best information for your cause.

Worldcat

This the most enormous catalog of them all. Its scope is international and, while not entirely comprehensive, it promises the biggest return for your search.

A local selection of libraries:

The New York Public Library Research Libraries

The Humanities and Social Sciences Library

There are so many collections in the Humanities Library.

Useful ones that you should know about:

The Irma and Paul Milstein Divistion of United States History, Local History and Geneology

They have access and resources related to vital Records, Census Records, City Directories, and Family Histories. Access to Ancestry.com there avails you of beautiful historical documents online, such as military records, census records, etc.

SIBL Services

A Directory of SIBL Research Guides you can print out

See the video "The SIBL Experience"

A list of Information Services at SIBL

Here's something good for you from the NYPL reference team:

Digital Photography Resources

All of the brains at NYPL got together and organized a list of resources on may topics for you to browse, particularly if you have a topic that is partly one field and partly another.

Some tips from Laverne Clarke, a great SIBL Librarian who makes photographs too:

"Call Ahead" service for Off-site Requests e-mail callaheadsibl@nypl.org

SIBL e-reference: Please get in touch if you have any questions e-mail sibleref@nypl.org

Remember: a flash drive is lighter than a laptop, but both can be used to save and carry out articles and citations you find in any of their subscription databases.

The New York Public Library Branch Libraries

Obvious Choices

Museum of Modern Art Library

Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Less Known Special Places

The General Society Library

New York Society Library

The Reference Interview, or, "Popping the Question"

Knowing what exists

Of course, you don't. There is information that can be found in a variety of forms: books, articles, statistics, profiles, archives, audio-visual materials [aka films], e-books, MP3s, etc, and you will need to know how to get to each kind of material in the most efficient manner. Reference librarians excel at connecting you to your desired information in the desired form.

You will need to have a clear enough query for them to work on, though. It should be as specific as possible, and articulated in a way that they can ascertain what the subject search should look like. Fortunately for you, that is a part of their training. The main thing is to distill the essence of what you are seeking, and be specific.

Librarians convert your interest into what is called "controlled language" to search for items that have had subject headings attached to them in order to "disambiguate" them. This is one way that a library search leapfrogs over the capabilities of even the most sophisticated search engine.

Your friendly neighborhood librarians:

Arezoo Moseni, Art Librarian, Mid-Manhattan Library

amoseni@nypl.org

Matthew Carson, Associate Librarian/Archivist, ICP
mcarson@icp.org

Deirdre Donohue, Stephanie Shuman Librarian, ICP

ddonohue@icp.org

Natalia Rand, Associate Librarian, ICP
nrand@icp.org

Brooke Watkins, Reference Librarian, NYPL
bwatkins@nypl.org

If you cannot reach a librarian, you can try some of their shared tools to find your way through catalogs. There are subject and name authorities that will help you navigate your way along.

Search Library of Congress Authorities

Search Getty Vocabularies

This is the first step in you being able to convert your "natural language" questions into a "controlled language" search format, as well as considering related terms for your search you may not have already. Finally, name and geographic authorities confirm the currently accepted form for names so that you are getting the maximum amount of material.

Compiling your findings

From A Studio Visit

The best time to start with a orderly research collection, bibliography or reference shelf [actual or virtual] is as soon as you have a research topic.

There are a variety of ways to compile this information so that it is easy to sort and access for reading and analysis, and the one you choose depends upon you comfort and ease and what format the information is in.

Here is a great compilation from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Watson Library:

Organize your research using online tools guide


Here are some tools:

del.icio.us

Google notebook

Some photographers use notebooks, too.

I want to introduce you to an open source tool that I am starting to use and love: ZOTERO!

Some How-tos

I am still learning it, but it has boundless capacity to both gather and reconfigure citations and materials.

The main thing is that you can cite your sources. Galleries, agencies, editors and museums will take your word for what you say is a fact in your work or supporting it, but if it cannot be backed up with an accessible citation, you will not be in good shape at all, and will lose more than face.

The Big Search

Worldcat is the name for the richest book database in the world. Librarians who subscribe to its parent database, OCLC, and can search it to determine for you where books and other items can be found in the world. You can also search it yourself via the web if you do not have a librarian handy.

If you have a vast topic to research, this is a good place to start. You can learn a lot just by reading the catalog records before you even have the books in hand. Some of what you learn can be used to either narrow your search, or hone your topic.

It is not fully intuitive. We will review some search strategies to make the best of it. The "open web" version is not as full of books as the one you can access with your NYPL card, so we will be searching that version.

Worldcat

http://www.worldcat.org/