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.
