This is not the first time I’ve been asked to be provocative and irritating on the subject of special collections but it is the first time I’ve done it before an integrated audience of directors and curators. In 1992 on the 60th anniversary of this Association, I gave an address that made only one serious point, that the association and its members were, in its statistics and its agenda, largely ignoring those collections that distinguish ARL libraries from each other, and that provide elements of uniqueness separating them from most other libraries, i.e., their Special Collections. Ten years earlier I had been inveigled into addressing the 1982 Rare Books and Manuscripts conference on the topic of “An Administrator’s View of Special Collections,” designed to irritate the complacency of some special collections librarians and to address some of the issues that recur in the current debate. I also participated in the RBMS navel-gazing of 1987 on the effects of new modes of humanities scholarship on special collections. In the intervening years, both as an active librarian and now in my foundation work and as a regular user of special collections, I’ve given a good deal of thought to these collections and how they might reach their full potential. It’s very gratifying that the Association is doing the same in sponsoring this symposium and in bringing the responsible parties together to share in the discussion.
Recent developments have placed a much-needed spotlight on these collections, not least in the thrust toward digitization of unique resources, just at a time when proliferation of electronic resources has homogenized our other collections. The rhetorical success of Nicholson Baker in demanding that the most mundane of our collections be treated as special has further compounded the issues involved. So have the pressures to use these collections as fund-raising tools, the problems of retooling existing staff to meet new demands and recruiting new staff with new kinds of skills.
Just so you’ll know where we are here’s a brief outline of what follows: first the hypothesis; then some conundra and contradictions involving the hypothesis; a brief critique of the survey; and then some ideas for the rest of you to kick around for the next 28 hours.
I want to put my main thesis fairly forcibly for purposes of debate, not dogma. Little of this is new, as a humbling review of the literature shows; variants of the title have appeared recently in American Libraries and in RBM. Neither is there consensus among curators and directors on my main point, but I offer it here baldly and boldly:
Our special collections must be democratized, must overcome their exclusionary origins in the monastery or aristocratic library, must shed their image of aloofness and preciosity, must get their precious treasures and scholarly ephemera into the sometimes dirty hands of potential users, must place a higher priority on access to unprocessed material, and must build a wider audience including the traditional scholar (whom we’ve always tried to serve), the innovator in new uses of old stuff, and most importantly for survival, the inquiring student. To quote a Christie’s dictum from the new credo of that auction house: “As the face of the client changes, so do we, or we will have no clients” (New York Times, June 8, 2001, p. E28). All of this and more is needed if these collections are to achieve some element of centrality in the university and move beyond the marginality we all decry and yet perpetuate. To achieve the support these collections deserve, they must break down the barriers to full use. Both scholarship and survival demand no less.
The very term Special Collections is an albatross, as many have noted; it sounds grand but divides rather than unites, separating the prima donnas from the chorus. In my experience special collections personnel often lead schizophrenic lives, enjoying some isolation from the fast track, while trying to integrate closely with parent institutions. They are in fact psychologically and physically separate in a Sanctum Sanctorum that other staff think of as alien and irrelevant, far removed from the front lines of library service. The phrase itself is a tautology; they are special because we call them so.
No doubt there are some misperceptions here, but others share them. For example, I recently learned of a proposal for a digital project to address “the ever-decreasing availability of historical documents from the 1700s and 1800s. They are being ‘locked away’ from public access in private collections, and in museum and university libraries.” Some of you have shared similar views with me.
Looking at the year 2001 as a possible turning point for Special Collections, the assignment of this symposium, is rather like looking at the earth from outer space—there are no clear borders or dividing lines except between land and water, or in this case between the open stacks and the locked doors of special collections. Much of what needs to be done is being done already (as demonstrated by the survey), but the survey does not measure the attitudes of library administrators: they will correct me if I’m wrong but they convey the sense that they have not adequately defined the territory, have not clearly established the responsibilities and jurisdictional scope of our treasure houses, have not made clear what old skills we value or what new ones we require, and have not sufficiently justified our investments in these offshore wells of oil and sludge. Of all areas of our professional activity, special collections can least be described as meeting the currently popular objectives of “unfettered access” or responding to “accelerated change,” to use the current clichés of the trade. But those clichés represent real objectives from which special collections cannot be aloof?
