{"id":6893,"date":"2010-11-10T16:20:52","date_gmt":"2010-11-10T20:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=6893"},"modified":"2010-11-10T16:20:52","modified_gmt":"2010-11-10T20:20:52","slug":"uneasy-in-the-library-stacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=6893","title":{"rendered":"Uneasy in the Library Stacks"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the not so distant past, libraries weren\u2019t such great places to go to if you wanted to read comics. Typically a library would have the Smithsonian comics volumes, a few New Yorker albums, and odd volumes reprinting a few years of the better known strips. The situation is changing rapidly now, largely thanks to increased academic attention on comics. More and more in academic and public libraries, its common to see on the shelves the mainstays of the comics canon. But the integration of comics into the library hasn\u2019t been a smooth process and there are still problems, notably the inability of librarians to figure out where exactly graphic novels should be shelved. Does Maus belong with the other comics, for example, or in modern literature or in European history?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Over at Publishers Weekly<\/em>,\u00a0Karen Green \u2013 a librarian at Columbia University \u2013 has a thoughtful essay<\/a> on this problem. She notes:<\/p>\n

\u00a0As a result, there is a certain logic to classifying Jim Ottaviani\u2019s Niels Bohr graphic novel, Suspended in language, in QC16 (Science > Physics > General) and Josh Neufeld\u2019s Katrina memoir, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, in F379 (History of the Americas > United States local history > Gulf States > Louisiana.) It is comforting to a librarian to think that patrons browsing in African-American biography will find Ho Che Anderson\u2019s graphic biography of Martin Luther King, King: A Comic Book Biography (E185.97.K5 A547).\u00a0In fact, the vast array of comic book biographies may be found in their subject classifications. But Seven Miles a Second, the posthumous graphic autobiography of David Wojnarowicz, is in the PN6700s.<\/p>\n

Even within a given classification area there is little consistency. Josh Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli have created two volumes of the graphic novel Unknown Soldier, but volume one is classed at PN6728.U5 D97 and volume two is PN6727.D97 U553. Not only do they differ in their primary classification (PN6727 vs. PN6728), but one privileges the title over the author, and the other, the reverse. They are about twelve feet apart on our library shelves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On an academic list-serv Green offered other evidence:<\/p>\n

Another example I discovered yesterday, more egregious even than the Unknown Soldier example in my article, is the Fantagraphics Popeye series:<\/p>\n

volume 1 = P96.P65 S45 2006g
\nvolume 2 = PN6728.T5 S386 2006g
\nvolume 3 = PN6728.P6 S44 2008g<\/p>\n

There is just no discernible logic to that–especially since there is a series trace in some (but not all) of the records.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All of this is a minor but persistent irritant, especially annoying of libraries are your major research source. It might be worth asking what are the larger roots of this problem. Part of the issue is that some comics publishers don\u2019t send their books to the Library of Congress, so they get classified in an ad hoc basis from library to library. A deeper problem might be that the scholarly community, indeed the world at large, still doesn\u2019t know what to do with comics or how to place them in a larger context. Lacking an overview or consensus, books get shuffled off to different shelves willy-nilly. In any case, Green\u2019s article is very interesting and worth a read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the not so distant past, libraries weren\u2019t such great places to go to if you wanted to read comics. Typically a library would have the Smithsonian comics volumes, a few New Yorker albums, and odd volumes reprinting a few years of the better known strips. The situation is changing rapidly now, largely thanks to increased academic attention on comics. More and more in academic and public libraries, its common […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[733,799],"class_list":["post-6893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-karen-green","tag-libraries"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6893\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}