Library

I began work this past weekend on my proposal for the International Conference on the History of Cartography in Berne, Switzerland. The conference isn't until the summer of 2007, but the juried proposals are due at the end of the month. After a year of thinking about ways to re-work the questions of my Master's Thesis at the University of Wisconsin so they speak to a wider set of audiences, I decided that I will write a paper presentation about the use of maps on wine labels by marketers. This will springboard off my Master's work because it speaks to how and why the place of agricultural production is still an effective marketing tool in certain sectors of the American food economy (e.g. wine), even though the majority of our foodstuffs are generic and globalized, with no mark of the labor or the environmental circumstances that went into the production of the food. I think it's interesting that with some products this reverence toward place, sometimes local place, is still in tact, and with other products it is off the moral radar. I am discovering in the initial phases of this proposal -- essentially the task of locating the labels themselves that have maps on them -- that the style of library research here will be vastly different than what it was at Wisconsin.



UCLA is an excellent research institution (pictured above), but not necessarily because of its campus libraries. It relies heavily on other collections in the area, such as the Los Angeles Public Library, the Huntington Library & Archives, the USC libraries, and the UC-Berkeley libraries. While at the spatially small but intellectually gigantic universe of Wisconsin, where all these groups would be folded into one or two square city blocks, it was a matter of walking next door to grab a book. Here it is a matter of taking a day to go somewhere with a research agenda and call numbers in hand ready to pull and photocopy or check out what I need. Fortunately it is possible to have many items delivered to the UCLA campus, but some special collections and archival things have to be viewed on location. Hence the traversal of this never-ending urban expanse, which my dad and I measured once to be over 75 miles in width, so that I can look at a wine label or two.




I made my first of such treks to the LAPL Central Branch yesterday (above pictures), which for the Madisonians in the house is the L.A. equivalent to Memorial Library. It is an eight story cube full of books. The decorations are clearly more intricate, though, and they had a particularly relevant art exhibit going on about citrus crate labels from the first half of the 20th century in the United States (below). I found at the library what I think I'll need to bring together advertising label history and the history of cartography for the proposal. To these literatures I hope to add health geography for my dissertation, as well as expand away from the focus on wine.



The night before this trip I watched the Dodgers hit four consecutive home runs on TV to tie the game against their arch-rival Padres and gain control of first place. It was the first time since the '60s that a team had hit back to back to back to back home runs.