Exhibition Review — “Rule №5: The Library is a Growing Organism,” NYU Libraries
by Bridget O’Keefe
Assistant Librarian, Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program
“Books are for use. Every reader has his or her book. Every book its reader. Save the time of the reader. A library is a growing organism.”
- S.R. Ranganathan, Law №5, Five Laws of Library Science
In 1931, S.R. Ranganathan, the father of library science, published his enduring manifesto, The Five Laws of Library Science. Rule №5: The Library is a Growing Organism, a historically-anchored exhibition derived from the last of Ranganathan’s laws, investigates how the library has evolved and taken on new meanings since 1931–and how it has not. Rule №5 engages audiences in a kaleidoscopic dialogue on how the world’s knowledge is collected, described, and preserved from voices at the heart of the profession. The award-winning exhibition is an interactive and sculptural audio installation that was collaboratively developed by NYU Libraries’ Amanda Belantara, Instruction and Outreach Librarian for the School of Professional Studies, and A.M. Alpin, Director of the Library Lab and Special Projects.
Rule №5 consists of six interactive sculptures that are dispersed throughout NYU’s Bobst Library, each modeled after a historic library or communication technology for retrieving and disseminating information. A rotary phone rests on a shelf furnished with curiosities, hiding a secret doorway into the exhibit. I pick up the receiver and nobody is there. A note sits beside the phone, which reads:
In libraries, we receive transmissions from people we have never met but can feel closely connected to through the works or ideas they have left for future generations…we encourage you to pick up the phone and to connect with loved one’s lost, or perhaps ancestral muses whose stories fill libraries even after they are gone.
This talismanic prop, inspired by Itaru Sasaki’s wind phone sets the tone for what is next to come. In the library, one can trace historical and ideological lineages, excavate the past, and converse with the dead. The works of several generations linger within these walls, “waiting to be reawakened.” As you proceed through the exhibition, you contemplate whose history is preserved, and whose is forgotten.
Rule №5 invites you to meditate on absence and invisibility. A constellation of insights from library workers lifts the veil on a profession believed to be “inherently good and sacred… beyond critique.” Cataloging & Classification, a sculpture modeled after a card catalog, can be found outside of the fourth floor reading room. I opened the drawer labeled POWER, and tuned into a discussion interrogating the constraints and dangers of controlled vocabularies. The Library of Congress Classification system continues to essentialize, misrepresent, and disregard the identities of marginalized communities, sustaining established practices of structural violence.
Belantara and Alpin engage in an ongoing discourse on the evolving “history and cultural meaning of libraries,” whilst centering the unheard voices of the workers whose labor keeps the organism alive. Tufts University Librarian Leo Settoducato wrote of the phantasmic and undetected work of the library worker in a 2019 In the Library with the Leadpipe article, which reads:
Libraries are haunted houses. As our patrons move through scenes and illusions that took years of labor to build and maintain, we workers are hidden, erasing ourselves in the hopes of providing a seamless user experience.
In the Avery Fisher Center on Floor 7, you will find a diorama furnished with the accouterments of library rituals — a book cart, a laptop, classification tape, a Library of Congress Call Number guide, a card catalog – making the invisible labor of the librarian suddenly visible. There is an assemblage of historic professional literature, too, demarcating desirable characteristics for librarians, reiterating a history of racism, misogyny, and classism that has governed the profession. Rule №5 poses the question to librarians: how can we exist within a system that we are simultaneously seeking to reform? The display of ephemera documenting a history of dissent and grassroots activism to challenge discriminatory practices in the field, such as copies of LIS Microaggressions and Progressive Librarian, begins to address these questions.
At Bobst Library, you are immersed in a tapestry of sounds — singing bowls, the drone of a monk chanting, pages turning, laughter, and the voices of information professionals — within and reverberating beyond the exhibition. Rule №5 calls to mind the 1987 Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire. Two telepathic angels haunt a library in a divided West Berlin– each patron’s thoughts blend into an indecipherable cacophony. Impermanence, the final sculpture, stationed on Floor 8 consists of an overhead speaker concealed in a chandelier composed of obsolete library material including 35mm film and LP records. A symphony of voices whisper literary passages in a panoply of languages. Rule №5 demystifies the labor beyond the stacks, delineates a history of advocacy within the profession, and connects the visitor to networks of thought across space and time, inspiring us to think critically about the institutions, principles and practices that constitute public memory.
You can schedule a visit to Rule №5 here: https://www.ruleno5.org/contact
Bibliography
Alpin, A.M., and Amanda Belantara. “Rule No 5: The Library Is a Growing Organism.” Rule No 5: The Library Is A Growing Organism, 2023. https://www.ruleno5.org/.
Ettarh, Fobazi. “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, January 10, 2018. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/.
Settoducato, Leo. “Intersubjectivity and Ghostly Library Labor.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, March 6, 2019. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2019/intersubjectivity-and-ghostly-library-labor/.
