Of the 3, the Borghese was hands-down the most memorable experience. The collection was much smaller, and for some reason seemed to have more Carravaggio paintings, which I was all about (the Medusa at the Uffizi was cool, though). They also had a lovely Botticelli:

Unlike the Uffizi, you could actually see this Botticelli!

My friend Raymond recommended this museum, I think, mainly for the fabulous Bernini statues. The Rape of Proserpina was obviously my favorite:

and your little dog, too.

at first I was transfixed by her feet, but Keegan pointed out that Pluto’s fingers are digging into her flesh. Keegan has better photos. I can’t find any closeups online. it was truly astonishing.

the best part of this museum was the ticketing. it was a total pain to get, for some reason they wanted your SSN to purchase which, uh, NO. they sell tickets for a 2-hour window to see the museum. I wish I’d know that they flush the museum at the end of your reservation time, because we would have showed up at our entry time instead of only giving ourselves about an hour. it was easy to avoid tour groups, so none of the obnoxious talking that happens at other museums.

this was honestly the best museum experience I’ve had in my life. i think they let just the right amount of people in, we had a few rooms to ourselves for a few minutes. museums in the US should do this and charge a premium to go (maybe they already do).

ok, back to Florence. 2 museums with Medici origins of some kind. I was not into the Uffizi: way too crowded, and way too many of the same thing, repeated (I felt the same way about the Capitoline). y’all know I love nativity scenes but COME ON.

I much preferred the Pitti Palace: the grounds were super chill to wander, the view of Florence from the top of the hill was choice, and, the interpretation of Rites of Spring in the costume exhibit was far more enjoyable than trying to catch a glimpse of the actual painting at the Uffizi. the Uffizi building was pretty cool, I guess, but man, I don’t think I would have felt like I was really missing anything by not going: the signage, as in most of these museums (the Borghese was the rare exception, and the Pitti Palace actually did have some information; a little less thorough than the Borghese’s, though, which had comments on every piece in every room) was so lacking that half the time I had no idea what I was looking at, it seemed like the Carravaggio room was either closed or they had only 3, all the busts looked the same and CERTAINLY the nativity scenes looked the same.

wow, I am so uncultured!

I asked our presenter about whether they’ve experienced issues with file preservation: things like bit rot, or corruption. He asked someone who worked with the digital objects, who told us that it depended on the file type and image resolution. I’m not sure whether something got lost in translation, or whether this particular project is just too new to have had these issues appear.

What really struck me was the lack of a central, national archival structure in Italy. One would think that federal records would have their own repository: this doesn’t seem to be the case, according to the folks at the state archive in Florence.

Beyond that, it seems that all archives have the same issues: insufficient space, inadequate housing/lack of a suitable environment conducive to preservation.

Didn’t manage to get any photos of the reading room, but here are some from our visit. Note that archives all over the world love to display their collections and do local history exhibits! Didn’t have enough time to pop in on our visit, but it felt like home, and so did the lockers for researchers.

In a stroke of luck, we rode in the elevator with an American researcher who introduced us to the head librarian, Dr. Alessandra Lenzi, who spoke very good English and who was generous enough to show us around the library.

Earlier this week, we visited the Medici Archive Project [writeup of our visit here]. The Galileo Museum Library clarified that the Medici Archive only contains the Medici records relating to affairs of state. Records related to the Medici and Lorraine family collections in art and science are housed at the various museums in Florence. It seems like these museums don’t have a formal relationship with one another – I think, in part because of the Firenze Pass suggesting I expected something akin to “The Smithsonian” museums, which I suppose is our country’s closest thing to a major individual collection spanning several subject-area museums. Here’s a brief overview of the history of the collections at the Galileo Museum. Like the Uffizi Gallery, the museum gives a good overview of how collections arrived in their holdings.

The highlight of our tour was visiting the rare books room: we got to see an instruction manual written by Galileo, one of his first books, and certainly the first printing, devoted to Cosimo de Medici and intended for use in the field by military officers. We also got to see a Medici printing of Galileo’s complete works, less the ones banned by the Catholic Church at the time of publication. Keegan didn’t bring out his camera until the end, and immediately left for Japan, so his photos of the reading room will be added later….

