Museums and Digital Culture - Pratt Institute
By: Kira Zimmerman
Tags: Digital Strategy, Accessibility, Libraries, Interview, Museums

The Rossell Hope Robbins Library & Koller-Collins Center for English Studies

As of March 2021, libraries and museums are confronting the reality of returning to a “new normal” — one marred by a collective trauma unique in its depth, breadth, and effect on long-term community service and collection management practice. But the staff who run these spaces have not lost sight of their short-and long-term projects, digital strategies, or dedication toward building more service-oriented, sustainable spaces. It was my pleasure to speak with Dr. Anna Siebach-Larsen, the director of the Rossell Hope Robbins Library at the University of Rochester, about her team’s digital strategy both before and in the face of COVID.

Anna Siebach-Larsen, Director of the Rossell Hope Robbins Library & Koller-Collins Center for English Studies

Robbins Library is a non-circulating medieval studies library that contains comprehensive holdings across medieval history, literature, art, and culture (including a full-size book wheel, shown above, and a substantial collection of rare books and incunabula). Siebach-Larsen, who holds a PhD in medieval studies from Notre Dame, joined Robbins in 2017, where she co-curates the early print collections and oversees the medieval and early modern manuscript collections. I begin our conversation with the intent of understanding Robbins’ broad approach to digital.

Does your library have a digital content strategy?

There are a few different strategies, and some of them intertwine. Some of our digital content depends on what other departments do, especially Rare Books and Special Collections. That would be anything with our manuscripts collection. So that relies on what we’re doing, and what their strategies and their priorities are, and then also what the priorities are for the rest of the library organization because that requires so much infrastructure. So in terms of those collections, medium- and long-term, ideally what we’d like to have happen is to have all of those available online in IIIF-compatible formats, so that those can be plugged in with other large-scale digital projects surrounding medieval studies. So that’s the goal with that! For other digital content, our strategy and our goal is to make our collections as accessible to as many people as possible.

You’ve mentioned that the core objectives are interest and accessibility. Do you subdivide your content strategy based on objective — for example, for Facebook versus Twitter, or for a popular audience rather than an academic audience?

To a point, yes. We tend to cross-post the same things on Twitter and Instagram, and I might modify the caption a bit to provide a little more bibliographic information on Instagram, and I think of our Twitter audience as being an international audience and probably the most engaged of all of our audiences.

(Siebach-Larsen and I actually connected about this interview on Twitter after following each other for several weeks. I nod to this here, joking that Twitter’s where the real nerds are.)

That’s where most people are! I think that Instagram is mostly other libraries and museums that follow us. And Facebook — we post on Facebook the least, because Facebook is primarily where we post events and other things that are for our local community.

(Regarding Robbins’ social media strategy, Siebach-Larsen explains that, because Robbins has such a small staff — there are only two full-time staff members, including her — , their entire content strategy all went by the wayside with the pandemic. At the moment, Siebach-Larsen is running an unusually empty library; COVID-19 is keeping most of the regular grad student working staff off campus.)

Now, we’re just balancing the, “It does great things, but…” Is it (social media) the be all and end all? No, it’s not.

I’m going to follow up with a few questions on that specific work (I’m referring to several digital projects ongoing at Robbins, including the Middle English Text Series (METS), The Alexander Project, and an open source notarial signatures database that uses machine recognition to identify and match notaries, using user-uploaded images that users can annotate and collate). What are the main opportunities you see in upcoming technologies?

Assorted illustrations, 1927, Sir W. Russell Flint in Le Morte D’Arthur: The History of King Arthur and his Noble Knights of the Round Table, print, digitized courtesy of the Camelot Project and Rossell Hope Robbins Library

Those kinds of projects (Siebach-Larsen is responding to a prompt referring to the University of Pennsylvania’s VisColl) are ones I’ve been thinking about a lot since I got to Rochester in terms of our medieval manuscript collection because it is really unknown, including here in Rochester. I think the way that those technologies they’re developing (at Penn, at Stanford) can bring together collections from around the world is really powerful for smaller institutions like ours, with smaller collections and also with smaller staff. The challenge, of course, is that we have smaller staff. And so we end up having to be a little scrappier and think a little bit about, “Okay, so what are the pockets of time we have in order to get these things up and to connect them to projects like Fragmentarium, that kind of thing?”

(Fragmentarium is one of the really neat pieces of collaborative digital humanities scholarship coming out of medieval studies right now.)

I really think that those kinds of projects are the future. And I think that there is a serious barrier to participation, because if institutions like ours are going to have to rely on really generous and fabulous grants from places like the NEH and CLIR in order to have the time to get our metadata online, our manuscripts online — you know, that’s a pretty big barrier. So I’m interested in, as a field, us talking more about how we can lower those barriers to access, because it’s tricky.

Open source only goes so far.

