The Cross-Reference Coalition
An Experimental School
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METRO works to create a sustainable culture of creativity, collaboration, and open exchange for libraries, archives, museums, and cultural institutions in the Metropolitan New York region and around the world.
We accomplish our mission through leadership, grantmaking, resource sharing, professional learning, research, technology services, creative practice, and more.
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The Metropolitan New York Library Council is launching the Cross-Reference Coalition, an experimental public school that knits together METRO’s member institutions — hundreds of libraries and archives across New York City and Westchester County. We aim to discover what new knowledges and creative practices might emerge through integrative thinking, through interdisciplinary collaborations, through inter-institutional partnerships, through the activation of New York City’s shared public knowledge.
Exhibition announcement for Saul Steinberg Drawings show at Betty Parsons/Sidney Janis, New York, January 28 through February 16, 1952; Whitney Museum Artists' Correspondence and Ephemera Collection; via DCMNY (a METRO-hosted project)
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METRO’s Cross-Reference Coalition will connect the metropolitan region’s public and private knowledge institutions across a range of genres and sizes — from museum libraries to hospital archives, living specimen collections to neighborhood historical societies, universities to philanthropic foundations — to highlight the wealth and variety of resources in our metropolitan region, as well as the prismatic refractions made possible when we juxtapose them.
“Contemporaries - Juxtaposing Perceptions,” Exhibition Catalog for Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, New York, New York, Sept 15 - Nov 6, 1989; via DCMNY
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The Cross-Reference Coalition offers participating member institutions opportunities to highlight their collection materials, services, and staff; to find commonalities and complementarities with other institutions; and to build foundations for future partnerships.
Exhibition announcement for Kenneth Noland show at the Andre Emmerich Gallery from November 10 through 28, 1964; Whitney Museum Artists' Correspondence and Ephemera Collection; via DCMNY
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As the United States enters a period of great upheaval and uncertainty, METRO’s Cross-Reference Coalition demonstrates how New York City serves as a national and global beacon: an embodiment of the vital importance of trusted public knowledge, of robust investment in cultural institutions, and of mutual aid, solidarity, and coalition-building.
Arnold Eagle, “Learning a New Machine - Astoria Sewing Center” and "Learning Code - Radio Workshop, 1941, via The New York Public Library Digital Collections
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We’re Cross-Referencing Collections, Institutions, Disciplines, Fields of Practice… and�Historical Precedents��Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Sulla fina anatomia degli organi centrali del sistema nervoso (1885); via Wikimedia
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We’re building upon a long tradition of lyceums, mechanics institutes, arts leagues, Freedom Schools, and various other models of voluntary, collaborative — and often radical and abolitionist — adult education. ��Free School Department of the Mechanics' Institute, 1900; via DCMNY; student registration card, Mechanics Institute, 1912; via DCMNY
Legacies of Adult Education
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There exist today a few professional development and voluntary professional training programs for librarians and archivists — from Library Juice Academy to Rare Book Schoolsto Digital Humanities Institutes to METRO’s own programming. Many of these programs require participants to pay tuition and travel. ��The Cross-Reference Coalition offers something different — something more like an interdisciplinary arts and humanities graduate seminar without grades or grandstanding 😉
Contemporary Professional Education Programs Serving the LIS Community
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In recent years, as more and more people have been disillusioned by the neoliberalization, corporatization, and political timidity of higher education, and as they’ve found it increasingly financially inaccessible, we’ve seen the rise of myriad intentional learning communities. We build on this tradition, too.
Alternative Schools
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In Spring 2022 Metro’s Director of Creative Research taught a widely circulated class exploring the challenges facing American higher education, and the increasing prevalence and relevance of alternative, abolitionist, convivial learning communities — like the one we hope to cultivate!
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Its focus on the particular ecology of knowledge institutions in the New York metropolitan region
Its intentional assembly of participants from across the city’s GLAM*, arts and design, and higher education institutions��* galleries, libraries, archives & museums!
Its distinction from traditional continuing education and professional development. The CRC aims to offer a new kind of learning experience: a para-academic, thematically- integrated, experimental, intentional learning community
What distinguishes the Cross-Reference Coalition
Its rejection of surveillant technologies and instrumentalist learning
Its commitment to “commoning” and preserving its course materials as Open Educational Resources
Its focus on the collaborative production of an experimental open-access publication, and the provision of editorial support + publication mentorship. Participants gain experience with collaborative peer review and imagine new forms of knowledge production
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Its Instructor �
Shannon Mattern is METRO’s Director of Creative Research and the 2025 Kluge Chair of Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. She has held tenured full professorships in media studies, anthropology, and the history of art at The New School in New York and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
She has written four books about libraries, maps, and urban intelligence; edited several collections on digital technologies and everyday knowledge practices; and published over 100 articles (nearly all in open-access venues) and book chapters about a range of topics — from experimental libraries, geo-archives, deep-time document preservation, lichen typography, and “tree thinking” to local data stewardship, public design processes, pneumatic tubes, field guides, repair manuals, slide decks, and dashboards.
archipelago.nyc
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Its Instructor �
At The New School, where she served from 2004 to 2022, Shannon collaborated regularly with the Parsons School of Design, directed the graduate program in media studies and the undergraduate program in anthropology, and founded and directed the graduate minor in anthropology and design.
She has designed and taught over 40 courses on topics ranging from urban technology, maps, and information infrastructures to design ethnography, local media, and critical university studies – and, since 2002, has created an open access website for nearly all of those courses. A celebrated teacher, she won The New School’s Distinguished University Teaching Award, was nominated for the University of Pennsylvania’s LIndback Award for Distinguished Teaching in her second year, and has advised over 70 graduate theses and dissertations.
archipelago.nyc
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Sample Courses from Shannon’s Portfolio
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Sample Courses
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How the Cross-Reference Coalition Works
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Each semester, fall and spring, will focus on a particular theme that is germane to the gallery / library / archive / museum world, but which also invites examination through multiple disciplinary lenses and artistic mediums. Options — which will be workshopped with an advisory board — might include “experimental magazines” or “intellectual furnishings” or “organic knowledge infrastructures” or “collecting miniatures” or “signs, labels, and metadata”
“Librarian at Desk and Reader at Bookshelves,” 1837; via the New York Public Library Digital Collections
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Employees of METRO member institutions, graduate students enrolled at METRO’s higher education member institutions, and local artists and designers are invited to apply.
Participants in the former two categories will be funded through their institutions’ METRO membership fees; artists and designers will be granted scholarships.
Mary Alexander Fabric Samples, 1726 - 1760, via the New York Historical
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A group of 15 admitted students will be invited to attend 10 weekly meetings, during which we’ll engage with critical literature and creative work on the semester’s theme, participate in discussions, host guest speakers, and take part in field trips and workshops at local knowledge institutions.
The following semester, for four months, we’ll meet bi-monthly for a group workshop, and bi-monthly for one-on-one consultations, to develop our collaborative publication.
Ralph Lemon, Untitled no. 13, 2023, via MoMA, fair use
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We’ll explore new models of peer review and editorial processes.
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Potential Publication Forms
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Our 2025-26 courses will ideally serve as generative frames or seeds for germination. In future years, we aim to add additional courses of varying lengths and formats, taught by additional instructors, possibly integrated with other METRO services and linked to programs at other METRO member institutions.
WNYC, Masterwork Bulletin, Volume 35, Number 3 (May/June 1968); via DCMNY
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