by Merrily Taylor, University Librarian, Brown University

Remarks for "Building on Strength: Developing an ARL Agenda for Special Collections," Brown University, June 28, 2001

It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Brown University Library—some of you may recall President Kennedy's remarks to the Nobel Prize winners visiting the White House, namely that there hadn't been such wit and intelligence gathered at the White House since "Thomas Jefferson dined alone." Well at Brown we might prefer to make the analogy to John Hay dining alone, but nonetheless we're delighted to have such a distinguished group of colleagues on our premises, and honored to be the site for a conference that I believe holds great promise for the future of special collections in ARL libraries and accordingly, for scholarship.

As visitors to Brown, you may have learned a few things about the university already, but one thing you probably don't know is that, if you stand on the steps of the Rockefeller Library, you can see every building which was, at some point in history, the home of the Brown University Library. I've always thought it appropriately symbolic that the libraries have grown and changed as has the University, and that as each building was added the libraries remain circled at the heart of the campus.

Brown was founded in 1764 as Rhode Island College, in Warren, R. I. After the move to Providence in 1770, a second floor room in the "College Edifice" (now University Hall) was designated as a library. When you leave the John Hay tonight, look directly across the street and you'll see University Hall, a red brick building.

In 1775, that collection of books was sent to Wrentham, Mass., to the home of William Williams, a graduate of Brown's first class for safe-keeping during the Revolutionary War. We like to think of William Williams as the first member of Brown's Friends of the Library; the books remained in his home (supposedly the collection was small enough to fit on his kitchen table) until 1783.

By 1835 the Library was "crowded to excess and totally unsuited" for its designated purpose. (Does this sound familiar?) Nicholas Brown donated the land and funds to build Manning Hall, which was to serve as a chapel and library. (For those of you who want to spot these buildings as you cross the campus, Manning Hall is right next door to University Hall) Not long after, President Wayland hired Charles Coffin Jewett in 1842 to be the country's first full-time professional university librarian. Jewett later became librarian of the Smithsonian Institution.

By 1878 the Library had again outgrown its building and thanks to the generosity of the another Brown (John Carter), a new library was built—now Robinson Hall, the home of the Economics Department. Robinson Hall is on the corner of Prospect and Waterman—you may pass it as you walk to the Smith Buonnano building tomorrow. At the time of the move to this new facility, the library had grown to 40,000 volumes.

The recent history of the Library and the growth of the collections says a good deal about the information explosion in the Twentieth Century. In 1906, Andrew Carnegie offered $150,000 toward the construction of a new library building to be named after his friend, John Hay (Lincoln's secretary, a former Secretary of State, and a member of the Brown class of 1858). When the library moved into the new building—this building, the John Hay Library—on August 23, 1910, it contained 140,000 volumes, having grown by over two-thirds in the approximately 30 years since the construction of the previous building.

In 1964 the John Hay building was "crowded to excess and totally unsuited" for its designated purpose, and the John D. Rockefeller Library was built next door. Of course, the Library collections have long since grown beyond the capacity of any one building and there are now seven library buildings. The irony, of course, is thanks to the advent of digitization the Library is now simultaneously too large for one building and yet small enough, via a laptop, to again sit on Rev. Williams' kitchen table. And the implications of that for special collections and for the original artifact bring us right back to the central purposes of this conference.

I'd now like to introduce our Associate University Librarian for Special Collections, Sam Streit, who served on the ARL Research Collections planning subcommittee and who has provided both important ideas on content and done yeoman's work on what we simplistically call "local arrangements." Sam will pass on some important information both for tonight and tomorrow.