Straightforward as my thesis of “more open access” is, it is encumbered by a number of conundra and contradictions that confuse the mission and make it easy to claim that nothing can be done. They have to be acknowledged but not allowed to paralyze. Here are a few:
Item: The present versus posterity—which must be served? Preservation for posterity impedes utility to the present; we have to ask whether the balance between use and protection is out of kilter. When will we admit that posterity has arrived?
Item: Another paradox: quality is sought in special collections; yet most scholars seek the obscure, the materials of history unknown to others, hoping to raise that material to a level of accepted importance. But behind much of our special collecting is Chester Beatty’s injunction: “Quality, quality, always the quality,” not an easy task in areas of obscurity. For others, research materials are not fixed in either their materiality or interpretation, but demonstrate what Stephen Greenblatt calls the “volatility of texts.” Why else would 7,000 editions of Shakespeare have appeared in a mere 400 years? Will the tyranny of the canon survive the digital age, as our fetishized documents are now changed and redistributed in new forms, authorized or not, and the “fluidity of cultural objects” challenges the authority of the original?
Item: Our institutional collecting is often competitive but much of scholarship must be collaborative. The irony is that we work hard to win collections of quality for local institutional purposes while their primary users are often from outside our institutions. The processing of those collections, dissemination of information about them, and making them available to outsiders is our ultimate collaboration: the sharing of our users.
Item: the obsession with possession needs rethinking. Preservation of works of “quality” cries out for a different kind of collaboration (in rare books at least), but contradicts pride in possession. Why does everybody’s Audubon need preservation, when there are so many unique deteriorating materials to be preserved? Is it only the institutional ego that distorts these priorities? Perhaps it can be justified pedagogically, but over what alternatives?
Item: the artifact and the surrogate. Much evidence lies in the original artifact; yet much of that evidence cannot be seen or heard without technological enhancement. That enhancement requires funds that diminish resources for conventional collecting or other needs, resources that in any case are beyond our collective or individual capability. Why should the recreation of the sound on Edison cylinders, to take a Syracuse example, take precedence over unprocessed archives of state politicians? Who should set these priorities: the administrator, the curator, the user, or the donor? How can the user dictate the digital priorities when so much is inaccessible.
Finally a personal obsession: we posit a utopian world in which we believe we can preserve the essentials of the human record; yet we live in a real world of disappearance, decay, and memory loss. The history of library loss, since well before Alexandria, exceeds that of library survival. Any vision affected by historical hindsight will embrace the inevitability of loss. Yet we pretend with considerable hubris that we can prevent the decay. When George W. said that the past was over, he spoke better than he knew. But so may have William Faulkner when he said that the past wasn’t dead, it wasn’t even past.
Thomas Jefferson once said, “A library in confusion loses much of its utility” (March 31 1825). Feeding the confusion in these times is a shared disquietude among administrators and special collections librarians. Tensions over support, the genuine desire to get things done and the inability to provide sufficient support to do them, exist on both sides. The frequent reliance on soft money for special collections adds to the insecurity, as has a spate of personnel changes among the higher ranks of special collections curators. We don’t have a good handle on these issues, but for me the ARL survey presents a rather more positive picture than the situation warrants. Perhaps that reflects the views of the respondents, mainly the directors of special collections who naturally view their work with approval and would like that approval shared. It is true that the report modestly raises a number of concerns and unanswered questions, and the Committee on Research Collections deserves high praise for making this attempt to assess the landscape. I hope they will forgive a few critical comments about the findings.
It seems to me counter-intuitive that 87% of respondent’s should claim that they are progressing or holding steady on conservation, when we know from elsewhere in the survey that many are adding collections which bring new preservation problems: manuscripts and archives acquired as gifts, video and film collections of volatile materials, sound recordings, and other materials that must be preserved if they are to be heard or used. Perhaps “holding steady” was the misleading phrase, if it meant no more than coping along as we always have. And surely we are not holding steady on digital preservation.
