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Future of PBI

Paper & Book Intensive Perspectives

Beyond suitable education, all careers require occasional jolts of self recognition. If you experience a sudden, strange newness of familiar topics, a frenzy of change in what you know and if you realize that change in a strange place among new friends, you will never be the same. Afterward you will have a different experience of your daily work and, perhaps, a magical expectation of success.

The Paper and Book Intensive events have always surprised and inspired participants. What are the force fields of PBI that make it an exceptional experience and will these attributes stay fresh? Let’s imagine some PBI trajectories into the future. Three trajectories are apparent as PBI converges with trends in professional development and with an accentuated interdisciplinary status for book and paper studies, while, at the same time, PBI remains independent and diverges from administrative domination.

Professional development

PBI can assist professional development activities of other specialty groups such as the AIC (American Institute for Conservation), SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship Reading and Publishing), the RBS (Rare Books School), or the APA (Amalgamated Printers Association) as well constituents with the similar goals at university based programs in book and paper studies. In turn, these institutions and programs can support PBI as a component in their own membership services and course offerings.

To provide this support, PBI must not converge with other established programs; just the opposite. PBI must provide an environment for unexpected collisions of specialties and strange new networks of peers. In this way, PBI provides authentic professional development.

The PBI event occurs in a natural setting with participants disconnected from the news and from all familiar routines. Mind sets are quickly dissipated and what is obvious suddenly becomes strange. Add to this a frenzy to work, or the “intensive” aspect of PBI, and it is not surprising that each participant is surprised by a new recognition of themselves.

This is not escapism, but a lesson in the adaptability and flexibility of our own personalities. We can be suddenly different. Within that realization is another. We can adapt our career stances and our working relations with others. We can even reconsider our assumptions and, for a change, really question the obvious. This is a very useful and very usual PBI experience which is relevant to professional development goals of many organizations.

For example, the American Institute for Conservation is now progressing through a rapid development of its program for professional development. From June 2003 to June 2004, twenty eight workshops with six hundred and two participants were involved. The annual operating budget for the program is about a half million, most of it from interested granting agencies. Yet, while AIC members have been involved in PBI programs from the start, neither organization recognizes the relevance of other in terms of shared objectives and joint sponsorship. During the same period of thirteen months the AIC could have co-sponsored almost two dozen additional PBI workshops. Although related to AIC goals for professional development, not one of those PBI workshops would have been redundant of those in the AIC program.

The benefits of the PBI program, its intensity, its communal and resident ambience and its topical diversity will need to be communicated. The PBI will need to bridge to other organizations. At the same time, professional development workshops are being emphasized in the related organizations. The match is apparent.

Interdisciplinary status

Universities recognize that some types of research must cross over departmental lines and flourish in a zone in between them. Book and paper studies are examples of disciplines that are not really disciplines, but pursuits that cross over the various humanist and scientific departments. Book and paper studies are even more expansive than most interdisciplinary studies since they also cross boundaries into craft skills, requiring both scholarship and practical arts. So book and paper studies in Universities are always orphans resolving their rambling curricula, their disparate degrees and certificates and their strange array of zero percent faculty appointments.

The UICB (University of Iowa Center for the Book) has just been transferred to DIPS (Division of Interdisciplinary Programs). This move acknowledges the rambling nature of the UICB and tosses it in among other trans-disciplinary study programs such as Museum Studies, Sexuality Studies and Leisure Studies. The University is protecting and encouraging these study programs. The programs benefit from diminished administrative costs while gaining a full time receptionist. But is there a missing aspect in support of these programs?

The Book and Paper Intensive provides a needed model of interdisciplinary training. Curiously, the relevance is not in the PBI workshop topics themselves, but in the social structure in which the workshops occur. At PBI, equally as much time is spent engaging co-participants as is spent in class. Debate, negotiation of ideas, exchange of insights provides much of the content of the PBI event. This third layer, added to hybrid academic and hybrid craft themes, is that of a hybrid society.

Such a hybrid society, so apparent in PBI, is lacking in university interdisciplinary studies as the home departments keep the participating individuals from social integration as an independent group. Likewise the faculty is partitioned both to its home departments as well as from the students. PBI merges instructors and students into a single group of participants. PBI is a better model.

Administrative domination

PBI is not run by a cruise line, or a conference service or an administrative center. PBI is run by practitioners. As time goes on the administrative methods of the event are improved and refined, but the event should still be managed by those who know paper and book careers first hand. This circumstance protects PBI from encroachment by a self-validating administration that may have little knowledge of the work and needs of practitioners. PBI features of event costing, workshop content, site accommodation are not purely administrative issues. What an administrator would judge impractical or inefficient, the practitioner might consider ideal.

A recent contest for control among conservation organizations in the UK provides an illustration of administrative good intentions that disregard the needs and insights of practitioners. A National Council has decided that it will be a good idea to “dissolve all existing structures and create a new single body representing the whole of the conservation profession”. Practitioner members of the Institute for Paper Conservation must now defend their highly productive and effective group from a convergence that will result in the loss of their distinguished journal. The National Council simply does not wish its plans for economies of scale and unified political influence to be distracted by the needs of practitioners.

In the future PBI must remain dedicated to the practitioner. If this course is inscrutable to administrators then more time will be needed to study the implications. Experts can be consulted…it will all take time.

Trends in professional development, interdisciplinary status and administrative domination all surround PBI. And so do trends in global warming, fundamentalist validation and political polarity. In all this diorama, PBI will need a mission statement for the future. Meanwhile PBI can meet in remote locations for the benefit of those in paper and book careers. The practitioners can meet there, discuss cosmic mistakes and invent their own futures.