Composite of M. E. Descourtilz’s Atlas des Champignons (Chappron, Ancien Avocat, 1827), via Biodiversity Heritage Library and Public Domain Review; and Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color (Longmans, Green, and Co, 1903), via the Internet Archive and Public Domain Review.

LIBRARY FIELD

by Shannon Mattern

Let’s say that, amidst this era of tremendous turmoil — political violence, institutional implosion, epistemological assault, climate collapse — we were granted a field, a physical and intellectual terrain where we could reimagine our institutions and social conventions and community values from the ground up. From the soils, streams, rocks, and roots, up to the treetops and clouds. And what if we imagined that Field as a Library: a public space, a social infrastructure, an intellectual and ecological commons, a site for the convergence of myriad ways of knowing? Such opportunities exist. In fact, I’m part of an organization that’s in the process of creating a Library Field to serve hundreds of knowledge institutions across New York City and Westchester County. Similar projects, big and small, germinate across the globe, where they grapple with the global legacies of colonialism and capitalism and climate change. With this syllabus, we invite you to think with us about what a Library Field can be — and about how you might help us shape our plot of Land (as you’ll come to see, that capital-L is intentional!) or tend to a parcel of your own. Can imagining a Library Field field prompt us to think differently about collection management, classification, access, preservation, pedagogy, community, and solidarity? Can it compel us to ask deeper questions about epistemology, about the ontology of our knowledge artifacts and media forms, and about information ethics and the political-economy of knowledge? 

About Your Guide

First, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Shannon Mattern. I’ve written books and articles about libraries, maps, communication infrastructures, urban intelligence, geo-archives, rock collections, anthropocene archives, deep-time document preservation, lichen as documentarians, tree thinking, and a number of other eccentric topics; and I’ve designed and taught over 40 classes — at the University of Pennsylvania and The New School — on themes including information infrastructures, media collections, local media, data landscapes, maps and tools. I’ve also contributed to a number of library design and exhibition projects. Everything’s documented here, on my website. In 2015 I was invited to join the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, and I served as its president until very recently, when I became Metro’s first Director of Creative Research and Practice!  

Notes on Navigation

In our first unit, “Field and Sites,” we’ll orient ourselves by examining what we mean by a “field,” then surveying some specific sites of library exploration. In the next section, “Field Collections,” we’ll consider a range of elements, objects, and specimens that we might collect — and that might function as knowledge objects — in a field library. This middle section is structured as an assemblage of case studies that, collectively, convey the myriad entities we might learn with and from. It’s meant to be generative and purposefully overwhelming, and you’re welcome to skim and skip as necessary. After appreciating the potential diversity of our field collections, we’re then prepared to re-ground ourselves in the third section, “Roots and Networks,” which prompts us to consider how the very grounds and infrastructures of a field library can themselves be designed to embody ethical and ecological values. Finally, we’re invited to apply our thinking through various Exercises — to imagine how we might activate our own library fields. 

Throughout the syllabus you’ll find some Interludes that tie together various thematic lessons through various library-themed artworks. And, in some sections, you’ll encounter long lists of supplemental resources, which you’re welcome to skip or skim — but which I felt compelled to include both because they situate some thematic sections within broader fields of research and practice, and because they’re particularly pertinent to the current planning for the Library Field project to which I’m contributing. 

FIELDS + SITES

FieldWork: Grounding Interdisciplinarity
Site Orientation
Social Ecologies: Outdoor / Outreach Libraries
Interlude: Noah Purifoy’s The Library of Congress

FIELD COLLECTIONS

Ice, Sediments, Rocks, Plants & Bugs
Tree Collections
Interlude: Future Books and Dead Trees
Seed Collections
Interlude: Seed Geopolitics, Ecocide, Preservation, Activation
Weeds and Weeding
Soil Collections

ROOTS & NETWORKS

Epistemological and Material Ground
Ecological Infrastructures

EXERCISES

Local Data Models
Field Activation & Place-Based Pedagogy
Metadata + Didactics

Papyrus at Lake Merom, from American Colony of Jerusalem, Wild Flowers of Palestine (ca. 1900 to 1920), via Library of Congress and Public Domain Review. 

