Newsgroups: bit.listserv.c18-l
Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1992 21:16:44 -0500
From:         BCJ@PSUVM.BITNET
Subject:      TLS article on the Houghton Conference

The future of libraries?

  - - The original note follows - -

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Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1992 12:59:01 EST
Reply-To:     Rare Books and Special Collections Forum <EXLIBRIS@RUTVM1.BITNET>
From:         Stephen Ferguson <0629212@PUCC.BITNET>
Subject:      TLS article on the Houghton Conference
To:           Kevin Berland <BCJ@PSUVM.BITNET>

Some one mentioned that David McKitterick reported on
the Houghton Conference in the 13 November TLS. The scanned text
follows.


 TLS NOVEMBER 3 1992

The Houghton Library celebrates its fiftieth
anniversary this year. Founded to collect
manuscripts and rare books at Harvard
University, it is related to, but has always been
separate from, its neighbour the Widener Lib-
rary, whose open stacks remain of incomparable
richness despite the removal in recent years of
many of its earlier books. The bridge that still
links the two is a reminder of the Libraries' inter-
dependent qualities.
 The plans of the Houghton's founding genera-
tion, including Arthur Houghton, Philip Hofer
and its first Librarian, William A. Jackson, re-
main in place to a remarkable extent. But the
intervening half-century has also brought great
changes to scholarship and to the library commun-
ity. Among new subjects and emphases that have
been identified for research, women's studies[ and
black studies are but the most obvious. Collecting
policies may have changed, but there remain the
continuing responsibilities of maintaining collec-
tions already in place - whether of manuscripts
from every period, early printed books, music, or
the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts.
The advent of computer catalogues and databases
has both wrought new possibilities for retrieval
and, by means of networks and CDs, enmeshed
the special values of the Houghton in the rest of
the library world.
 In mid-September, almost 300 people gathered
to consider the future not only of the Houghton,
but also of rare book and manuscript libraries
generally. The present Librarian, Richard Wen-
dorf, posed a series of questions: how the mission
and operation of such libraries will change ; where
future staff will be trained and recruited; how
trends in funding, collecting, the market, infor-
rmation storage and academic publishing will
affect libraries; whether new libraries should
differ fundamentally from those already built; and
whether academic and independent libraries will
develop along the same Lines.
 If there was a bogy in the resulting discussions,
it was the university trustee - not, be it said, of
Harvard - who demanded why libraries should be
treated any differently from other general facil-
ities, such as car-parks: x, why shouldn't libraries
also be put on cheap ground on the campus
periphery? Furthermore, libraries will have to
justify themselves to people schooled in databases
rather than in books. and less and less informed of
the uses to which books may be put.
 More balanced arguments for change,as well as
aid in countering attacks, came from readers
themselves, including W. B. Carnochan of Stan-
ford University, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and
Simon Schama from Harvard, Ruth Perry from
MIT and G. Thomas Tanselle, Vice-President^ of
the Guggenheim Foundation. Others came from
booksellers (who have a perhaps ambiguous inte-
rest). William P. Barlow, Jr. an accountant and
current President of the Bibliographical Society of
America, indicated some of the advantages for
libraries in the United States tax laws. One of the
strengths of this international conference lay (on
stage at least) in the outnumbering of librarians by
sympathetic and informed others.

 Some of the questions that already most affect
readers and libraries were present more by impli-
cation than in prolonged discussion. Compute-
rized catalogues can offer much more than even
the best of cards. But, as early or fragile books are
increasingly withdrawn from open shelves, so
perhaps the records in public catalogues (and
those of Harvard are outstanding) should become
yet more detailed; and as critical and historical
practices demand fuller attention to the material
properties of books, so ^he interpretative powers
of the catalogue are ever more obviously inter-
posed between reader and book. About a century
ago, the world was agog with arguments for open
access; now we are seeing closure on a scale as
never before. Technology may offer disks and
holograms, just as it offered photography and
facsimiles; but that, too, is to see through a glass
darkly, rather than face to face.
 May we expect to see all the books currently in
the Widener pass into the Houghton? As chrono-
logical definitions of rarity, or value, press in-
exorably forward, from 1600 to 1700 to 1800 to
1850, it might seem that such must inevitably
happen. In thinking of all that such migrations -
whether at Harvard or elsewhere - imply, can we
be sure that all the books will have survived. and
not have disintegrated, or been stolen, thrown
out, or what is euphemistically called reformatted
- that is, recorded on film or perhaps (now) disk,
prior to being cast out? Special collections are
expensive to run; and for many libraries their cost
centres must look very odd on the balance sheet.
Many booksellers, as well as the more sanguine
collectors, foresee a day when there will, once
again, be riches to be had: this time not from
private collections, but from institutions. Will the
antiquarian trade's shortage of books, of which so
many now complain, be indeed only a temporary
phenomenon? And then, what of the less known,
less highly priced books - the very material that is
most difficult to discover, acquire and preserve?
  As recent discussions over the future of the
British Library have demonstrated, ambitions of
universality and total retention may be over-
reaching; but they are hardly ill-founded. The
Houghton conference certainly did not offer
many solutions even for Harvard, though it
looked at the latest underground libraries (parti-
cularly the recent extension to the Olin Library at
Cornell University), and at the "virtual library",
an information network not subject to the less
malleable characteristics of the printed word.
  In the time available, Karl Dachs, who is
charged with the care of rare books and manu-
scripts at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in
Munich, could say only a little on library exhibi-
tions. That subject posed yet another reminder of
the relation of books to other kinds of records.
Information services, museums and art galleries
all meet germane. if not quite the same, demands.
The British Library was itself created in the belief
that books and some other forms of information
are separable from other artefacts - though that
belief has always found plenty of heretics. So, we
now also speak of the "museum' functions of a
Library. thus re joining concepts that have become
divorced.
        DAVID McKITTERICK