by William J. Crowe, Spencer Librarian, University of Kansas

Notes for remarks for “Building on Strength: Developing an ARL Agenda for Special Collections,” Brown University, 27-29 June 2001

I. Introduction

From what vantage do I address these issues?

• I am no longer an ARL director, but neither am I a curator, even as I have been administratively responsible since mid-1999 for a large special collections library. In this company, my mix of experience may make me a strange bird, indeed.
• I speak as a librarian who has worked closely with librarians and archivists in special collections at five ARL libraries over a period of more than 30 years. (Now, I understand better, of course, what they had been trying to tell me for so much of that time!)
• I speak as a sometime user of such collections for my own research.
• I speak, of necessity, largely from my Kansas experience, and here I am acutely aware of the great legacy of the late Robert Vosper, who established the Department of Special Collections at Kansas less than 50 years ago, and of the still strong influence of the highly respected Alexandra Mason. Sandy was my immediate predecessor as Spencer Librarian, and her 40+ year stamp on our shop is still—and long will be—strong, even as we change.
• I speak as a seven-year member (four of them as chair) of the ARL Committee on Statistics and Measurement, and so can comment with some added weight on ARL’s excellent effort in the special gathering --and good analysis of—statistics on special collections—thanks in large part to superior work by our colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill. I also am reminded of what those of us close to this ARL program always emphasized to others about the value of the kinds of statistics that ARL gathers. These data may answer some questions, but more often they allow us to ask better questions.
• Last, and perhaps somewhat awkwardly, I speak as the father of an undergraduate student who has astonished me (and her librarian mother) with the news that she is eager to become a librarian, a special collections librarian, no less! She has abandoned a long planned career as a herpetologist, planning now not to work not with snakes, but with manuscripts! So, I have a more than professional interest in the future of special collections.

I draw on all of these experiences to offer some specific suggestions for an ARL agenda.

II. Suggestions for an ARL Agenda

I have clustered my suggestions into three topical areas: PEOPLE, POLICIES & POLITICS…

People:

We need to know even more about the people now working in special collections, not only in ARL libraries, but also in our sister research collections, especially in the IRLA group. We need more facts, but also more evidence of the expert opinions of the people now at work in the special collections community. And—beyond this forum at Brown--we need access to the opinions of other library leaders, leaders of scholarly societies, and of universities. This meeting is a very important step toward achieving these goals, as we must test our proposed agenda with other stakeholders . . . soon.

There is much useful information—fact and opinion---now available, of course, not only from ARL, but also from RBMS, CLIR (consider the work of the Task Force on the Artifact), and even some of the scholarly organizations. We need to tap aggressively into this body of information . . . to synthesize and share it with the ARL and wider community, perhaps with the help of a Visiting Program Officer at ARL. The scope of this task may be beyond the time and energy of one person, but I am concerned that we and the several communities we represent must make informed decisions quickly . . . decisions based on good analysis of a large body of reliable information about the environment.

If we do not require a summa, we may need something close to it to hold a place for special collections on our collective agenda. We have given only sporadic attention to the future of special collections during the last quarter century. Now, we cannot afford once again to let the issues fall out of our sight.

I have two more specific "people" suggestions:

First, we should look closely at the knowledge base of our general collections staff, many of whom, especially librarians of the younger (under age 40, say?) generation, seem not to have been prepared by education or experience to understand the various roles of special collections in the capturing and making available of primary sources. As more of our general collections staff must give more and more time to the transitions to the digital age, many seem not to have a developed a foundation, an understanding, say, of the role of primary source collections and services (in shorthand, knowledge of “the book,” in all its manifestations), which I once took almost for granted. I say this knowing that there seems long to have been a gulf between many general collections library people and those who work in special collections. That gulf has become too great for us to allow it to persist.

How can we engage library/information science educators on this topic? My suggestion is not to attempt promotion of some wholesale re-vamping of the graduate library and information science curriculum, but to seek ways to help library educators to know more about the context of special collections - in all kinds of settings beyond the research library community . . . and so begin to look for newly-minted librarians at least to have been exposed to this sphere.

Second, on the assumption that data collected by ARL do show an aging of the current staff in special collections, how can we find ways better to expose special collections librarians to enterprising undergraduate, but especially graduate, students to help promote this as a career option for some of them?