FIELDS + SITES

FieldWork: Grounding Interdisciplinarity

Why a “field?” Let’s begin by considering what constitutes a field (1) as a landform, (2) as a geographic site of research and practice, and (3) as a conceptual realm of inquiry and creativity. What other denotations of “field” exist? What happens when we think capaciously about a field across all these vectors – and productively merge them? How might fieldwork extend across sites, bridge the analog and digital realms, and integrate the methods and sensibilities of multiple fields of study? The questions we’re posing here echo those asked across various disciplines about what constitutes a “site” or “landscape” — or even capital-L “Land”; we’ll re-engage with some of these questions later in the course. 

This is a rather long list! Our goal here is to expose ourselves to a variety of field sensibilities so we can then think across them. I recommend that you choose at least four of the below texts: 

  • How do historians of science think about fields? Read Cameron Brinitzer and Etienne Benson, “Introduction: What Is a Field? Transformations in Fields, Fieldwork, and Field Sciences Since the Mid-Twentieth Century,” Isis 113 (March 2022). 
  • What about artists and art historians? Read Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30-44. 
  • How might naturalists, technologists, and engineers conceive of “fields” similarly and differently? Read Shannon Mattern, “Cloud and Field,” Places Journal (August 2016). 
  • What about indigenous botanists? Watch Robin Wall Kimmerer, “What Plants Can Teach Us,” New York Botanical Garden (December 5, 2017) . 
  • What about an interdisciplinary artist / philosopher? Read Adrian Piper, “On Wearing Three Hats,” a talk she shared at Brandeis University in 1996. 
  • And how have a variety of interdisciplinary theorists and historians of education regarded the distinction between “fields” and “disciplines” of study? Peruse the resources and slide deck in the “Fields and Disciplines” lesson from my 2022 “Redesigning the Academy” course. 
  • Librarians and archivists, how would you map the contours and terrain of your professional fields? 

Supplemental Resources: 

Site Orientation 

How might we constructively superimpose, or entangle, these diverse “field” sensibilities within a specific geographic site, itself a field? The Metropolitan New York Library Council is aiming to do just that by germinating the Library Field project. Explore the preliminary parameters of this work – and consider several parallel and partner programs.

Social Ecologies: Outdoor / Outreach Libraries

Now, let’s consider some recent precedent projects — library collections and services that extend beyond secured library doors — and the social-ecological conditions that have given rise to them: the COVID-19 pandemic, earlier shifts in public health and their influence on architectural design and urban/town planning, climate change, gentrification and the commercialization of the public realm, racist and sexist exclusion, and so forth: 

Supplemental Resources: 

ChrisGoldNY, “Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum – Joshua Tree, CA” (March 1, 2015), Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0. 
Interlude: Noah Purifoy’s The Library of Congress 

Consider the preservation challenges and opportunities presented by storing a collection outdoors. What kinds of collection materials would thrive outside, and which would warp, melt, disintegrate, or otherwise decay? When is “graceful degradation,” “curated decay,” or “managed retreat” an appropriate mode of collection management? 

Return to the field map.

Elias Verhulst and Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt, after a print by Jacob Hoefnagel, Natuurhistorische ensemble (nr. 17), 1596-1960, via Rijksmuseum, public domain. 

FIELD COLLECTIONS

Ice, Sediments, Rocks, Plants & Bugs   

What myriad forms of data — or knowledge, or wisdom! — exist in a field, and what can they tell us about the earth and its inhabitants (including us!), about the climate, about our very practices of collecting and classification, about other things we never thought to consider? What elements, materials, and conditions have functioned — or could function — as artifacts, proxies, media, records, documents, specimens, or talismans? What material and immaterial things can we record and measure and collect, and what are the politics of these practices? There are vast bodies of research — in the history of science, in museum studies, in information studies, and elsewhere — that take up these questions; we’ll just scratch the surface here. 