Similarly, the problem of uncataloged and inaccessible unprocessed materials is passed over far too lightly. This is perhaps the greatest obstacle to easy access and deserves far greater emphasis than the report conveys.
Especially striking was the section on Canadian research libraries that showed consistently lower statistics in support, staff, presentations and exhibitions, in fact in every respect except readership, where their numbers of users exceed the norm. They must be doing something right up north, compared to some of the more lonely reading rooms south of the border.
Particularly perplexing and difficult to interpret in the survey are appendix 4, which lists new and discontinued collections, and appendix 5, which covers digital projects at the responding institutions. Neither shows any real coherence of activity addressing a wider scholarly world. What does it mean that Michigan has discontinued Shakespeare? No more first folios? Arizona State’s withdrawal from Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam collecting is easily picked up elsewhere. That Harvard has diminished its collecting of Chinese and Japanese gray literature, and that Berkeley has demoted Herman Hesse should leave few tears among special collection enthusiasts, though others might lament the Harvard decision. I especially liked the idea of a “Reinvigorated Alabama Authors Collection,” though it is hard to guess which noun was being modified in that construction. The expansion of local and regional collections is encouraging, responding to what I believe is a clear responsibility of individual institutions to collect and preserve local and regional sources. Less convincing is the list of recently established collections on Populations and Social Issues that reads like a glossary of the politically correct. Is it crucial that we be so imitative in those areas? Wouldn’t aggregations of digital materials be a more effective collaborative option? Other expansions in collecting seem to be situational accidents motivated by an interested faculty member (e.g., popular television at Syracuse), the blandishments of, to, or by particular individuals (e.g., Mayor Tom Bradley at UCLA), or the desires of interested organizations (e.g., Hawaiian Sugar Plantation Assn. Archives at Hawaii). On occasion some discontinuations are in effect transfers (e.g., the Arnold Schoenberg Institute which moved from USC to Vienna).
Equally baffling are the lists of digital projects where, apart from photographs and images, there seems little coherence of effort. Several members cite finding-aid conversion as digital projects, when in fact that category needs its own survey question. Many other projects seem no more than demonstration projects with little wider rationale for scholarly dissemination, though they may have some marketing appeal. This is not a topic that I have followed closely since leaving ARL three years ago, and in fact there may be greater coordination than the survey indicates, but it does not show up there, and appears to be an area ripe for ARL collaboration or at least rationalization among its members and beyond.
Before moving on to some possible approaches to all these dilemmas let me just say a word about the contents of special collections. The survey alludes to the practice of transferring materials from general collections and there are good protective reasons for doing so. But I suspect that there is ample reason to move some materials in the opposite direction, that many collections, often constrained by conditions that should not have been accepted, contain many items that are not particularly special and would be better used in open stacks. I would make a case for cleaning these Augean stables, at least with twentieth-century secondary literature and other accidental detritus. The numbers game we tend to play in ARL doesn’t make much sense in the rare book world—it certainly doesn’t measure quality (see for example the miniscule statistics of Chester Beatty’s library in Dublin).
Some similar dispositive work could address the segments and fragments of manuscript and archival material that most of you possess that could appropriately be united with more substantial collections in other institutions where they could get better care and more likely use. Of course there are a lot of limits to such activity but I would argue that such collaborations are mutually beneficial, as they have been at Syracuse with the transfer of Michigan Railway archives to the Bentley Historical Collections in Ann Arbor, of fragmentary archives of the American Institute of Architects to their originator, and of radio prayer letters, thousands of them, to the Norman Vincent Peale Center. Call it the obverse side of the “building to strength” metaphor.
More difficult are the archival collections split down the middle between two or more institutions, but there too collaboration in preparation of dovetailing finding aids would be the best aid to scholarship. An interesting project of that nature, preparing finding aids for Irish studies collections at Boston College and Emery University would be worth imitation.
