The purchase of the formed collections, like Nichol Smith, enabled the Library to acquire what was often a lifetime s collecting work in one fell swoop. Well-read librarians, bibliographic wonders, then set about deepening or extending that field of research with the acquisition of books and pamphlets, serials, newspapers, vast quantities of microcopy and so on. Creative gap filling it was called. As we know this was the fast-tracking of the collection building process, of producing a world class research institution in a very short space of time. Acquiring the formed collections gave depth in numerous areas.
Research libraries make public and accessible a host of private or previously inaccessible pasts.
They turn family matters into national heritage etc. Which is why libraries are so precious and powerful. The conversations that I ve called the acquisition narratives reveal the bibliographical wisdom and the scholarship of acquisition librarians. The records of research inquiries reveal how they routinely point our projects and ideas in new and lateral directions, and we know that of course from personal experience. Equally, historians have played a part in building the research adventure, not merely as users of the collections, but as advisers, collectors in their own right, and often as mediators between the institution and uncaptured papers or private libraries.