Supplemental Resources: 

  • Clive Aslet and Svante Helmbaek Tirén, Collecting Nature: A History of the Herbarium and Natural Specimens (Bokförlaget, 2022). 
  • Elaine Ayers, “Strange Beauty: Botanical Collecting, Preservation, and Display in the Nineteenth Century Tropics,” Dissertation, Princeton University Press, 2019). 
  • *Jennifer Brown, Jenifer de Carvalho Lopes, and Sonia Ralston, “Glass, Dried, and Digitized: Preserving Plants for Science and Art,” Arnold Arboretum, YouTube (July 10, 2024) [1:20:30]. 
  • Harland Coultas, The Herbarium: Collecting, Arranging and Preserving Plants, Lichens, Mosses, and More – With Practical Instructions to Assist the Amateur Home Naturalist (Read Country Books, 2018). 
  • Maura  C. Flannery, Herbarium World. 
  • Yuriko Furuhata, “Archipelagic Archives: Media Geology and the Deep Time of Japan’s Settler Colonialism,” Public Culture 33:3 (2021). 
  • David Grazian, American Zoo: A Sociological Safari (Princeton University Press, 2015). 
  • Sara Grossman, Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy (Duke University Press, 2023). 
  • Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2020). 
  • Vernon N. Kislingjr, “Colonial Menageries and the Exchange of Exotic Faunas,” Archives of Natural History 25:3 (2010): 303-20. 
  • Mary Kuhn, The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU Press, 2023). 
  • Shannon Mattern, “Archival Phase Shifts,” Anthropocene Curriculum (December 13, 2021). 
  • Shannon Mattern, “Glimmer: Refracting Rock,” LA+ 12, “Geo” (University of Pennsylvania, 2020).  
  • A Museum for Future Fossils. 
  • Dietmar Offenhuber, “The Planet as a Photographic Plate,” Fotograf Magazine 20 (2021). 
  • Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia (Knopf Doubleday, 2011). 
  • Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 
  • Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 
  • Barbara M. Thiers, Herbarium: The Quest to Preserve and Classify the World’s Plants (Timber Press, 2020).
Tree Collections

Now, we’ll focus on a specific entity we’ll likely encounter in our field — an exemplar of “charismatic megaflora”: the tree — to appreciate the countless ways it can be conceived, collected, and conscripted into knowledge work. What can we learn from and among the trees? Trees provide conceptual models that inform how we organize information, make decisions, and design algorithms. Trees also serve as material repositories, embodying in their rings and leaves accreted data about environmental and political-economic history. And through different species of tree collections – from arboretums to experimental forests to xylotheques – we harvest different forms of ecological knowledge and different means of carving the tree into an epistemological unit. Again, there exist multiple forests’ worth of books about trees; here, we’ll examine just a few leaves. 

  • Read Shannon Mattern, “Tree Thinking,” Places Journal (September 2021). 

What follows is a relatively long list of tree “collections.” Our goal is to appreciate the variety of arboreal assemblages, so you’re welcome simply to skim each: 

Supplemental Resources: 

The Lowry, “Katie Paterson, Future Library Certificates 2014-2114,” Photo © Blaise Adilon, 2015 (May 29, 2015), Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. 
Interlude: Future Books and Dead Trees

Where does knowledge reside within the ecology of a forest — and when the forest yields resources that become documents and artifacts that circulate elsewhere? What are the various components of a local knowledge ecology, and how does each necessitate a different process — and temporality — of conservation? Must we sacrifice some elements of our local ecology in order to ensure the preservation of others?  

  • Visit the Future Library. Read Dan Piepenbring, “Future Library,” The Paris Review (June 26, 2014) and Brian Castriota, “Instantiation, Actualization, and Absence: The Continuation and Safeguarding of Kate Paterson’s Future Library (2014-2114),” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 60:2-3 (2021); available on Paterson’s website. 
  • See also Mark Dion’s The Life of a Dead Tree (2019), and watch the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto’s video [5:43]. You might also like to explore Dion’s broader oeuvre, which includes many projects that engage with trees, libraries, labs, fieldwork, and the natural sciences. 