We also reviewed the online catalog with Dr. Lenzi. I was just so impressed – their search engine is pretty close to what I imagined a federated search would be, and searches all the images of their collection! I guess they have an extensive, older image collection of past museum inventories, and there are catalog entries for individual museum objects, so, you can do a full-text search that includes the descriptions of Galileo’s instruments. There’s also a robust subject search – this really seemed like an example of the “linked open data” we talked about in my Indexing, Abstracting, and Thesaurus Construction class.

Dr. Lenzi told us that one of the staff’s major initiatives is to flesh out Wikipedia pages to increase awareness of the library’s collection – they upload document lists as citations in certain entries, and include information about the library’s primary sources in biography pages of prominent Florentines represented in the historic books and documents. [note to self – email her to get links to the library’s “sandbox” page on wikipedia]

Also learned that there is a regional governmental organization that has to approve digitization projects – can’t recall the name, but a quick glance at the Firenze Card website really shows how many players there are in this space in Italy:

the Firenze card…is promoted by Municipality of Florence, the Ministry for the Arts and Cultural Activities, the Regional Direction of Cultural Heritage, the Special Superintendence for Historical, Artistic and Ethnic-anthropological Heritage and for the Museum Circuit of the city of Florence, the Province of Florence and the Chamber of Commerce of Florence

Enough about libraries: my “7 Churches Walk” with Heather and Keegan proved prescient, since the Pope said Mass at St. John Lateran and led a procession to Santa Maria Maggiore to commemorate the feast of Corpus Christi. Dr. Chancellor and I went – we stood quite close to the center aisle, close to the 22nd row of nuns seated. I was glad to have attended a few of the morning services at the Convitto, since I was able to follow along pretty well and knew some of the responses. This experience has given me a deeper appreciation of the vision of the new translation of the Roman missal, it really is closer to what the rest of the world says. There were priests and nuns from all over the world at the Mass, I felt like I saw all of humanity there.

Representing @catholicuniv @CUA_LIS about 500 feet from "Sante Padre Francesco," it was pretty awesome #CUArome pic.twitter.com/sqJuU878zc

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) June 4, 2015

Corpus Christi Celebratory Mass with Pope Francis! – with @Anitalifedotcom (Visions of Italy) @CUA_LIS @CUArome pic.twitter.com/lpxSahzXfd

— Renate Chancellor (@rchancell) June 4, 2015

Also, riding the #3 streetcar in Rome is infinitely more pleasant than the subway. I’m not really that opposed to the bus outside of rush hour periods, but I think we must have been on a particularly busy line because the 71 always seemed pretty crowded.

Still can’t believe I got to see a book Galileo touched, and the Pope, in one day, this trip rules!

A 1599 map illustrating Rome’s 7 Pilgrim Churches [source: Wikipedia]

There is definitely some papal connection to the basilicas featured on this walk, as we saw Il Papa himself, not a week later, at St. John Lateran followed by a procession to Santa Maria Maggiore.

This was a REALLY frustrating walk to take. I’m not sure how Heather even heard about it, because there was not a whole lot of information online about it (the directions were kind of wonky) and certainly NO signage whatsoever along the route. I’m sure there must be 5 Santa Maria churches in Rome, at least, on each side of the river, probably, and there is an entire neighborhood called “San Lorenzo” so we had very bad luck trying to ask for the church of the same name. Also, of course the hours the churches are closed aren’t posted anywhere online (these churches close sometime between 12-3pm, and good luck figuring it out for the smaller ones).

One thing I noticed in Rome was that the Internet just does not have great information. It occurred to me when I was writing this blog post to use Google to search BOOKS and I came up with more thorough information about these churches. The Wikipedia article about the Seven Pilgrim Churches talks about the history of Roman churches as a destination for pilgrims and tourists, and the parallel history of the guidebooks describing these pilgrimage sites.

