Thank you for your interest in METRO’s upcoming events! If you’d like to help shape our programming:
METRO also offers a limited number of scholarships to members who wish to participate in professional development events, networking opportunities, and learning programs (whether sponsored by METRO or not). All current individual members and institutional member employees are eligible to apply.
We are committed to providing a welcoming and productive environment for all. Please check out our Code of Conduct for more information. Please reach out to us with your events-related questions; our email address is [email protected], and our phone number is (212) 228-2320.
The School of Visual Arts (SVA) Library has recently renovated their West Side branch, which now facilitates more communication with faculty and students and has improved reference and instruction services.
While its primary purpose is to provide a point of service on the SVA campus' west side, the space also includes new features such as a wide screen with dual projectors and a gaming room with both traditional consoles and virtual reality systems. The library has partnered with other departments to plan a wide range of events held in Library West, including game nights, film screenings, poetry readings, and a series focused on SVA's Visual Narrative MFA program.
Please join us for a tour of the new space, and hear how SVA has been using it to expand access and services. We'll meet up in the front lobby, near the security desk, at 133/141 West 21st Street, between Sixth and Seventh Aves.
RSVP required. Space is limited!
Please join us on Thursday, March 7 for a special screening of the film Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, produced and directed by Jason Schmitt.
Our screening starts promptly at 5:30pm. After the viewing, Jason Schmitt will join a live Q&A session via video conference that will broadcast to screening locations throughout New York state.
Paywall: The Business of Scholarship is a documentary that focuses on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google.
Learn more about this film:
About Jason Schmitt, Producer and Director
Jason Schmitt serves as Chair of the Communication & Media Department at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY. He concentrates his research on online education impacting a global audience, open access relating to academic publications, and media industry future trends. He has been a regular contributor to Forbes, The Huffington Post, EdSurge, and Slate and is a regular on news outlets and radio for expert opinions revolving around societal implications associated with new media trends.
For more information about the movie or the team behind it visit paywallthemovie.com.
Reference Librarianship & Justice: Critical Interventions
Book Launch Celebration and Discussion
Friday, March 8
1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Happy hour with beer, wine, non-alcoholic beverages, and snacks to follow
Join us for a half day event to celebrate the recent publication of Reference Librarianship & Justice: History, Practice and Praxis.
METRO Library Council, along with the book’s editors, are hosting a dialogue and happy hour to continue the conversation on the history, application, and critical dimensions of reference services.
In the book and in this event, we stake out and explore the terrain of a critical, social-justice oriented, purposeful, and engaged reference practice. How and when do reference work and justice work overlap? What steps can be taken to further a reference practice that seeks justice? These questions, among many others, will be discussed through panels, lightning rounds, and breakout sessions.
12:30 p.m.
Doors open
1:15 p.m. - 1:55 p.m.
Panel Discussion: Social Justice and Reference
Panelists: Kate Adler, Ian Beilin, and Eamon Tewell
2:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
Presentations & Panel Discussion: Reference Services and Incarcerated People
Panelists: Mia Bruner, Joshua Finnell, and Emily Jacobson
2:45 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Break
3:00 p.m. - 3:55 p.m.
Lightning Rounds: The History and Praxis of Reference and Justice
Speakers: Jeff Hirschy, Michelle Notto, and Haruko Yamauchi
4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Breakout Sessions: Exploring the Practice of Reference and Justice
Facilitator: Julia Marden
5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Happy hour with beer, wine, non-alcoholic beverages, and snacks
Registration fees for this event are $20 for METRO members and $40 for non-members. If these fees present a hardship for you, please contact [email protected] for special pricing.
Kindly register by Wednesday, March 6.
Code, Craft & Catalogues: Arts in the Libraries
What role do the arts and design play in today’s libraries? Our major public institutions frequently commission high-profile public art, some libraries feature dedicated exhibition space, and artists and designers have long drawn inspiration from archival and library collections. Yet today, as we access and create knowledge through an expanding array of designed platforms and interfaces, infrastructures and algorithms, aesthetic operations are integral to the core services that libraries provide. We see a growing number of library- and archive-based artists’ residencies and exhibitions, and expanding interest in more sustained collaborations across the library and art worlds. In this symposium we gather librarians, artists, designers, and representatives from allied fields to examine recent examples of library-centered creative practice, discuss the mutual benefits of such collaborations, and propose new models for growing and sustaining these partnerships.
