We are thrilled to share with you the final of report on the SHARP 2025 conference that took place in Rochester, NY July 7-10.

Library Transformations

If judging by the headlines on either side of the Atlantic, anyone might reach the view that libraries are places of conflict. Certainly, libraries have been and continue to be a conduit for anxieties about all sorts of aspects of individual identities and social cohesion. Yet for all the conflict, it remains that libraries are much better characterized by the way they provide spaces for community. They are also spaces in which we build relationships with books. This capaciousness underpinned the theme of the SHARP conference in Rochester, NY: “Communities and Values of the Book.” 

Much of the power of the library comes from its ability to change to meet the needs of users and materials. The two papers in the panel “Transforming Libraries” explored our relationships with books by way changing the spaces and ways in which we use them: one by a contemporary pedagogic intervention, another by a technical innovation. 

Students, like every other reader, have complex emotional responses to books as material objects and to accessing them in the space of special collections. For all the hard work of the profession to make these spaces welcoming, it can still be daunting. None of us who study rare books will likely forget sidling up for the first time, clutching mandated pencils to see material designated as warranting particular restrictions; that thrill never goes away. 

And it is this thrill amongst other responses which Anastasia Armendariz (UC Irvine) has been harnessing in her work with students, outlined in her paper “Rare Care: Prioritizing the Personal in Rare Book & Special Collections Curatorship.” Her approach invites students to determine what is ‘rare’ and deserving of attention. This is of particular value when, as at UC Irvine, students are from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in higher education. Armendariz aims to push against the nineteenth-century bubble of colonialism and white supremacism – the underpinnings of much western bibliographical thinking and its hierarchies – that for so long has defined the logics by which certain material was and is considered rare, fine, or collectible. Artists’ books are one way by which these arbitrary criteria have been challenged. Armendariz gave two examples of artists’ books with rubbish-based substrates: Sara Parkel’s Baggage (Filter Press, 2012) made from laminated plastic bags, and Ashlee Weitlauf, Tossed Aside (Pell Mell Press, 2004), on paper produced from rubbish from the streets of Tempe and printed with found objects. 

Armendariz encouraged her students, after Giuliana Furci’s suggestion to look for books like foraging, “to find wild mushrooms in a forest, you have to be in a state of receptiveness, a state of openness to an encounter”, but by using “personal affective responses,” students are able to “broaden our categories of rareness.” Following their interests, students curate an exhibition showing what matters to them. Capturing the exhibition as radical space, Armendariz has also presented questions in captions – I could not help but think of Sarah Werner’s suggestion that “[w]e can shift from modeling expertise as bibliographers to modeling questioning, and in so doing, we can bring in newcomers to our work and expand the types of work that bibliography does.” Here, leaning into the personal and the affective was presented as a way of “decentering and moving away from curatorial authority” as Werner suggests.

At its best, the end results of this approach can challenge what counts as bibliographical information. One glorious comment from a student in a class was was: “this book smells good.” We have all been there. 

Other than for olfactory satisfaction, another reason for having a good sniff in the archive can be to identify some duplication processes, almost all of which were obsolescent with the arrival of xerography. An apt discussion for Rochester, former home of the Xerox company, which was founded in 1906, and had already developed a range of processes. The xerox process, launched in 1960 with the model 914, soon became ubiquitous. Chester Carlson, sensing the real potential for dry, quick copies, made his technology available to all without license, somewhat confusingly given that it took the firm’s name: xerography.

Sylvain Lesage’s paper “Communities of Xeroxes: How photocopiers transformed libraries” (Université de Lille) began with his own experiences as a student at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, queuing to have xerographic copies made of books. Shortly after he finished his research, digital cameras were permitted in the library. What a difference this would have made! It would indeed have transformed his experience of the library, where as he gathered imprint and other bibliographic data. And if we are familiar with the transformative effect of the arrival of free or inexpensive digital photography in libraries, we can imagine how much things changed with the arrival of the xerox, making reference copies available on the spot. 

The 914 xerox machine, the first launched, was aimed at large corporations, but, as Lesage explained, quickly found their way into libraries, where process copying was already common. The NYPL had photostats as early as 1912. Indeed, libraries had complex needs, from catalogue cards down to bulletins. Xerox approached the University of Rochester and offered it one of three machines for field testing before commercial release. The Registrar’s office shot up from 50-100 copies per day using Verifax to 1200 a day by the end of the first week of xerography. Later, the increased demand produced by the machines would be described as “the narcotic effect”. As soon as 1961, the library was copying journal articles in response to ILL requests. 

A bigger case study came from the Bibliothèque publique d’information (BPI) which opened in 1977. Offering access to books and contemporary documents, readers had total access to the shelves, but could only read on-site. Naturally, people wanted to make copies. Quite what they did with them or how they felt remained unclear, so Lesage turned to the archived feedback ‘notebooks’ which were available to users at every desk. Many of these notebooks listed extensive complaints, often about the xerox machines. Like the notorious Cahiers de doléances of 1789, the frustrations poured forth: there were not enough machines, the queues were too long, and the quality was too low, the frustration of having been artificially impaired to keep publishers happy if reading copies could be made but they could not circulate further. Despite the cost, the quality, and the waiting, people were still copying, even entire books, and by 1981, 70 per cent of visitors xeroxed: at 50 centimes a copy, some million pages were made per year. All this, Lesage argued, had a transformative effect on what the library was – “a kind of sales library or bookshop only selling extracts.” 

A further paper was withdrawn, leaving space for lively discussion. The common ground between the two papers was clear: how we use libraries and the materials within them shapes what they are. Some may lament the use of reading rooms as places of reproduction if books are xeroxed or snapped on mobile telephone in great number for later consultation, rather than as places to sit and read; others might celebrate, seeing barriers to access reduced. Libraries and their information might change users, but ultimately, users will make what they need and want of these spaces. 

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Malcolm Noble is a freelance historian and bibliographer. His bibliographical work has appeared in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, The New Americanist, and Journal of Electronic Publishing. As Linda Hall Library Presidential Fellow in Bibliography 2025/2026, he will be working on the history and bibliographical description of tinted office paper.