I really can’t believe that these historic routes don’t have any signage. A few people we met at the various churches did seem to know what we were up to, but the employee at the information desk in St John Lateran didn’t know where any of the other churches on the route were! I’m surprised there aren’t brochures about the walk INSIDE the churches on the route. This seems like a missed opportunity.

Listening to the guest speakers in our course speak about the Roman economy made me realize how inextricably culture and economy are bound. I thought about this when looking at the chintzy ticket booths and machines inside churches. You don’t see promotions the same way in Rome (but you kind of do in Florence, they gave us a coupon for the La Specola natural history museum at the Galileo Museum). It seems like there are so many peripheral and auxiliary businesses that could be doing so much more than employing aggressive waiters on the sidewalks and sending out faux-uniformed tour guides….

The museum is split into different areas of scientific research promoted by the Medici, roughly chronologically, with commentary about how the Medici’s patronage in these areas related to their political progress and goals. Progress in areas like warfare, astronomy, and navigation is explained along with the development of the scientific method and the development of formal experimentation. The relationship between Medici and Lorraine  patronage and scientific advancement is heavily featured. Amazing that the Medici had enough STUFF to span so many museums in so many areas (their collection of scientific instruments was housed for two centuries in the Uffizi Gallery!).

The museum manages to separate collections by topic AND according to the collection history of the Medici and Lorraine. Some of the historic collection is retained in its original order, and these near-original stagings are supplemented with subject-specific collections that dovetail with the early presentation of the artifacts. There’s also a history of the evolution of the industries that allowed for the creation of these scientific tools, like, the differences between quality of lensmakers, and the political motivations for investments like observatories.

The amazing-looking gold sphere is Antonio Santucci’s Armillary Sphere.

There was pretty aggressive signage that told you the correct order to visit the exhibits. This kind of chronological arrangement was something that I really missed, in contrast to American museums. I felt like I really understood the ways that science bolstered a political agenda.

Kind of hilarious that Galileo’s middle finger is in the museum. A perverse reliquary.

There’s a virtual tour of the museum here. Check out the integration with the library catalog. Neat stuff.

On this trip, we’ve stopped at quite a few churches. I’m sure that a lot of the things we’ve seen look similar because we don’t have the background in Italian art and architecture to appreciate the points of divergence in the places we’ve visited. We visited 2 churches in Trastavere today and it really hit me that, well, churches seem to be responsible for large portions of Rome’s cultural heritage.

Something that’s really struck me on this trip is how totally lax the security is in a lot of these places. It reminds me of visiting the Hemingway house in Key West about 10 years ago, where it seemed really easy to just walk out with something. At the Capitoline museum the other day, the guard didn’t approach someone in our group until after they were already leaning on an artifact! The most hands-on security we’ve seen so far was this nun who guards the Cavallini frescoes at the monastery adjacent to the Basilica of St. Cecilia:

The sister guarding the Cavallini frescoes.

But obviously they’re short-staffed, peep the outside of this building (in a locked courtyard, no less):

Graffiti in the courtyard of Santa Cecilia in Trastavere.

It’s hard to figure out how these sites are managed – I wonder if there are nonprofits associated with them, or if any are run by the state, or if they’re just run by the parishes themselves. The quality of interpretative signage is wildly inconsistent between churches (I think for my final project I’ll deal with signage). Some of them (like Santa Maria in Trastavere) have just no signs at all. St. Cecilia had signage in Italian and homebrewed guidebooks:

guidebooks at St. Cecilia

A point of minor irritation on this trip is the low quality of captions/information in the museums – it seems like they just give you the bare minimum of information and then upcharge you to access anything more than the title. So antithetical to American values! information wants to be free! but Italian churches want to charge you 2.50 to see priceless works of art as though they were sideshow carnival attractions, then charge you 5.00 for the guidebook, I guess? [further discussion of this in my post about the art museums we saw on this trip: the Uffizi, Pitti Palace and Galleria Borghese]

At least this one had signs in the actual attractions. Here’s a photo dump, including the basement (the sanctuary itself was free to visit), which they claimed was the ancient home of St. Cecilia.