If we do this and accomplish nothing else, we may have helped prepare some members of the next generation of scholars to understand the challenges and rewards of the field, and so stimulate their call on special collections in their work as teachers and researchers..… We can make new friends and advocates . . . and perhaps bring over a few.

ARL leaders know the paths here very well . . . the Council of Graduate Schools, the learned societies, the funding agencies. Tapping into the planning for the education and acculturation of the next generation of scholars, in this area as so many (not least, the future of scholarly communication), is vital.

Policies

Here, I see at least two areas that warrant ARL's attention:

We should encourage, again in close cooperation with RBMS, but also with the Society of American Archivists, and perhaps also the museum community, opportunities for information exchange, especially of emerging changes in practices. Cross-fertilization does occur now, of course, but I hope we can find ways to expose a wider group of special collections practitioners to more intense building of community, including learning about the work of some in communities now perhaps seen as far afield . . . in the public schools perhaps. Many of us are working now on research and demonstration projects with librarians, teachers, and technologists in these other communities (in my case, with the local school district) and can be reminded quickly (and sometimes in humbling fashion) of the value of entirely fresh perspectives.

I make this suggestion, even as I cannot speak with any authority about the state of information exchange, because I sense a more persistent tradition of "local practice" in the special collections community, perhaps more than in many other sectors of the research library community.

Second, and fundamentally so, we must find ways to help our staff create wider/deeper/faster means of promoting intellectual access to our holdings, especially to our great manuscript collections and to the kaleidoscope of other media in our care. David is right on target here!

How do we address these issues in forming an action-agenda?

First and foremost, we need to engage RLG, OCLC, and local online systems vendors to work more aggressively with each other and with the special collections, archives, and museum communities to promote adoption of newer standards for the creation of metadata. Too, we need software that can ease local staff effort and promote innovations that can lead to wider sharing of information about such things as innovations in work flow. I cringe when I think of the 2.5 million photographic images held in the Spencer Library, about which many people on our campus, much less those in the wider world of scholars and the general public, know so little. Our staff need this help, and because ARL has a long tradition of advocating standards in bibliographic control and a spirit collaboration its voice should be heard here!

Politics

By “politics,” I mean the need for ARL to engage in aggressive advocacy/promotion of the importance of special collections to our wider community of interest . . . to the AAU, to NASULGC, to the scholarly societies, to government, to the foundations. ARL does very well here in advocating for attention to many specific areas . . . in preservation, in digitization, in international cooperation . . . that are core to special collections issues. But I see the need for a coordinated, broad scale program that can excite, entice, and encourage the leaders of the institutions in which we operate . . . and of the scholarly organizations with which we share so many values . . . and whose current and long term interests can be assured only with vital special collections programs.

Here, I have benefited from the example of a certain former Governor of Kansas, now become Archivist of the United States, in developing means effectively to capture anew the attention of national political leaders about the vital importance of securing, preserving, and providing imaginative means of access to archival collections. Money follows.

To be sure, library leaders have the greatest share of the responsibility to call attention to the needs of the great collections of original records of human experience for which research libraries, with our sister and brother institutions in the archival and museum communities, have a bedrock responsibility to capture and transmit to this and succeeding generations. Still, we need ARL’s help to carry the message.

III. Conclusion

Two years ago I left a satisfying (well, almost always satisfying) role as an ARL director of nine years experience and some twenty years before that time as a general library administrator to move to special collections. Among other things, this move is a test of the validity of my conviction that all of us should consider refreshing and renewing our roles from time to time (that is a story for another day).

I made this change by taking an opportunity that came along at the right time for me (and, I hope, for Kansas). My goal is to serve as a transition leader or change agent, building on the work begun in the halcyon era of Bob Vosper, to reach a still difficult to discern future for the Kenneth Spencer Research Library. In this, I am optimistic, not least because of the good people I work with at the Spencer Library and in the KU Libraries at large, but also because of the renewed interest of ARL and such bodies as CLIR, the Mellon Foundation, and the Delmas Foundation. I am especially encouraged to see so many of my former colleague ARL directors who have worked on these issues over the last three and years have trekked to Brown at this vacation season to listen and to share their knowledge and their questions.

Like Bob, I choose to close with words from a poet. A poem written in 1924 by a sometime resident of Lawrence, Kansas, the young Langston Hughes, conveys with eloquence my conviction about our future, one that I believe is held also by most ARL directors and special collections leaders alike:

We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.