John Payne Collier and Finding Aids at Folger Library

John Payne Collier (1789-1883)* was a 19th Century English literary scholar, Shakespeare expert and publisher. He was quite respected in his day. But over time, it came to light Collier forged some of the data he used to justify some literary "discoveries." He is still respected, but he's a controversial fellow within the domain of Shakespeare Studies. 

The Folger Shakespeare Library has a large collection of writings by and letters to & from John Payne Collier in its collection. The library has gradually been creating online finding aids, coded in EAD metadata standards, for subsets of Collier related items in its holdings. Presently, I have been writing a new finding aid, one that will eventually be found in its finding aid database, for letters written from the early 1830s toward his death 50 + years later. This finding aid creation is accomplished via Archivists Toolkit, a fantastically useful piece of software that works as an interface between content keyed into the finding aid (such as Scope and Content and other archival description data) and the XML file that is processed through style sheets to produce the way the finding aid is structured for the open web - the way it looks. The value of this process is that each finding aid does not need to be coded from scratch in XML. It can, however, be edited later in Oxygen XML Editor to change content or to link items such as objects found in Folger's Luna Insight Digital Image database. 

The upshot is that my time interning on this project will result in publication of this latest collection finding aid - an action which will provide even better access to and promotion for Folger's superb collections.

* This link for Library of Congress' Authority Records connects the portal because each search is only available in discrete search-sessions.

A Thought on Linguistic Diversity and Classification

I have a tendency to believe linguistic diversity is also a sign of knowledge diversity and am very frustrated with attempts to globalize knowledge into one vast pot. I point to the impact of global mass communication content and technologies, the lack of allowing the "other" to truly be and the impact of the World's most widely used library classification system, Library of Congress Subject Headings. I am not taking a stance against The Library of Congress. I live in America and make use of their diverse resources regularly. Also, their main building is a work of architectural art. No, I question standardization of "knowledge" at the expense of diversity and questions. It seems to me that if we classify all the world's knowledge under one system (which is not the mission statement of the Library of Congress), then we have declared globally what everything in the world is "about." This action is accomplished by all kinds of groups around the world who write indexes to be LC compatible. But if those local knowledge resources and populations have to use another "aboutness" structure other than their own, have they not committed a kind of murder of their own knowledge system? Believe me, this is a bit scary. I am not sure that we can separate "knowledge" from "questions." I note this point because it seems to me to state up-front what something is about has already annihilated many potential questions - and thus knowledge types. How can this tendency sit well with ongoing questioning? Somehow, I feel this happens because we are afraid of uncertainty. This is not an overshadowing fear in this context, but a fear nonetheless. Surely it is different for different people. But why should we be afraid of conflicting and disagreeable classifications in information organization?