The Alethea Wing Parington Botanical Gardens

[truepenny]

But first, a question: I know there's a difference between a librarian and an archivist, but I find I don't know how to articulate it. I also know that there are both librarians and archivists reading this blog. Would any of you care to step up to the plate and help a girl out?

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I'm working on a new Kyle Murchison Booth story for The Bone Key; this story may or may not involve the rose garden of the Alethea Wing Parrington Botanical Gardens, but for my own use, I want the hypertexted list of the roses that might be cultivated there. Only one of these roses originates post-1875, and that's the Pax rose. (One of the things I love about roses is that they're so shamelessly symbolic.)

Seven Sisters (1817)
Abbandonata (1834)
Asmodée (1849)
Bacchante (before 1811)
Banshee (1773)
Blanchefleur (1835)
Cardinal Richelieu (1847)
Cloth of Gold (1873)
Desprez à Fleur Jaune (1830)
Glory John (1853)
Rose d'Isfahan (before 1832)
Jacobite Rose (a.k.a. Bonnie Prince Charlie's Rose) (before 1500)
Queen of Denmark, Alba (1826)/Queen of Denmark, Damask (1826) (I probably meant the Alba, but wotthehell, why not list both?)
Lilas monstrueux (before 1810)
Agrippina (a.k.a. Queen of Scarlet) (1832)
Pax (1918)
Souvenir d'un Ami (1846)
Souvenir de la Malmaison (1843)
Souvenir de la Princesse de Lamballe (a.k.a. Queen of the Bourbons) (1834)
Souvenir d'Auguste Rivoire (1861) (or did I mean Souvenir d'August Rivière?)
Souvenir de la Bataille de Marengo (1840)
Souvenir de Mme. Auguste Charles (1866)
Souvenir du Docteur Jamain (1865)
Orphée de Lille (1811)
Charlotte Corday (1864)

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"Thirdhop Scarp": 1,542 words

Comments

ooh, a fun question!

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

Am neither, but am avoiding work in hot office, and know about it from the other side--the researches--who lurves both librarians and archivists.

An archivist is in charge of a special collection, an archive, often non-circulating materials, not necessarily published materials, within a larger setting (usually a library, but can be city, corporation, etc. Say a company has its own archives of all sorts of documents and productions maintained on its premises). Archives can be any size, but they tend to focus on a specific focus, primary materials, not general fun for reading stuff (though fun novels can be part of an archive!). Sometimes archives put very specific requirements on scholarly access, use. Archives aren't usually used by the general public (although more genealogical work by people these days may have changed that) unless they have a very specific interest.

For example, I just spent a week researching covers of periodicals and books covers in Hal Hall's Archives inCushing (http://library.tamu.edu/portal/site/Library/menuitem.4671eb1f54acfda343aecb5419008a0c/?vgnextoid=5b5ec35b248c0010VgnVCM1000007800a8c0RCRD). I had to fill out forms, identify self, follow their rules (they were fantastic, by the way), let me pimp them like crazy for anyone in Texas wanting to do research on SF (Hal has a fantastic online database too).

Historians work with archives, and have to learn how to do archival research. Lit people who work with earlier periods (manuscript study) often do as well, but it's not as common.

I'm sure you'll get lots of good and specialized answers from people who know more, but librarians--well, there can be lots of different kinds of librarians -- and I imagine many archivists are librarians (in terms of degree, work), while having perhaps more specialized degrees (our university archivist has a Ph.D. in History).

Hope this helps!

[shana.livejournal.com]

I'm a librarian.

An archivist deals mostly with the preservation of knowledge -- often primary source, unpublished materials. The idea is to keep it and preserve it for the future.

While some librarians are archivists, another wodge of librarianship is about making information accessible. Putting it into the hands of people who can use it. This includes things like reading for pleasure. Here the emphasis is on the needs of the current and near future users, not posterity.

Is this any help?

An archivist remarks...

[oursin.livejournal.com]

There is no point in keeping knowledge for the future unless it is made accessible. Just warehousing, however good the conditions, is not enough. Intellectual control over the material is essential as well (metadata). One of my constant gripes is that many people, including those on funding bodies, have very little conception of the importance of, or the amount of labour involved in, cataloguing archives, rather than merely acquiring and storing them.

Re: An archivist remarks... and a librarian replies

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

funding bodies, have very little conception of the importance of, or the amount of labour involved in, cataloguing archives, rather than merely acquiring and storing them.

Ohhhhh so very true it's probably one of the founding truths of the universe. (It's true in libraries too.)