Yeah. Open source only goes so far, and it doesn’t do the work for you. I love open source, especially as we work on things like METS, as we’re completely overhauling our online editions, and as we think about putting our medieval manuscripts collection online — open source is so fabulous. But I think it’s important for administration to realize that, and it’s important for users to realize that, because people want everything digitized and people want everything accessible, but it’s got to get there.

“Robin Hood and Little John,” 1912, Louis Rhead in Bold Robin Hood and His Outlaw Band: Their Famous Exploits in Sherwood Forest, print, digitized courtesy of the Robin Hood Project and Rossell Hope Robbins Library

Who are your target audiences in terms of digital strategy — social media and METS, for example, but also your other projects?

So let’s start with our digital projects. With the Camelot Project, it is scholars of Arthuriana — and scholars really broadly construed, as anybody who is interested in it and working on it — and then the general public. In terms of METS, it is explicitly geared both toward scholars and novices who are working with medieval texts for the first time.

(Siebach-Larsen pauses before naming an audience of more and less experienced scholars, elaborating that students are researchers and therefore it is not accurate to appeal to them separately.)

Both of those are international projects, and we know from our analytics that people from around the world are using those sites really regularly.

(I note how interesting it is that Robbins’ digital strategy focuses on beginning researchers; I haven’t heard that necessarily highlighted by a medievalism collection before.)

Yeah, and it’s one of the things that I really love about it and really sets us apart: that we are that inclusive in terms of who we want to use our collections, and also what’s in our collections. METS was founded by Russell Peck, and he did it in conjunction with TEAMS (The Teaching Association for Medieval Studies), so it has that really strong pedagogical function to it while still wanting to meet the needs of the most rigorous scholarship. Going back to social media, our audiences are pretty similar. For Twitter, I think about it as international and we definitely have a wider range of academics from around the world, other institutions, other libraries, museums, and people who are just interested in the Middle Ages, which is a large group. Instagram is mostly other libraries and museums and then people who are here in Rochester who follow us on Instagram. And then Facebook: our audience there is alums, the broader library community here at the University of Rochester, and people who are here right now. That one tends to be people who have physically been to the library and then follow us on Facebook.

How has the library changed its strategy during the pandemic in terms of planning to incorporate new technology into public programming?

(Siebach-Larsen envisions Robbins Library as a place “where people experience books and literary culture as much with their hands as with their minds.” COVID threw a wrench in this vision — at least, in its traditional interpretation.)

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. So many libraries and museums have really been pushing out huge amounts of virtual programming and we actually decided not to do that because so many other places were doing it. There are so many opportunities! And I know that I am tired of being on a computer all day and other people are probably tired of being on a computer all day, and I felt it would be a better use of our time just to highlight the things that are going on elsewhere.

(“These things” are a number of reading groups and working groups that have moved online, as well as a series of events coming up in conjunction with a digital exhibit by the Robbins’ dissertation fellow.)

I’m really hopeful we’ll be able to ride this wave of virtual access to really start prioritizing some of our digital projects like this METS overhaul, but also making our manuscript collections available, that kind of thing. So it’s a little bit of strategizing — can we leverage this, will we have time to work on this, so on.

“Cinderella,” 1876, W. Gunston in From Coloured Designs by W. Gunston, print, digitized courtesy of the Cinderella Bibliography and Rossell Hope Robbins Library

When you’re strategizing for either the near future or for the “after the pandemic,” which I know is such a grey area, what are the main challenges that you’re already anticipating having to overcome?

The first thing that comes to mind isn’t a question about technology or anything, but the first thing I think of is actually our collective trauma about what we’ve experienced over the last however-long-this-ends-up-being. I think that people will want to engage in community, I think that they’ll want to engage in research, but I think that it’s going to take us a while to get used to doing that and to think about doing it in ways that feel safe and comfortable to us. I don’t think that people will want to continue to do everything online — I know that people won’t want to do all of their research online with online resources — so I think it’s a question of figuring out what that balance is between accessibility, which I think is both digital and physical — I think offering both of those things it is really important. I think, with all of our digital strategy, not just in terms of the content that we have but the people who are using it — and our community is both international and it’s here — , that rebuilding that community is our greatest challenge.

What are some of the changes you think museums and libraries will have to make to heal?

I think about this a lot. I think that one of the first steps is to connect with, to talk with, and to listen to the people who work in the library or the museum. They may have been furloughed over this past year, they may have had their pay reduced, they may have loved ones who have passed away, they may be doing two jobs or three jobs instead of one, and then they may be working an extra job on top of those other ones — and the communities that we’re in, whether they’re virtual or in person, they’re experiencing the same thing. And it seems like a really really basic question, but I think it is maybe the thing that is being overlooked the most, which is to stop and take some time to talk to the people who make up your community, the people who are on your staff, and just listen to what they need and listen to what it is that they’re feeling. And I think that that is the first, and one of the absolute hardest steps, because the next step is to make a plan based on what you’re hearing.

It’ll be interesting seeing what next steps are and what folks come up with.

I think that institutions have to recognize that people are watching them in a new way. And now that everything is, at least right now, online — people are really watching.