Live-documentation by Neta Bomani & Cybernetics Library.
Agenda:
1:00 PM - 1:15 PM
Introductions: Nate Hill, Shannon Mattern
1:15 PM - 2:15 PM
Panel 1: Privacy in Public: Digital Privacy in NYC
2:15 PM - 2:45 PM
Break
2:45 PM - 4:00 PM
Panel 2: Helsinki / The Library's Other Intelligences @ Oodi
4:00 PM - 4:15 PM
Break
4:15 PM - 5:30 PM
Panel 3: Group Show: An Assortment of Interventions
5:30 PM
Reception
There is no fee to attend this event, but registration is required. We look forward to seeing you!
About our speakers:
Salome Asega is an artist and researcher whose practice celebrates dissensus and multivocality. She is currently a Technology Fellow in the Ford Foundation's Creativity and Free Expression program and Director of Partnerships at POWRPLNT, a digital art collaboratory in Bushwick. Salome has participated in residencies and fellowships with Eyebeam, New Museum, The Laundromat Project, and Recess. She has exhibited and given presentations at the Shanghai Biennale, Performa, EYEO, and the Brooklyn Museum. Salome received her MFA from Parsons at The New School in Design and Technology where she also teaches.
neta bomani is a black, first generation american born, multicultural east african person of tanzanian-malawian lineage. neta participates in an anti-art practice which is inclusionary and invites participation from black and brown communities. neta seeks to reveal rather than conceal social precarity and inequality through the use of tangible, accessible media such as computational objects and abolitionist gestures of resistance like organizing and making archives, writings, prints, zines, maps and circuits.
Greta Byrum reimagines the way we design, build, and govern communications systems. As Co-Director of the Digital Equity Laboratory at The New School, she builds digital justice through applied research, community projects, and policy strategy. Previously Greta built the Resilient Communities program at New America, where she developed and led Resilient Networks NYC, an initiative bringing training and for storm-hardened mesh WiFi to five neighborhoods in NYC's flood zones. Her poems have appeared in the Colorado Review, the Denver Quarterly, and various open FM frequencies.
Ilari Laamanen is a Project Manager at the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and a co-founder of the transatlantic fellowship program MOBIUS. With a background in curatorial and media studies, he focuses on interdisciplinary projects, commissioning new works, and collaborating with a broad spectrum of partners. Recent curatorial work include fashion after Fashion at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, and Momentum 9 Biennial in Moss, Norway. He is currently working on a publication on environmental and land art in Finland and the United States.
Shannon Mattern is a Professor at The New School. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces and infrastructures. She is the author of The New Downtown Library; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, all published by University of Minnesota Press. She contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places, a journal focusing on architecture, urbanism, and landscape, and she collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.
Trent Miller is an artist, curator, and the Head Bubblerarian at Madison Public Library, where he spearheads the library’s artist-focused program The Bubbler. Miller has orchestrated large-scale art events, including Bookless (2012), Stacked (2014), and MUNICIPAL (2018), which have been catalysts for other happenings in Madison and beyond. In 2015, Library Journal recognized him as a Mover & Shaker. Miller centers his energies on establishing the public library as a platform for creative and innovative art events, shows, and workshops and has recently expanded that vision by founding Library Artslink, a resource for facilitating collaborations between artists and libraries.
Laura Norris is a Service Manager at the Helsinki Central Library Oodi, which is the new public library in Helsinki. She has been in the library business for over 15 years. She started out as a librarian, and then worked for several years in library web services, marketing and events. Before her current position, she worked as the Chief Librarian of Kallio Library – the third-busiest public library in Helsinki. Her passion is in leadership, now developing the Teal way of working together with the Oodi staff. Developing the future library together with patrons as well as putting the strategy into action with the 54 staff members in Oodi is a thrilling adventure.
Jussi Parikka is Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at University of Southampton’s Winchester School of Art. He is the founding director (with Ryan Bishop) of the Archaeologies of Media and Technology (AMT) research group and the author of several books on media theory and digital culture. These include What is Media Archaeology? (2012), Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010) and A Geology of Media (2015) as well as several edited volumes, including Across and Beyond: a transmediale Reader on Post-Digital Practices, Concepts and Institutions (2016, co-editor) and Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048 (2015, co-editor with Joasia Krysa). With Shannon Mattern, he was the curator of the Library’s Other Intelligences exhibition at Oodi Library, Helsinki. Personal site: http://jussiparikka.net.
