At Bennington College, the Library Becomes a Work of Art

Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 08/07/2008

• 27 bookmarks attached via inserts
• Course, project supported by Mellon grant
• Artwork is open source

Art is usually part of any good library, but at Bennington College’s (VT) Crossett Library, students, faculty, and librarians have turned the library itself into a work of art. Bennington Bookmarks, billed as “an interactive art installation” was unveiled at Crossett in May, inviting students to attach gently-glowing “bookmarks” to library materials—books, DVDs, and VHS tapes, for example; each indicates a message has been left about the item. Patrons can then access messages at one of three touch-enabled “Bookmark Stations” installed on each of the library’s three floors. The stations connect to a library database, which displays the messages in hexagons on the screen. 

(Images courtesy of the Artists and Bennington College. Above: Occam's Razor. Below: Bookmark station and Jocasta.)

The physical bookmarks, 27 in all, come in nine different forms—ranging from an Apollo lunar lander, to a yeast cell, to a statuette of American dance innovator Martha Graham. Each one contains a microcontroller and an LED light. They attach to items by hand-sewn, embroidered wool inserts, and students can set the gentle glowing lights within the bookmarks to a range of colors to further personalize their messages. Already, library officials say, the messages are creating “a dynamic, evolving portrait of the Bennington community.”

Oceana Wilson, director of library and information services, told LJ that one of the project’s great elements is that it encourages physical interaction with the library—students must be logged in to leave messages; anonymous messages are not permitted. And in an age when so many of the library’s resources can be accessed remotely, students must be at the library to leave a bookmarked message—messages cannot be left via the library web site, or, for example, emailed. So far, the installation has been a hit. “Throughout the summer we have seen people leaving bookmarks and having fun with it,” Wilson said. “I’m interested to see what it’s like in the fall when we have the whole population on campus.” 

Collaboration, via Mellon
The project is the result of a year-long collaboration between visual arts faculty member Robert Ransick, computing faculty member Joe Holt, and nine Bennington students enrolled in a course entitled “The Augmented Library: A Site Specific Installation.” The project, and course that spawned it, are the first initiatives of the Crossett Library Fellows Program, which launched in 2007 with a $275,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to create “dialogues and projects that expand the role of the library within the Bennington College community, as well as highlight the importance of libraries in contemporary society.” 

Expandable project
Wilson says the artists and librarians at Bennington would love to see their project expand to other libraries—in the spirit of both libraries and artistic exchange, the “Bookmarks” artwork is all completely open-source and available for anyone to adopt under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. The artists are “definitely interested in what variations people might come up with,” Wilson said. “That just seems so in the spirit of this project.”