Letter of Transmittal
A lot has happened since the first Stacks Explorer!
I worked at Green Apple Books for a few years before finally landing an amazing job with California Digital Libraries. My spouse and I bought a condo in Civic Center and adopted a cat. Sara & Bob had a baby two babies and Richard & Casey got hitched. There was a worldwide pandemic; Global authoritarianism reared its ugly head; And active ground wars began in Myanmar, Ukraine, and Gaza. And a few months after my 40th birthday, I was officially diagnosed with ASD (level 1). I'm still digesting this last one, but in retrospect of course it was there all along: Happily tackling projects like this one, with thousands of moving parts in need of organization and alignment... who knew, right? lol
Over at the Prelinger Library, the monthslong Covid closure presented an opportunity to reassess, reevaluate, and reorganize the collection. Megan, Rick, and Jay literally took the library apart and put it back together: Every book unseated, every shelf dusted, the collection carefully pruned and replanted. This was a massive undertaking. With the collection thusly refreshed, Megan & Rick asked me to thusly refresh the Stacks Explorer. With the dovetailed benefits of 20/20 hindsight from the first go-round and an expanded technical palette from my CDL gig, I happily accepted.
STACKS EXPLORER 2 features a renewed emphasis on the "look first, query later" ethos, a new set of higher-quality photos, more complex tooling resulting in a less complex user experience, and better mobile compatibility (though of course a larger screen is generally better for this kind of site).
Anyway I hope you like it!
Feel free to drop me a line.
Cheers!
A Million Utopian Afternoons
I have a hard time with change.
I wear my favorite clothes until they're threadbare, become a little distraught when switching jobs (even when it's a positive move), and dislike when software auto-updates because it often feels different.
I've been working on this project (very on-and-off) for four years; But here in the final stretch, my mind keeps inventing new tasks to avoid saying "this is ready to go." But I've scoured the JS for lets that could be consts -- and really, drafting these final remarks is all that remains.
Coffee, as they say, is for closers.
*
I want to speak for a moment about the library's layout and how my view of it has changed over time.
When Megan first took me through the layout, I perceived it, I think, mainly as an artwork, using the physical form of a library as the media. As I became more familiar with the it via the Stacks Explorer (and moreso explaining it to visitors), I became more interested in its structural particulars: The specific points of connection within the contiguous flow of ideas.
When I eventually started my MLIS, I encountered the theory and development of the big-name systems like LOC and DDC, which aim to provide a comprehensive framework for classifying all knowledge (or put another way, all human experience). The role of a cataloger provides some wiggle room here, but the systems themselves are organized around rigid expectations of how certain ideas should relate to one another, and of ideas' relative importance via their hierarchical placement. These systems point to a way of being in the world involving an unhealthy preoccupation with precision; an inflexibility under the cumulative weight of seeing things in one way only; an induced stasis. These are characteristics I see in myself when I'm at my worst: A mouse endlessly pressing the lever long after the cheese has run out.
But a layout like the Prelinger's instead points to the unending potential for individual ways of knowing; the subjective core of each person's lived experience. Here, full circle, the library's layout once again shares more with the activity, the purpose, of art. A library designed this way generates questions rather than answers; It is a starting point rather than a final outcome; A constant reminder that the occasional transposition of ideas from one place to another is both healthy and interesting; That change can be embraced rather than resisted.
Megan once described the oddly-placed bank of Television material in Stack 4 as the spillover from the breaking wave of Stack 5, where the rest of the broadcast-related material is housed. The world needs more libraries like this.
*
It's hard to express how much Megan & Rick and their Library have impacted my life. I've hosted hundreds of visitors over the years, and in walking with them, encountered just as many ways of experiencing the world and unexpected lines of inquiry. There are so few places like this; social spaces centered on tangents of the mind, operated in a spirit of hospitable anarchy. I still find it incredible that I essentially wandered in here one day and never left: A stray cat plucked from the gutter, bathed, tiaraed, served Fancy Feast in a crystal dish -- at least, this is how I felt it. How I feel it still!
But back to the matter at hand: Like all homebrew software, in the coming weeks I'm sure we'll find kinks to work out, crossed wires to untangle, typos to fix.
As I take a sabbatical from hosting to assess my time management with an increased workload, I'm filled with gratitude for the path the Prelingers have encouraged me to walk. And I remind myself that this, of course, is not an end but the starting point of some new, weird tangent.
- Devin