It is quite an honor to welcome such a distinguished group of librarians to our own John Hay Library and to Brown University. I hope that your stay here at Brown is both productive and stimulating.
I would like to thank the two co-chairs, Joe Hewitt of the University of North Carolina and Brown's own, Merrily Taylor, for all the work that they and their committee have expended on behalf of this conference and on behalf of the cause of research libraries throughout the country.
I am sure that, in preparation for this conference—and at many other times in the past—you have all received e-mails from Merrily Taylor. I've served for a long time in the Brown administration, and over the years as Dean of the Graduate School, Dean of the Faculty and now as Provost, I have had quite a large number of her e-mails sent my way. Merrily always appends to her e-mail a quote from Archibald MacLeish: "The existence of a library is an assertion, a proposition nailed like Luther's to the door of time." While I am sure that Mr. MacLeish felt the pressing need to defend libraries during his own lifetime, whether he was speaking as a poet or as the Librarian of Congress, I think that we have come upon an even more pressing moment where we need to re-assert the importance of libraries and re-affirm our commitment to their support.
It seems like just a few years ago when the new communication and computing technologies seemed to offer universities the answers to any and all of our Library problems. Technology was going to fill in any gap in our collections. With new storage capacity, computers were going to put any resource our faculty and students needed right on their screens in their offices or residence halls. Technology was going to solve every library budget problem, every cataloging need, and every library staffing need. We wouldn't need to borrow books or get them through inter-library loans. It even seemed that we would one day reach the point where we really didn't need libraries anymore. We just needed the right computers and the right wires to transmit and receive information.
But to quote another, later, Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin, writing on the computerization of libraries back in 1983, "Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge."
So once again we are looking to our libraries to lead us—this time in helping us create tools for knowledge out of information technology. There is no better organization than the Association of Research Libraries to set the agenda, and no more interesting domain than the one that will occupy your attention over the course of this conference: namely the role of Special Collections in the scholarly community, how we can better integrate such collections into the general library collections, how we can coordinate our collecting and cataloging within our own institutions individually and across our various institutions, and how information technology can be used creatively and supportively to enhance scholars' abilities to learn and teach from such materials. To the lay observer it might appear that Special Collections may hold the one type of scholarly materials that are simply not amenable to the digital age. Yet we already know that technology affords us the opportunity to open these collections to more scholars and students, and to use them in ways that have not been possible up until now. These rich collections open up our unique histories and to reveal the hidden corners in the annals of humanity. In the words of one of my previous mentors here at Brown, Vartan Gregorian, who was once himself a librarian, "Libraries keep the records on behalf of humanity, the unique and the absurd, the wise and the fragments of stupidity." We hope that your work here will better help us use our Special Collections more wisely to parse out the unique from the absurd.
Many of the special collections that Brown has assembled are housed in this wonderful old library, the John Hay Library, named after a man who served as Abraham Lincoln's personal secretary and later Secretary of State and Ambassador to Great Britain under William McKinley. John Hay arrived at Brown University in 1855 with enough prior education that he cold have completed his studies in two years. He decided, however, to stay for the full three-year course because, as he said, "if I go through hurriedly, I will have little or no time to avail myself of the literary treasures of the libraries."
In addition to holding over 9,000 manuscripts by Hay and his associates, this library holds McLellan Lincoln collection. I would be remiss, therefore, if I didn't evoke the former President and Civil War leader. Speaking before the Springfield Library Association in February 1860, Lincoln stated that "Writing, the art of communicating thought to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling is to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space."
What we now have are new ways that libraries can reach across "all distances of time and space" in ways that certainly Lincoln could never have conceived but would certainly appreciate.
I look forward to hearing from Merrily about the work you will be undertaking over the next two days. And I know I speak all universities and all scholars when I wish you good luck with this endeavor. Not only are our faculties and our students relying on you and your good work, but tomorrow's faculty members, researchers and students are relying on you as well. I offer the welcome and hospitality of Brown University and our best wishes for your important work.
Thank You.