Supplemental Resources: 

Kuchi Nashi (Jasmine Seeds Pods), 1931, Harvard Art Museums/Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Forbes Pigment Collection, via Harvard Art Museums, public domain. 
Seed Collections

Much has been written about seed collections! Let’s explore just a few examples and critical analyses to consider how these various collections — whether they regard themselves as “libraries,” “archives,” “trusts,” “vaults,” or some other institutional or structural species — differently conceive of the seed as intellectual property, as a form of apocalyptic “insurance,” as a common good, as a social infrastructure, or otherwise. 

Interlude: Seed Geopolitics, Ecocide, Preservation, Activation

Supplemental Resources: 

Weeds and Weeding

As Alves demonstrates, many of the plants that germinate through the seeds in ships’ ballast are regarded as invasive species. A particular species’ reverential or deprecatory treatment is often entangled with geopolitical dynamics, including nationalism and xenophobia. Species that are staples for or sacred to particular cultures are likely dismissed as weeds by those with whom they are at war. What biological species — or forms of knowledge, or genres of media — do we regard as superfluous, obsolete, or invasive, and how do we decide whether to “weed” them out? What accessioning and weeding protocols should guide our practice at the Library Field? 

Supplemental Resources: 

Curtis F. Marbut, “Color Profiles of Representative Soils of the Great Soil Groups,” in Atlas of American Agriculture: Physical Basis including Land Relief, Climate, Soils, and Natural Vegetation of the United States, ed. Oliver E. Baker (United States Government Printing Office, 1936); via David Rumsey Map Collection.
Soil Collections

We began our study by considering our fields and sites of exploration — but what if that very ground became an object of analysis, too?  The anthropologist Mary Douglas famously referred to dirt as “matter out of place,” but soil is matter of its place; it’s a mixture of place-based matter — dead and alive; solid, liquid, and gas — that embodies local environmental histories and often embeds local artifacts. How can we collect and preserve soils, and what can we learn from them? 

  • Revisit the “Soil Samples and Rock Cores” section in “The Big Data of Ice, Rocks, Soils, and Sediments,” Places Journal (November 2017). 
  • Read Nicola Twilley, “Soil Archive,” Edible Geography (August 7, 2012). 
  • Introduce yourself to Cody Miller, “Soils as Archives: Cultivating and Integrative Pedagogy for Soil History and Place-Based Education in Appalachia,” Agricultural History 97:4 (2023). This piece is paywalled, but you can view some excerpts in my “Libraries of Seed & Soil” slide deck. 
  • Explore the recordings from Aroussiak Gabrelian and Alison Hirsch’s fantastic “Ground” lecture series, hosted through USC’s Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program in 2021. The series examines ground’s “significance as a noun (the ground; a material), a verb (to ground; its agency), and an adjective (to be grounded; situated). In particular, the series [considers] the ground as both a site of exploitation and extraction, as well as resistance and creation.” I moderated the April 8, 2021, session on “Archival Grounds” :) 
  • Peruse Delcy Morelos’s recent el abrazo exhibition — which “explored the sustaining power of mud in its many forms, as a source of life and sustenance” — at Dia: in New York. You might also be interested in this Brooklyn Rail conversation between Morelos and Gaby Collins-Fernandez (February 2, 2024) [Spanish-language version]. 

Supplemental Resources: 

Return to the field map.

John E. Weaver, The Ecological Relation of Roots (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1919): 32; via Internet Archive. 

ROOTS & NETWORKS

Epistemological and Material Ground

We can collect, classify, and preserve the soils and seeds beneath our library site — but how do we conceive of and steward the capital-L Land itself? If that Land scaffolds resources that constitute an intellectual commons or trust, can we regard the Land as a commons? With whom might we share space to better serve our missions and enact our values? 