I wasn’t really sure what to make of this library. I think this tweet pretty much says it all:

#tbt to the Vatican's digital resources pic.twitter.com/aYDXgRrSnF

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) June 4, 2015

It seems like some of the rare books are housed in safes that can only be opened by skeleton keys that are kept inside a leather pouch. It isn’t clear whether these safes are archival quality, or are, in fact, old wardrobes belonging to past popes.

The library contains about 150 thousand manuscripts and about 1.5 million print volumes, and our guide told us that there has been a decrease in users because of increased digital resources – whether this means a decrease in reference because of Google, or a decrease in physical visits because of the library’s digitization work wasn’t specified.

The card catalog is not complete, and staff from the Library of Congress worked in the 1920s to update it. I wonder whether card catalogs are a relatively modern invention because it really doesn’t make sense to me that there isn’t a master list somewhere, geez.

I assume these are mostly theological volumes. I believe that the writings of popes, etc. are housed in the archives. It wasn’t clear what the particular collecting strengths are. We got to see some old books on display, though, which in retrospect puts me in mind of the Laurentian Library.

70 MILES of documents in the #vaticanarchives – it took an archivist 20 YEARS and 800,000 index cards to create the sole index!

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 26, 2015

Love that Italian archivists measure collections in kilometers rather than linear feet! #CUArome @CUA_LIS

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 26, 2015

We went up about 6 flights of stairs & guide delighted in telling us we were 2 stories underground, in a bunker housing 47km of docs

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 26, 2015

The Vatican declassifies its documents according to papacy, not a yearly schedule: Pius XII is next on deck.

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 26, 2015

#vaticanarchives began digitizing holdings in the 1980s – over 48 terrabytes so far – most at-risk documents are digitized first.

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 26, 2015

#vaticanarchives archivist touched briefly on risks of bit rot/obsolete formats: flashbacks to our other @CUA_LIS coursework!

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 26, 2015

Just walked into the Vatican's "secret archives" – I think I'm inside a Faberge egg RN

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 26, 2015

Crazy detailed carved wood-paneled ceilings in these rooms – it's like The Cloisters @metmuseum threw up all over the place

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 26, 2015

Archivist at the Vatican described Francis's encyclicals & other theological writing as drawing heavily on Benedict's…

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 26, 2015

Says Benedict "is tired now," but Francis's work "is written with 4 hands," ie, #PopeFrancis draws heavily from docs left by Benedict

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 26, 2015

(this was in re: my question about whether Benedict had left material to the #vaticanarchives following his retirement)

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 26, 2015

I like thinking about my hands working beside others' across time – seems more collaborative than "standing on someone's shoulders"

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 26, 2015

TIL: the pope's old clothes go into the "Vatican wardrobe," where current pope can select from clothes of all past popes

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 26, 2015

Visions of Italy group photo from the top of the Secret Vatican Archives! @CUA_LIS @CUA_AGLISS @CUArtSci pic.twitter.com/V1GOUeyG1O

— Renate Chancellor (@rchancell) May 26, 2015

best. class. ever. https://t.co/tpRSY1gM9E

— Anita Kinney (@Anitalifedotcom) May 27, 2015

exiting the Convitto

Convitto San Tomaso

Heather and I got the coolest room – an apartment, up a spiral staircase from the rooftop.

Father Luke gave us a warm welcome and told us a bit about the history of the city.

Tomorrow is our first class!

Other things on my plate:

Wrapping up Mr. Shumaker’s Marketing course, LSC 772. This course came highly recommended from several folks in the program, and I have no regrets about taking it, although it really was a struggle at times. I’ve been working on a project revamping external print marketing materials for the Standards Coordination Office at NIST, which has reminded me that I am NOT a graphic designer.

I think I’ve been frustrated in this class because it’s made me a lot more attuned to just how BAD a lot of library marketing is. It’s like we do things to keep up with one another, or follow trends. Why do we have staff people devoted to social media if we can’t actually prove that this increases the quality of service to our customers, or drives new customer visits? (Related: how do libraries have Flickr and Pinterest accounts, but not Instagram?) This is all time that would be better spent doing serious website overhauls and investing in real email marketing tools and campaigns.

