Librarians: Portland's Quiet Heroes

Jessica Crawford is the music librarian at The Portland Opera.

Sometimes they work in public, sometimes in private. Often they perform their job thanklessly cloistered in rooms, hunched over books and other media. They may sometimes be quiet, but they are what keeps our civilization thrumming, and if they're doing it right, we never even know they're there.

Here is a round-up of some rich morsels of Portland culture curated by some of our city’s finest librarians.

Portland Opera

Access: Private
Location: The Hampton Opera Center, 211 SE Caruthers Street
Hours: Monday-Friday, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.
Connect: 503.241.1407

The pregnant pause, collectively performed by 40 violinists as they prepare to strike at their strings with their with their bows, is no accident. This seemingly small choreographed moment—and in fact all such moments in the performance, rests on the shoulders of Jessica Crawford.

Crawford is the music librarian at The Portland Opera, where she oversees a collection of 40-50 complete opera sets, containing the vocal, orchestral and choral scores that comprise any given opera, all of which are stored in 10 nine foot tall file cabinets in a 250 square-foot room at the Hampton Opera Center in the southeast.

When a soprano needs to rehearse an aria with her pianist, or when a percussionist wants to hear a recording of her most recent performance, she comes to see Crawford. But that's just a small part of her job.

"I'm basically an editor," she says, a proofreader, a troubleshooter, charged with fixing wrong notes, and penciling into each player's score corrected notes and performance choreography that make each opera look well-rehearsed and long lived-in.

"If I do [my job] well," she says, "nobody knows about it."

40 Frames

Access: Private
Location: 5232 N Williams Avenue
Connect: 503.231.6548

Pam Minty and Alain LeTourneau, 40 Frames. Photo: Ann Ploeger.

No one these days says a prayer for relics like the un-index-able microfiche, but film is another matter. The rise of digital film production has obvious benefits—low costs and easy-to-use, constantly improving technologies—but it has also, to an extent, endangered a century's worth of cinema.

For the last 12 years, Pam Minty and Alain LeTourneau of 40 Frames, an artist-run nonprofit, have been preserving films, specifically 16mm films, that could easily vanish without proper preservation and storage.

LeTourneau says that for decades, 16mm was the medium of choice for professional and amateur filmmakers who shot everything from home movies, travelogues, documentaries and experimental films.

If organizations like 40 Frames didn't preserve films, LeTourneau says, "we would lose an enormous part of film history. Not to mention, viewing films on film is a unique experience, and there is a quality to the light, color and grain structure that creates an experience worth preserving."

40 Frames is currently preserving 600 titles donated to them by media nonprofits, colleges and universities, and regional filmmakers who either don't have the space or the resources to preserve their films.

Recently, 40 Frames set up a global directory of 16mm-related services as a resource for all things 16mm. Minty and LeTourneau have also spent the last two years completing their own 16mm film, Empty Quarter, a sound film documenting the landscapes and people of Oregon's sparsely populated southeastern quarter, which premiered in Portland in January.

North Portland Tool Library

Access: Public
Location: 2209 N Schofield Street
Hours: Saturdays, 9 a.m.-2 p.m., and Tuesdays, 5-7:30 p.m.
Membership: FREE for North Portland residents
Connect: 503.823.0209

For seven years, residents of north Portland have been able to visit the basement of historic, now-defunct Kenton firehouse, where they can browse hundreds of tools to help them better care for their lawns, automobiles and homes. Arolia McSwain, the tool room coordinator and the non-profit's only paid employee says, as far as she knows, the North Portland Tool Library (NPTL) is the first of its kind in the city.

"Although I heard some lore about a woman in the 1970s who started a tool library on the west side," she says. "But we heard she stopped to become a yogi."

Originally founded by Portlanders Jason Hatch, Laura Dalton, Matt Moritz and Jason Henshaw, the NPTL, says McSwain, has also had the opportunity to consult with and mentor other aspiring tool librarians eager to have tool repositories in their own neighborhoods. For instance, the NPTL helped the Northeast Portland Tool Library (NEPTL) get off the ground, and she says the NEPTL in turn acted in an advisory role to help the Southeast Portland Tool Library get going.

So if you live in North Portland, and you need a rototiller or a lawnmower of small jackhammer, look no further than just down the street.

Northwest Philatelic Library

Access: Public
Location: 4828 NE 33rd Avenue
Hours: every second and fourth Saturday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., and every second and Tuesday, 7-8 p.m.
Membership: $12 a year
Connect: 503.284.6770

Ever since the U.S. government issued its first postage stamp, authors have been writing books about the mail, whether focusing on the Pony Express, the United States Postal Service, or the collection of stamps. But it's likely the collectors and hobbyists themselves who make necessary such reading rooms as the Northwest Philatelic* Library (NWLP).

Charles Neyhart, a retired Oregon State professor of finance, currently curates the NWPL's library, which is made up of about 5,000 titles stacked in a 700 square-foot room in the basement of an old Portland City fire station, now home of the Oregon Stamp Society.

The volunteer-run NWLP currently boasts about 300 members. You don't need to be an NWLP member to check materials, which can be reserved through an inter-library loan. But if you are a member, the NWPL will ship books to you no matter where you're currently living, whether it's New Orleans or Shanghai.

*According to the O.E.D. and translated from the French, via the Greek, a philatelist "loves exemption from payment," referring to the recipient of a letter on which the post has already been paid.