  • First, let’s consider how the particular parcels of land on which our libraries and archives sit — and where their off-site storage facilities, distribution hubs, and vendors’ data centers reside — determine their vulnerability to various environmental risks, including those posed by climate change. Skim through Eira Tansey’s “Climate Change Exposure for the METRO Region” report, prepared for the Metro NY Library Council in 2023. You can also watch Tansey present her work in two virtual presentations. 
  • Appreciating the complex geography of our knowledge institutions should prompt us to rethink how we understand “land.” Read Katie Burke, “An Ethics of Land Relations in Science,” American Scientist (August 19, 2021), which features Max Liboiron’s fabulous Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021). How might Liboiron’s understanding of capital-L Land prompt us to think more capaciously and carefully about the “field” our Library Field inhabits and activates? 
  • How might we reconceive the political-economic and ethical frameworks bounding our institutions’ facilities and “properties”? What does it mean to own land? Read Cassim Shepard, “Land Power,” Places Journal (July 2022) and  introduce yourself to Monica M. White’s Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
  • And who are the neighbors — people, organizations, other species — with whom we are, or should be, in good relation? With whom could we partner to improve those broader social relations. Read Michael Kimmelman, “Chicago Finds a Way to Improve Public Housing: Libraries” The New York Times (May 19, 2019) and “Neighbors Fight Affordable Housing, but Need Libraries. Can We Make a Deal?” The New York Times (June 21, 2024). 
  • Finally, how can the design of our libraries and archives — even the landscape architecture of a field library and the design of its basic amenities — meet local needs and reflect local character? I wrote in my 2007 book about the incorporation of local identity and “critical regionalist” principles into library designs. Let’s consider a recent example: the Toronto Public Library’s new Dawes Road Library and Community Hub, which aims to integrate indigenous principles throughout the design process. Recall the anythink Nature Library, too.

Supplemental Resources: 

Ecological Infrastructures 

How might we draw inspiration from field topographies, botanical morphologies, other-species intelligences, and organic processes to design technical and social systems that embody ethically-consistent, “appropriate” operative logics and politics? That allow for different forms of engagement and promote new ways of knowing? That have a low carbon footprint? That remind us of their geologic origins and environmental entanglements? That prioritize care, cooperation, consent, inclusion, exploration, and delight above extraction, habituation, and commercialization? 

Supplemental Resources: 

Return to the field map.

Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners, 1857, via Musée de Orsay and Wikimedia, public domain. 

EXERCISES

Local Data Models

Now that we’ve considered a range of entities and elements that could potentially populate a field, the various ways they could be gathered into collections, the different frameworks through which they could be structured as embodiments of knowledge or sources of data, and the politics and ethics of those collection and “operationalization” processes, let’s think even more broadly to imagine capacious, creative, values-driven “data models” for our own field sites. What are all the entities, forces, and elements within our fields that possess or embody knowledge, that yield information about themselves or their environments, that can be observed or processed — perhaps with the aid of various analog or digital instruments — in order to yield data? What different disciplinary knowledges and skills do we need to bring together in order to appreciate the prismatic intelligences embedded and infused throughout our fields? 

Supplemental Resources: 

  • Justin McGuirk, Jan Boelen, Camilla Buchanan, Isabel Carlisle, Rachel Fisher, Leonora Grcheva, Summer Islam, Elizabeth Rapport, and Emily Reed, “Islands of Coherence,” Future Observatory Journal 1 (Summer 2024). 
Field Activation & Place-Based Pedagogy

How might you then invite others to join you in the field to collaboratively create and share knowledge, while also stewarding the Land? What events or field-based or virtual programs might you organize — and how might they differ from those you could offer in a traditional library, lab, or classroom? What resources and tools might you need? And how might you adapt, or productively reimagine, the tools and resources appropriate for a conventional, indoors facility? 

Supplemental Resources: 

Metadata + Didactics 

How will you label and contextualize things within the field? How will you direct visitors’ movement,  shift their attention, and prompt their contemplation? How will you convey codes of conduct? Give credit? How might you use labels, tags, directional signs, flags, field guides, maps, apps, and so forth? 

Supplemental Resources: 

Return to the field map.

Giant Sequoia Record Label, Arnold Arboretum; photo by the author. 

Library Field references Library of Study, Hallel Yadin, Holly Eliza Temple, and Kristoffer Tjalve, all of whom are Syllabus contributors.