Jer Thorp is an artist, writer and teacher living in New York City. He is best known for designing the algorithm to place the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. Jer was the New York Times' first Data Artist in Residence, is a former National Geographic Explorer, and in from 2017-2019 served as the Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. Jer’s book, Living in Data, will be published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Toisha Tucker is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist and writer living in the Bronx and working across the universe. Their work explores social constructions around race, gender, and identity and the faltering relationship between technology and human empathy (think Black Mirror). They are the 2018-2019 Alice C. Cole Fellow at Wellesley College, Affiliated Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and Alumni of Bemis. Their short fiction After Jacob’s Room was published in the 2016 Vassar Review. They hold a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Design. Find them at toishatucker.com.
Anni Vartola is a Helsinki-based architect, architecture critic and scholar in postmodern architectural theory. She works as the Senior Lecturer in theory of architecture at the Department of Architecture in Aalto University and contributes regularly to architectural publications in Finland and abroad. Her current research interests are critical regionalism in Finnish architecture and the architectural history of Finnish public libraries. Her most recent works includes curating the Mind-Building exhibition for the Pavilion of Finland at the Venice Biennale 2018. Besides her work as a teacher and writer, Vartola devotes her spare time to her online architecture bookshop at bookm-ark.fi.
This symposium organized by The New School, Finnish Cultural Institute in New York & Metropolitan New York Library Council.
Hosted by Nate Hill & Shannon Mattern.
For assistance with accessibility to the 8th floor, please contact [email protected] in advance of this event.
An Introduction to the US Census: Understand, Find, and Access Data
How many people live in my neighborhood? How many Americans have a college degree? Which counties have the highest percentage of public transit users? What is the composition of the population or labor force by age, sex, and racial and ethnic group for my city or town?
These questions and many more can be answered by the census. More than just a ten-year population count, the US Census is a vast ecosystem of datasets that can be used for describing places and groups of people. All of these datasets share a common vocabulary and organizational system, and the data is available from many different sources. Knowing how the census is organized and which sources to use are the keys for unlocking this valuable resource.
This session will provide a conceptual overview of the census so you can learn to choose the best data and sources for answering specific questions from researchers with varying needs and skills. You will gain hands-on experience with exploring, finding, and accessing data using several different online tools, and will get some practice with basic data manipulation in a spreadsheet.
Prerequisites for this workshop include a laptop and familiarity with spreadsheets like MS Excel or LibreOffice Calc. Participants should be able to navigate the web and their laptop effortlessly.
About the instructor
Frank Donnelly is the Geospatial Data Librarian at Baruch College CUNY, where he supports members of his university with finding, processing, understanding, and using geographic data. He manages the library's GIS Lab (geographic information systems) which provides research consultations and GIS workshops and produces tutorials and data. Frank's book, "Exploring the US Census: Your Guide to America's Data", is slated to be published by SAGE publications at the end of 2019. Frank shares tips, tutorials, and stories about his work on his blog "At These Coordinates": https://atcoordinates.info/.
Who saves our stories for the future? A Preserve This Podcast Launch Party!
Come celebrate the launch of the Preserve This Podcast podcast! Preserve This Podcast is a campaign to preserve podcasts against the threat of digital decay. Episode 1 of the podcast drops on March 21. In celebration, the Metropolitan New York Library Council is hosting a party. There will be food, drinks, zines, dead disc commercials, a disco ball, and a panel discussion about the stories of our future -- and what we need to do to preserve them.
Attendance is free and open to the public. There is limited space, so please RSVP.
Schedule of events:
6:00 Doors open
7:00 Panel: Who saves our stories for the future?
Zaheer Ali
Oral historian, Co-host and Co-producer, Flatbush + Main
Natalie Milbrodt
Director, Queens Memory
Mark Pagán
Host and Producer, Other Men Need Help
Sam Riddell
Principal Host and Producer, Inner Hoe Uprising
Molly Schwartz
Moderating Host and Producer, Preserve This Podcast
7:30 PARTY!