What other remedies can we pursue to assure some semblance of special collections health in the 21st century? Here are a few suggestions—others will come from all of you. Drop the “Special” and move to the “Essential”. I don’t want some cute and trendy formula but what we’re talking about is making these collections vital centers of primary research and preparation for it. Call them Centers for Primary Research, or some other name that conveys their mainstream importance. If Indiana University can rename its Oral History Research Center the Center for History and Memory, you can come up with something equally imaginative, suited to your own individual situations.
Make access happen—the amount of unprocessed material, much of it unique, documented in the survey is reprehensible. Make that access available more hours of every day and don’t abandon the place on every weekend and holiday when potential users can take best advantage of your facilities, especially the non-resident ones. Demand more flexibility from your staff. Exhibitions can help lead into the collections, but should they have the priority we give them? What are we doing putting treasures into hermetically-sealed exhibition cases when we can’t put the raw materials of scholarship into the hands of users? Finding aids for unknown materials are surely a higher priority. Without giving up our vaunted independence, create some collaborative coherence in the rush to digitizing research resources, creating substantial bodies of cohesive materials (e.g., ArtStor) rather than the isolated tidbits of curatorial fancy. Abolish keeper and curator from the vocabulary. Explore collaborative acquisitions to reduce competition and expand potential use. Focus those acquisitions on current academic programs; build on their strength rather than the dubious strength of unused collections. Use what you do have in faculty recruitment. Within limits, don’t use the acceptable surrogate excuse, whether facsimile or digital, to preclude handling the original; use the surrogates whenever possible to lead back to those originals. Diminish the barriers to student handling—white gloves and the aura of the untouchable may have their place, but do little to gain the support needed. In any case, we have to accept that use has a certain price in decay. The transforming potential for the student of touching the rare and unusual could be worth the price. That is the answer to the question, what’s so special; for me personally and for many students I’ve observed over the years, it is the palpable connection to history that comes from the tactile experience of touching the rare book or unusual manuscript. It’s a conversion experience: seeing them under glass with unturnable pages just doesn’t do the same thing.
How do we respond to the most difficult question, what staffing skills will be required to change the vision? If our criteria of employment emphasize such trendy qualifications as digital dexterity, fund-raising finesse, and entrepreneurial expertise, will we be sacrificing the intellectual focus of the enterprise or the ability to communicate with scholar and student alike on the educational and scholarly potential of these collections? To what extent do we need subject knowledge to exploit these collections? Will its absence affect our credibility among faculty? What programs of continuing education would benefit a new vision of open collections fostering the best of the conservative and the risk of the innovative? Would job rotation of more staff in and out of special collections help reduce the sense of isolation? Above all, what are the primary purposes that these staff must pursue? There are no easy answers but these questions have to be addressed to realize the purpose of this symposium. The best answers will come from Special Collections librarians themselves, but it is unfair to ask them to do it alone since they neither control the resources nor have the institution-wide responsibility.
In presenting these questions, largely devoid of nuance and deliberately underplaying security issues, it is easy to anticipate the objections, the arguments why it can’t be done, the reluctance to yield status and the desire to protect satrapies, the retreat behind the shield of past practice. But I have tried to make the case in extreme terms in order to force the debate and move toward a clearer sense of purpose and balance. Hindsight may provide some insight, but it should not decelerate change.
After the indulgences of our special collections past, it is clear that we are ready for reformation, so I give the last word to The Reformed Librarie-Keeper, John Dury’s 1650 description of the thoughtful librarian, resurrected from my 1982 RBMS speech:
The proper charge then of the Honorarie Librarie-Keeper in an Universitie should Bee…too keep publick stock of Learning, which is in Books and Manuscripts, to increase it, and to propose it to others in the waie which may be most useful unto all; his work then is to be a Factor and Trader for helps to Learning, and a Treasurer to keep them, and a dispenser to applie them to use, or to see them well used, or at least not abused.
That charge, updated for a new era, would provide the balance needed to resolve some of the conundra and contradictions of the research librarian’s work. I’ve raised enough questions—now the rest of you can move on to the answers. In a word, my vision is standing room only in the Centers of Primary Research and Training. Go for it!