Cobbledick contends that
“Artists make up a considerable proportion of this nation’s
[i.e. the United States’] educated professional class, but their information
needs have been neglected by information professionals.”
(Cobbledick 1996,
p.343)
My interest in Cobbledick’s research is threefold: to
prepare a point of reference on whether the situation has improved; to gather
notions of what makes for good support for artists’ information needs; and to
pose a critical query about whether serving people’s imaginative engagement
with research materials is always best achieved by making things easier.
This last perhaps brooks a little more explanation, seeing
as it departs from the wisdom of serving the user. I am interested in the ways
in which encounters with information can either lead us deeper into a
confirmation of our initial position, or, contrariwise, those times when
information surprises us or helps us create new insights. This dichotomy is
germane to the experience of serendipity. Serendipity is not an organised
event; it cannot be rationally planned-out in the sense of creating better
indices or categories. It can be nurtured by creating the right circumstances,
but it is not easy to predict. Serendipity is not in the business of confirming anything; we do not seek out
serendipity, it is not research in that sense. Picasso puts it more simply when
he says “I do not seek; I find”.
With those interests in mind, what do we find in
Cobbledick’s 1996 research on the information-seeking behaviour of artists?
Cobbledick notes that artists’ information needs may be obscured by
The persistent appeal of certain preconceptions concerning
artists – that they are intuitive, self-contained individuals who create via
inspiration.
(Cobbledick 1996,
p.344)
The persistence of this romantic and expressionist figure
leads to a conception of the artist who “needs a library about as much as does
a whirling dervish”. Cobbledick
concludes that “the rarity of artist-use studies is itself a silent
endorsement” of the view that “libraries are peripheral to the lives of
artists.”
(Cobbledick 1996,
p.345)
Cobbledick now lays out the purpose of her study: if we
neglect artists’ information needs, what, then, are those needs? Her research will try to outline this, drawing on
the very varied possibilities of artists’ actual practice. A literature review
follows, with Cobbledick building on Toynr and Stam’s studies. Notable
quotations here include:
“Although her research was centred on the art library, Stam
also speaks of the great need artists have for a ‘wider culture than the world
of art’ [9, p.22]” (ibid. p.346)
“William J. Dane […] identifies […] needs for culturally diverse materials and legal
information about insurance and copyright laws. He also insists that the public
library is ideally suited to meet the needs of artists because they often use
the language of other disciplines [13].”
(Cobbledick 1996,
p.346)
“In a series of three short articles in Art Libraries Journal, three artists discuss the place of the
library in their creative lives [14—16]. All three express a great love of
libraries and books, books of all kinds from many different disciplines,
valuable for both their textual and their visual content. They also speak of
the joys of browsing and serendipitous discovery, the accidental stumbling on
just the right image in an old, forgotten volume. ” (Cobbledick 1996,
p.346)
So far, Cobbledick’s findings seem to emphasise the
importance of general access to stock. Artists are apt to require access to a
wide variety of information, not simply materials on art; and, however we weigh
this, the experience of serendipity does seem to be a part of the attraction.
Cobbledick is struck by the fact that artists do not list art books as among
their most important or influential resources; instead, as Cobbledick notes, in
a feature in Arts Magazine where artists were asked to list books
important to them,“books about art dominate only two out of […] thirty-eight
lists”(Cobbledick 1996,
p.347)
Drawing from these results, Cobbledick notes that it is art
librarians who are for the most part looking at the needs of artists, which risks “confin[ing] concern for artists to a specialized
arena where their needs may not be met.” (ibid. p.347) If artists need material
outside of the art library, why aren’t they a bigger part of the discourse of
more general provision? Why are artists’ needs limited to the ‘jurisdiction’ of
the art library when the existing information points to their needs being met
elsewhere? (It’s worth noting that this doesn’t negate the value of the art
library; it’s just that artists themselves cast a wider net than just their
‘home’ subject.