MKK

[veejane.livejournal.com]

An archivist is kind of like a museum-specialist who deals mostly in words. (More and more, library programs and museum-studies programs are falling under the same rubric; between the two, balanced precariously, lies archives-studies.)

Most of the time, a librarian is interested in Type: a copy of Tom Sawyer, any copy, maybe a specific edition but it doesn't matter where the copy comes from as long as the user can read it. An archivist, on the other hand, tends to be interested in Token: not just any copy of Tom Sawyer, but this specific copy with the chocolate thumbprint on page 12 and the letter pressed in the back to John Dillinger from his mother.

(All librarians have to deal with tokens, and archivists with types, but I don't know many archivists who would consent to digitizing and throwing away print of a part of a collection; whereas librarians do that often these days.)

[oursin.livejournal.com]

We might consider digitisation for access purposes, but not as a viable substitute for careful preservation of the originals. Since paper still has a guaranteed life-span, under reasonable conditions, much, much longer than digital images.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

We love paper. (Okay, not acid paper.)

When I was getting my degree (information structure, at a school with an archives track), all anybody could talk about was digital objects, digital this, digital that. As counterpoint, our more traditional instructors told stories of incomprehensible punch cards, gigantic useless floppy disks, and reel-to-reel dataforms from the 1960s that burst into flames when played on modern players.

It was enough to make one a Luddite.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

In all the hoohah over the new online Domesday Book, there has been a certain curtain of silence drawn over the original, now defunct, digitisation project, as the march of technology moved over and past it. (Am now trying to calculate the percentage of time during which that was viable and working compared to the survival rate of DB itself...)

At least people are now taking seriously the problems involved in the long-term preservation of digital (especially born-digital) records.

[libskrat]

Clay tablets were heavy and tended to shatter.
Papyrus crumbled but at least it was flatter.
Parchment was handsome but prone to decay.
Paper with acid will just melt away.
Magnetic disks are erased in a trice.
Something that lasts, really lasts, would be nice.

-- David Drake, Overdue Notice: Poems from the Library

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

slrose is right. Archivists, who usually have librarian degrees, are tasked with preserving primary materials. They might work with acess to that material, but preserving and archiving material for future generations is the primary goal.

Librarian and information specialists are tasked with matching users/patrons/customers/label du jour with the materials and information they need or desire. Sometimes, that means helping them find books or CDs or DVDs, and sometimes it means looking something up on an online database. And so on.

And then there are the library folks who are tasked with organizing all the data out there: cataloguers and indexers.

I was an indexer for 2 years (for Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature) and have been a public librarian for nearly 25 years so far. :)

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Archivists in the UK (and I think in many European countries) do not have library degrees, it's a totally separate and distinct professional qualification. And it's just as much about facilitating access (while taking thought about how that can happen while conserving materials for posterity) as it is about preservation. Because archives are seldom intuitively accessible to the potential user.

A book is something that's purposefully written and enclosed between two covers. An archive is something that accrues in the process of doing something else: running a government or a business or a charity or a medical practice, or living one's life and conducting one's personal affairs. It may include unpublished and published materials, what matters is their contextual position in relation to one another: thus, the original arrangement by provenance of the archive is an important element. Thus, an archive is unique: even if the specific items aren't (e.g. duplicated minutes), their presence in that particular collection and their place within it is.

A librarian is looking to categorise a book according to certain predefined categories (Dewey, Library of Congress etc). Archivists often spend a long time living with chaos in the process of sorting a collection and cataloguing it - you have to be sensitive to its creation and original purpose, something that often only emerges with any clarity during this process.

However, the term 'archive' is increasingly used in a very loose way - that would bring tears to the eyes of the stoical Sir Hilary Jenkinson - to mean many kinds of collections of research materials preserved for the future. Unfortunately there is no one word in English that encapsulates that meaning of 'artificially created* collection of primary research materials'. So 'archive' tends to get used.

*As opposed to the organic accretion of an archive in the strict sense.

one of things.. roses

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

http://www.rdrop.com/~paul/ I haven't been following so probably not for your story, just candy and more substantial. There's some good stuff on his links page too. Myth history scent things like Fantin Latour that climb over the gables and drench the side yard in glorious scent and drop silk petals.

I grow Konigin Danmark also http://www.rdrop.com/~paul/albas/danemark.html and the names are great aren't they? The Albas take quite a bit of space but will bloom in part shade. The damask blood you can tell by the scent (altho my sniffer is poor)but even that far back things and notes were confuzzled.