SLA student chapter end of year report: Wow, we did a lot of stuff this term! It’s been a great year for our chapter and I’m really proud of the great programs we put on. Working with Kelly Knight and Sam Russell has been one of the highlights of my time at CUA – I wish I’d gotten involved sooner in student leadership. I’m satisfied that other people have the institutional knowledge to apply for funding from GSA – was really happy to have publicized the GSA Lectures Fund to a wider audience and see this being used to support great events like the Stone Lecture.

Emerging Leaders: Well, this gets back to my frustration with LSC 772: I’ve seen some really poorly designed (not to mention, redundant) surveys come out of ALA divisions over the last few months, and now, I have my very own to write up! The ALSC team has been working on valuation of children’s library services, and many in our 80+ strong response pool don’t seem to understand what an “outcome” actually is, and what’s at stake when we don’t have them to demonstrate our value. Some of these responses are pretty unbelievable. In response to a question of how libraries measure outcomes:

We’re short-staffed so I don’t do any outcomes measurement.  Candidly, too, I’m not crazy about it because while it’s something people like to hear about, I find it invasive to gather such data.

Where to begin? Also: more than one person thought that “thank you cards to donors” were an “outcome” of library services. I don’t even know what to say to that.

Honestly, I’m bored of assessing children’s library services: this article really sums up my issue with this whole line of inquiry. In typical Anita Kinney fashion, I have not yet read the primary source linked to in that article, but, if your study can be summarized as:

A recently released survey from the National Summer Learning Association (NSLA) confirms that teachers spend a significant amount of time re-teaching material due to summer learning loss. The survey, which was based on answers from 500 teachers, found that 66 percent teachers have to spend three to four weeks re-teaching students course material at the beginning of the year, while 24 percent of teachers spend at least five to six weeks re-teaching material from the previous school year.

is NOT OK. Check out NSLA’s front page:

All young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer. Research spanning 100 years shows that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the summer (White, 1906; Heyns, 1978; Entwisle & Alexander 1992; Cooper, 1996; Downey et al, 2004).

Really dudes? We’re trotting out research that’s eleven years old? Where is the new research? Here’s what’s needed: a push to build relationships between school and public librarians, and stuff at a really high level that provides a legal framework for thinking about things like student privacy. Guidance for how to navigate publicly available test data. Information on research design: how to work with aggregate data sets. How to anonymize student data. Toolkits to help librarians organize in their communities and engage with local school boards to get test data released. If we’re not nimble enough to play real hardball here and map “summer slide” to actual test data, we need to focus internally on building that kind of capacity instead of relying on platitudes about “qualitative assessment.” Fun fact: no one cares. Show me a library that’s proved that they increase the test score du jour, and I’ll show you a library that’s gonna get hella grants.

Database management class: well, taking an online course in this was a complete disaster but fortunately our faculty is awesome and Bill Kules has basically been giving me one-on-one SQL tutoring, but damn, I’ve been distracted by other stuff, like LSC 772 and:

Contract work: I still have my contract with the Marine Mammal Commission and I’m really digging it. I’ve been working with a legacy version of InMagic, which has been used for at least 10 years to manage the collection and tag our books and PDFs with subject terms to make them searchable. Not a bad option for managing a library, maybe similar to something like ResourceMate, which if I recall correctly was what was used at the Franciscan Monastery library. Anyway, the rub is getting our InMagic data to play with Zotero, which the good scientists want to use to manage their citations.  This is what I’ll be playing around with after I wrap up class: http://www.scribd.com/doc/45190252/Data-Migration-Excel-or-CSV-to-MARC#scribd

I’ve done some onsite work for the National Science Foundation and it’s been really fantastic to see a different side of digital collection development.

Public health presentation at ALA: this is on my mind in a big way. I’m meeting with folks about this next week in Ocean City, and the following week in Baltimore. Time flies.

Other crazy idea: something clicked for me on Tuesday that could be very, very cool.

So, that’s where I’m at. Have just discovered that there’s another week of homework left to do in our database class, was hoping we’d be done the 2nd but it is all good.