Cobbledick’s studies draw on a variety of artists whose
consultations of libraries in an age before more or less ubiquitous internet
connections may differ from those we’d expect now. One of the most striking
aspects of her findings was that all the artists tended to use the library as a
whole, rather than the art library, to support their practice. The art library
has an audience – but it is not located in the practice of these practicing
artists. Books on technique, for example, tend either to be part of artists’
own collections, or not to be in-depth enough to be satisfactory. Cobbledick
turns up a range of artists whose usage of libraries ranges from those who are
willing and capable of using opac to serve themselves, to a user who is capable
enough but who does not want to learn to do this. His comment is revealing,
“[For him] The reference librarians [from the institutional
library] are not as helpful as those in public libraries: ”They insist on
teaching me how to use the card catalog and how to use the computer, etc. I’m
in a hurry, and I need to find where the books are so I can look at them on the
shelf; and I don’t want to be taught.””
He wants to be served,
instead, and finds that the reduced collection sizes and helpful public library
staff suit him more. His comments reveal two things: that he feels there are particular subjects he wants to research
(and feels that there will be materials which satisfy this wish), and that he
is not coming to the library to browse or peruse or seek inspiration.
In fact, Cobbledick’s research contains an interesting
construction for dividing information seeking behaviour into Sources of Inspirational Information and
other, more goal-directed types of information seeking, such as that described
here. For the same individual, sources of inspirational information includes
site-specific research involving library materials, to help the artist (a
sculptor) develop a relationship to the site he has been commissioned to
produce an artwork for.
Cobbledick finds overall that artists tend to use the library
in a more directed way than we might presuppose given the myth of the ‘inspired
artist’ :
“All of the artists interviewed visit the library with a
specific need in mind. They often locate material to answer this need by
browsing, but they do so by browsing within limited subject areas […] None of
the artists describes happy accidents of serendipitous discovery in the
library.”
(Cobbledick 1996, p.362)
One is tempted to search for the flaw here. I am an artist,
and I have often found sources of material by accident; but it must be said
that I recognise strongly the position outlined here, too. Certainly one will
search through a subject area hoping for that item that snags in the mind, that
fact or circumstance or story through which the creative artist can create an
aporia to discuss, as it were, one thing through another. Isn’t it this that
the sculptor does when he researches the history of a place? Though it would be
interesting to pursue the point, the article cannot share in detail with us
what the nature of this specificity is. The artist is not after all trying to establish
the facts; he is looking for the
facts that are inspirational. And though he can get help in narrowing the
field over which to search, their significance are still the products of a
convergence of circumstances which only he can bring together. No cataloguing
system, however personalised, can adequately reproduce this. (Indeed I am
concerned that the more personalised information offerings try to be, the less
likely they are to offer just such ‘snags’ or points of interest.)
Had Cobbledick led an inquiry that asked the artist if he
knew which facts he wanted to outline, I think he’d likely have answered no.
It would be an easy mistake to go from the observation that
artists do not appear to pursue
‘happy accidents’ to say that the nature of their research in libraries is not
of this kind. While it is true that their research will have a certain
specificity, I would offer that the artist still does not set out to confirm
facts or to disprove them, but to see what is there that will prove relevant.
To be purposive is not necessarily to operate with a particular outcome or task
in mind. This differs from a scientistic view of research, though it seems
valid to offer that historical research and other humanities research will as
often make discoveries in the library as (dis)confirmations. The dichotomy of
discovery/confirmation, whilst probably creating a point of friction if we try
to apply it to any individual’s research, probably offers a more revealing
argument – in my view – than the notion that artists either seek specific information
or are in the business of seeking the happy accident. I would also seek to
illuminate through the interview, whether or not there were times when more
specific information was being sought, and times when media was simply consumed
in a more random fashion. Perhaps this is a more obvious question in the age of
the internet, when we can all easily understand the difference between surfing
and searching, even if at times the line is very blurred. But it is also a part
of the strategic push and pull of artistic practice as I would recognise it.
Several of the artists interviewed note the importance of continuity in their
work. The buildup of a material language and of the webs of significance and
sensitivity that an ongoing practice evolves can sensitize one fact over
another – it is this form of ‘being situated’ vis-à-vis the information
landscape that describes what the artists’ sensibilities are; it is not
explicitly acknowledged here that this buildup continues in times of
specificity as well as in times of browsing. Picasso said of his practice ‘I do
not seek: I find’, but there are times to seek as well as times to find, and
what we find comes to depend on what the background of seeking has primed us
for.