Re: one of things.. roses

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Have to my add my two cents on your rose list, can't help it.
Lovely list, very interesting--so many of them are unfamiliar to me, and I know a lot of old rose varieties, sinc eI worked in a rose retail nursery who sold old 'uns too.
This may partly regional,"Help Me Find" folks often used to be in the Midwest, when I last looked around there very much.
Paul Bardon is major resource. His lists of varieties sorted by category are all great, all the ones I'm familiar with are all major and important, and deserve to be out there in your garden. Also, great links for further information.
The Help Me Find site is put together as Wikipedia is, people can get sold something under a name when it may be mislabled, but the comparison pix from different folks may catch errors.
Wanted to give one rose nursery's website with good variety lists and info, but not always helpful on the quality of their pix. (Not affilitated with them myself, I just know their stuff.) This is their explanation of old roses.
http://www.regannursery.com/getting_started/old_garden_roses.htm

I'm not sure of the context of your garden(please pardon my ignorance) but if they are a contemporary location, it would surprise me if they didn't also have a few modern and very famous cultivars such as Mr. Lincoln, Peace, Tiffany, Double Delight, and various beds with new test roses being tried out for the ARS rosarians--part of the deal when such places are getting support money and local volunteers to prune in winter. A lot of hands are needed to get it done.
I haven't checked through your listings, but I should mention two points, tolerance of the local weather, and timing of bloom for fictional scenes.
Autumn damasks, for instance, will be in bloom out here in SoCal in October, but not in the Midwest. The other hardy old varieties, such as gallicas and albas and centifolias, should be dormant even in SoCal by that point. However, the more tender varieties may still be blowing their heads off with all kinds of buds.
If you're north of the Mason-Dixon line, whatever era it's in, your garden may not be able to grow any of the Chinas or true tea roses without special extra labor & greenhouses, which is a shame. I say this because, among some others, Mutabilis is one of the important and famous stud roses that led to the infusion of reblooming characteristics in all the modern roses, although it's rather tender itself. Many of the chinas and teas are great landscape roses that look good as shrubs out of bloom, and they have thin, wiry, dainty stems that don't look anything like the heavy canes of modern roses, but give them a lovely faery charm in their own right.
So, for a botanical garden in New Orleans, say, a historically important collection would have to have chinas and teas and some of their offspring, the Noisettes, and believe it or not, they'd look far better in a public garden in the winter than any of the conventional modern roses look when out of season.
Northern gardens that use hardy species roses and leave the hips for the birds, and to collect snow into pretty pictures, also look much better, but a lot less tidy, more like wildflowers.
I should add that, like local museums, such a garden would have rose varieties famous in their location, which originated there, or somehow got local associations. Public gardens up in the foothills (CA Gold Country) practically have to have the 49er Rose, because it was one of the first imports, brought along by miners and settlers. Rosarians in the garden's area would love to give you any of that. (They might also insist on showing you how to prune, but you run these risks when researching properly.)
New Orleans area, for instance, may have been the birthplace of the Noisettes (I understand there's some argument about it), which are absolutely lovely climbers and among the first of the early European-grown hybrids to use some of that asian genetic stock, but also horribly tender. Marechal Niel and Gloire de Dijon are practicaly required for a public garden there, but impossible further north.
A Nebraska garden would probably have to bow to local rosarian sentiment and carry at least a major bed of Dr. Griffith Buck's sub-sero roses, which are all lovely things, but also all too modern.

Re: one of things.. roses

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

Thank you very kindly for the link and all the info here. The old roses are a passion of mine also. I have been playing around with hybridizing here (Upstate NY) in addition to the small Secret garden type of thing I have here in the small city space (mainly old roses and rugosas) and what I can do with the larger scpace I have started at the Park. It is very hard not to help it. I was thinking much the same after truepenny posted.

I don't want to highjack the thread so maybe it'll prompt me to post more in my own journal. (Not at all a bad thing!) And you have me thinking of In Search of Lost Roses again. Not a bad thing either. Thank you so much for the post.

Re: one of things.. roses

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

You probably know tons more about the hardy varieties, then! Yay for great varieties!!
I love that book.
I'm afraid I may have hijacked thread a bit, but the intent was to help on writing research angles and provide link.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

> But first, a question: I know there's a difference between a librarian and an archivist, but I find I don't know how to articulate it.

I was actually just wondering that this morning, so... thanks.

[vass]

My parents had a Souvenir de la Malmaison in their backyard when I was a kid. I think it's the first rose I knew the name of.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Has anyone ever named a rose Umberto Eco? Because they totally should, it would be so beautifully recursive.