9:00 Go home and ponder the future
About our panelists:
Zaheer Ali is the Oral Historian at Brooklyn Historical Society, a nationally recognized urban history center founded in 1863, dedicated to preserving and encouraging the study of the history of Brooklyn, New York. As Oral Historian, he record, collect, and curate the lived histories, testimonies, memoirs, and narrations of Brooklynites from all walks of life. He recently co-directed a project that built an online portal for Brooklyn Historical Society's oral history collections. Currently, he directs Muslims in Brooklyn, a two-year multi-faceted public history project designed to amplify the stories of Brooklyn’s Muslim communities and contextualize those stories in the broader history of Brooklyn. He also co-hosts and co-produces Flatbush + Main, Brooklyn Historical Society's award-winning monthly podcast, now in its third year of exploring Brooklyn's past and present through scholarly discussions, historical archives, and oral histories. In addition his an adjunct lecturer at New York University, where he has taught courses on United States history, Malcolm X, and Prince Rogers Nelson.
Mark Pagán is an award-winning film and podcast producer, writer, and educator. His work and performances have been shown at festivals and shows worldwide including Slamdance Film Festival, Arizona International Film Festival, Panoply's Family Ghosts, North Carolina Comedy Arts Festival, Charleston Comedy Festival, RISK!, The Moth, and Story Collider. He currently manages the Google Podcasts creator program at PRX and produces and hosts the award-winning podcast, Other Men Need Help.
Sam Riddell [pronouns: she/her] is a documentary videographer, editor, and podcast producer from Queens, New York. Her work centers on sexual health, Black feminism, the African Diaspora, and social justice. Sam is the Principal Host of the queer Black feminist focused sexuality podcast Inner Hoe Uprising. She has also produced work for media outlets like Inverse.com, Democracy Now! and Black & Sexy TV.
Natalie Milbrodt leads Queens Library’s Metadata Services division, responsible for the system’s cataloging and digitization efforts. In 2010, Milbrodt developed the Queens Memory Project on behalf of Queens College, CUNY and Queens Library. Queens Memory collects oral histories, photographs and other mementos from residents at public events and exhibits them alongside selections from the library’s archives on the project’s website, QueensMemory.org. The program was recognized in 2012 by the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services with an Outstanding Collaboration Citation, and in 2014 by the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York with an Educational Use of Archives Award. Dozens of libraries and other cultural heritage organizations have hosted Queens Memory events where neighbors can come to share stories and mementos for inclusion in the Queens Memory digital archives. Milbrodt graduated in 2000 from Michigan State University with a BA in Interdisciplinary Humanities and a Specialization in Film Studies. Before joining the library profession, she worked for film production, design and marketing firms in both creative and management roles. Milbrodt serves on the Oral History Association’s Metadata Task Force and as an advisory board member for New York State Historical Records, Global Grand Central, and Wikitongues.
Come back and experience the very first Preserve This Podcast interactive workshop after partying and pondering the future! It's free, but space is limited, so please RSVP.
It's the year 2039. Where's your podcast? (A Preserve This Podcast workshop)
Bring your hard drives. Bring your laptops. Bring your Dropbox password. We’re going to preserve your podcast.
If you’ve listened to our podcast or read our zine, you know that podcasts are disappearing. So how can podcasters protect themselves against loss? By attending our first-ever Preserve This Podcast workshop. This interactive workshop will tackle this issue head-on by walking audio creators through the history of podcast technology, the basics of archival preservation, and simple steps you can take to preserve your audio. We will review through the tools and techniques to prevent data loss before it’s too late, as well as “bake” these concepts into podcasters’ existing production workflows.
About our instructors:
Dana Gerber-Margie listens to podcasts while living in Madison, Wisconsin. She earned her Master's in Library & Information Studies at UW-Madison, and has worked as an A/V Archivist for WiLS and the Wisconsin Historical Society. She is the co-founder and co-editor of the Bello Collective, a publication about podcasts and storytelling.
Mary Kidd is an archivist and illustrator. By day, she works for New York Public Library's Special Collections Division. She has worked on audio/visual preservation projects for New York Public Radio, the Magic Shop Recording Studio, and the XFR Collective, a non-profit organization that transfers at-risk media off magnetic tapes to digital format for individuals and groups with limited means. She enjoys creating drawings, zines, gifs, and other artful tidbits to make archiving, and the technology that supports it, accessible, approachable and fun for everyone.
