Beyond the Stacks
“Landscape of the mind”: For Rosanna Warren, past, present, and poetry meet in New York’s Central Park.
Central Park map courtesy of Olmsted Museum
Photos of Central Park from istock
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
—Jorge Luis Borges
In an attention-challenged world, libraries and archives are invaluable repositories of heritage and history, as well as incubators of the ideas and inventions that will shape the future. Right now, libraries themselves are being invented, or reinvented, to accommodate powerful new tools for sharing knowledge. And though the words library and liberty are unrelated etymologically, their closeness is a happy coincidence—for, as the move from parchment to paper to pixels shows, information wants to be free.
Design for Democracy
Walking through Central Park on visits to New York, the poet and literary scholar Rosanna Warren often traced connections between the landscape and its designer, Frederick Law Olmsted. “I knew that Olmsted was subject to melancholy,” she says, “and I kept seeing the external landscape of the park, with its dips and hollows, its hills and irregularities, as a landscape of the mind. I wanted to live my way into that hunch I had.”
Rosanna Warren
Photo courtesy of Mike Minehan
As she began gathering the strands of a book of interconnected poems on the four elements, she knew that Central Park, and Olmsted, would anchor the poem at the book’s core, titled “Earthworks.” And a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers allowed her just the kind of immersion she had wanted. Warren, the Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities, spent the 2008–2009 academic year at the library, reading Olmsted’s papers, the books that inspired him, and other archival documents chronicling the park’s history. She also walked in the park almost daily, photographing it in every light and season and decorating her workspace with the images.
Among other things, she learned that Olmsted left his work on the park in 1861 to become the director of the Sanitary Commission—the predecessor of the Red Cross, responsible for setting up field hospitals and moving the injured and dead off the battlefield—during the Civil War. The sense of the battlefield as another kind of “earthworks” began to drift into her consciousness. Warren also learned that the land that became Central Park had once been filled with slaughterhouses and incinerators, a place of horror. History and images intermingled, as she began “to see the poem as a layering, almost an archaeological layering, of images of slaughter, out of which comes a design. I see that on the Civil War battlefield as well as in the park. And Olmsted is at the center of both of them.
“The design, finally, of the park or the battlefield or the battle is about the design for harmony and for civil life, and for democracy,” Warren continues. “It was a quite radical thing for Olmsted and the commissioners of the park to design a public space that wasn’t just for the privileged. It was a truly democratic idea. And you could say that the Civil War was a war to create a design for democracy, too.”
And in the halls of another great temple of democracy, the New York Public Library, Warren found the freedom she needed to test the formal limits of the lyric poem, “to see how much it can take in and dramatize of historical and even geological and biological material that’s outside the self. The lyric poem is conventionally understood as the song of the self: I want, I hurt. It’s country music. I’m just trying to see how far I can push it, and in which direction.”
A Case History
For David Seipp, the odyssey of a lifetime began with a proverb.
Law professor David Seipp’s open access database of Year Books contains more than 22,000 records of cases dating from 1268 to 1535.
As an undergraduate investigating the history of privacy rights in the mid 1970s, he wondered how far back one of the most venerable legal maxims, “A man’s house is his castle,” could be traced. Seipp followed citations back through cases much older than any legal database could search, to a set of medieval records called the Year Books, which contained the earliest reports of what would come to constitute English, and later American, common law. Dating from 1268 to 1535, and written in the legal dialect of the day, called law French, the books reveal a system of law whose principles and structure endure to this day.
Beguiled by that rich history, Seipp, now a BU professor of law, set about doing for medieval cases what Westlaw and Lexis do for modern ones: make them easily accessible and searchable. But in creating an online archive of more than 300 years of English caselaw, he’s done those services one better: his archive, containing translations and complete records of those early cases, is open access and free to use, hosted on Boston University’s server at www.bu.edu/law/seipp.
The project was launched after 2000, with support from the Ames Foundation, when Seipp started making records for cases dating from the first year of the reign of Henry IV, in 1399. Since the online database went live in 2003, it has been searched more than a thousand times each month—22,000 times during a single month in 2008.
Seipp has now indexed almost 6,900 cases in final form, with key words and full commentary; he has also indexed more than 15,400 other cases with summaries from modern scholarly editions or new translations, and will fill in missing details as he goes.
Each record in the database has room for 39 fields of information, including citation numbers, the type of lawsuit, historical context, translations of arguments and rulings, and the names of the court, place names after rulings, the parties, the lawyers, and the judges. Most records are also linked to images of the original text, which provide a sense of just how daunting Seipp’s task has been.
The Year Books were printed in a forbidding, black-letter typeface, with many words abbreviated or contracted, and with spellings that change even on the same page. In indexing the cases, standardization was the biggest challenge he faced. “To make these things searchable, you want every name, every statute to be uniform,” Seipp says. “The names of lawyers and judges vary greatly: there’s a judge named Babington who for a whole series of cases is called Danby. It’s extremely confusing.”
Seipp says his translations are meant to be close paraphrases and not “final, polished, literary productions. As I often say, I am translating bad French into bad English, and doing it as faithfully as I can.”
And as for the maxim that “a man’s house is his castle”? The earliest reference Seipp can find dates to 1499—but with a series of cases dating from the mid 1300s about to be indexed, he remains on the lookout.
Opening the Doors
“These are transformational times for libraries,” says University Librarian Robert Hudson, who is writing one chapter of that transformation at BU. Hudson has been a key driver of what he believes is an unprecedentedly broad move by a university to retain the rights to its scholarly work and to make it available to anyone, anywhere, free of charge.
Image from istock
After nearly two years of discussion, the University Council voted in February to support a far-reaching, though voluntary, open access initiative. It calls for the creation of a digital archive for preserving everything from peer-reviewed articles to data sets to dissertations, and it encourages faculty to negotiate to retain their copyright for scholarly, noncommercial use when entering agreements with publishers. It also endorses publication in peer-reviewed open access journals and promises equal consideration of such publishing during tenure and promotion reviews.
“Open access asks faculty to think about their research and about what happens to it after they generate it,” says Hudson, co-chair of the University Council’s Committee on Scholarly Activities & Libraries. “Faculty are engaged in the process, and we want to support them. We’re all in this new ecosystem together.”