Molly Schwartz produces podcasts and writes about tech. She is the Studio Manager at the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO). She did a Fulbright grant at the Aalto University Media Lab in Helsinki and worked at the U.S. State Department as a data analyst. She likes diving into the weird ways that humans and machines interact.
In this talk, Shawn Averkamp of AVP will demo a number of tools that AVP has developed to help you automate and streamline your digital preservation workflows, including utilities for fixity checks, embedded metadata, and metadata quality control.
Shawn Averkamp is a Senior Consultant with AVP [https://www.weareavp.com/], a consulting and software development firm. Founded in 2006, AVP provides services to help overcome the challenges faced in the preservation and use of data. With a strong focus on professional standards and best practices, open communication, and the innovative use and development of technological resources, we use our broad knowledge base and extensive experience to help our clients from a variety of sectors efficiently and effectively ensure that content is manageable and accessible for the long-term.
Join the METRO Economics & Business Librarians Meetup Group to discuss opportunities for libraries and information professionals to support entrepreneurship.
Our speakers include Helena Escalante (New York Public Library, SIBL) and Neely Tang (Cornell University, SC Johnson College of Business Management Library). Discover how Helena and Neely support innovation and work with interdisciplinary teams and founders as they launch new ventures.
***Neely and Helena would love to include your preliminary questions in their presentation. Please feel free to send your questions in advance in the form below.***
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf7MLviF3A6BbrXk6ASFbllfuEq9ObHe59RShslV60IUKWumA/viewform
Entrepreneurship: Where We Are, Where We're Going
Date and time: April 17, 2019 (Thurs) from 10 AM - 12 noon
Location: NYU's Bobst Library, Room 743
Individuals outside of the business/economics disciplines with an interest in entrepreneurship are warmly invited to attend.
See you there!
Lucy Heckman (St. John's University) and Dan Hickey (NYU)
SIG Co-Conveners
Rhizome's Anna Perricci will share with us the ease of using Webrecorder for WARC creation and Rhizome's other web archiving tools: http://rhizome.org/software/
Want to learn more about prison abolition but not sure where to start? Looking to explore the role of information in the prison industrial complex? Excited to discuss ways we can collectively offer information skills as resources to address violence caused by mass incarceration?
Join the club (literally)! This April, Prison Library Support Network (PLSN) is holding our first ever book club, where we'll meet over snacks to discuss a short reading on prison abolition to be chosen by our members. This is a space for anyone looking for collective support in learning about these ideas, regardless of familiarity with prison abolition. Just RSVP, and you'll receive a link to the reading at least a month before the event.
ArchivesSpace is an open source application for managing and providing web access to archives, manuscripts, and digital objects. Upon completing this full-day workshop, attendees will have been introduced to using ArchivesSpace to:
Create Accession records
Create Resource records
Create Digital Object records
Create and manage Agent and Subject records, and link them to Accession, Resource, and Digital Object records
Record and manage physical locations within a repository
Produce description output files in standardized data structures such as EAD and MARCXML
Import legacy data
Agenda:
Application overview
Getting started: repository and user records
Accession records
Resource Records
Break
Container management and locations
Digital Object records, with an emphasis on File Versions
Authority records -- agents, subjects, and classifications
Imports and exports
Participating in the ArchivesSpace community
Open discussion and extra practice time
What to bring:
A laptop
Or click here to borrow one of METRO's PC laptops for $5.00
We accept payment by credit card or by invoice. Please note that we do not accept cash payment, on site or otherwise.
METRO reserves the right to cancel any workshop or to substitute instructors. In the event of a cancellation, postponement, or substitution, registrants will be notified in advance (if possible) via email and may receive a full refund of the registration fee.
All registration cancellations must be submitted in writing to [email protected]
In order to receive a refund, we must receive your cancellation email at least 24 hours prior to the event start time. If METRO does not receive your cancellation email before that deadline, an invoice will be sent to recoup any unpaid fees. If you are unable to attend a workshop, you may choose to send another person in your place without penalty if you notify us in advance. Refunds are provided by credit card or check and will be processed within about four weeks.
METRO will make private space available to nursing mothers upon request. Please contact us at [email protected] to make a reservation.