The continuing development of special collections librarianship

Library Trends, Summer, 2003 by Michael V. Cloonan, Sidney E. Berger

ABSTRACT

THIS ESSAY INTRODUCES the overall subject of the present issue of Library Trends and puts into a contemporary and historical context all the pieces which follow. The authors look at the current world of special collections, showing how it has evolved and how, in many ways, issues of the past are still with us. Libraries change, in all of their capacities and departments. Special collections and archives have always presented specific challenges to those in charge of them. Those concerns have changed in many ways, but they have not disappeared. And new challenges and initiatives, new technologies, and new ways of configuring the infrastructure of the institutions which house the collections bring special collections librarians and archivists the need to stay current with the world of information management.

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In 1957 Library Trends devoted an issue to Rare Book Librarianship. Thirty years later Miche1e Cloonan edited another issue on the same broad topic. Sidney Berger's opening essay gave an overview of the field (Berger, 1987). This was followed by a section on "Advances in Scientific Investigation and Automation," presenting six pieces on the impact of science on books and manuscripts, scientific equipment, the proton milliprobe and its use in analyzing early printed books, paper analysis, and the need for standards in the burgeoning (though pre-Internet) electronic environment. That environment truly did burgeon, as we shall mention later. The third section of the 1987 issue focused on practices in rare book librarianship, followed by two sections on funding and preservation, respectively.

While most of the issues raised in that volume are still current, the growing complexity of the world--and of course the world of libraries and archives--has made it desirable to revisit the whole issue of Rare Book Librarianship with an eye to developments in the profession since that 1987 Library Trends issue. Indeed, today we tend to think more broadly of special collections since archival materials are now sometimes even more frequently consulted than their "book brethren." And, there seems to be an increasing interest in primary materials by a wider audience than the rare book world. It is probably no exaggeration to say that the profession has changed more in the last sixteen years than it did between the 1957 publication and the 1987 one.

One of the areas of recent change in the profession has to do with the clientele who use our collections. With ever-tightening budgets and the constant suspicion of many who do not understand the role of rare books and special collections in libraries, we must "justify our existence" by proving that the collections are being used for scholarly and other purposes. By "other" we mean that collections have often been used for impressing donors and garnering publicity. Witness the many articles we continue to see in the popular press and in our own scholarly publications about the acquisition of or discoveries in our important collections. But increasingly, we are seeing a wider audience for our activities. K-12 teachers, for instance, are bringing their students to our departments and exhibits. New databases and finding aids mounted on the Internet are making our collections "universally accessible," and are thus bringing increased research inquiries from a worldwide audience. And the nature of our manuscript holdings makes them ideal testing grounds for new applications. The EAD/California Digital Library (1) and similar projects at Cornell (2) and MIT (3) are cases in point. Scholars running those projects are testing the limits of current digital technology, and in so doing are making a vast amount of information--even digitized versions of unique primary materials--available. There are many technological advances that we must know about. Even if we cannot control or manipulate these advancements ourselves, we must know what they are capable of doing and how to direct computer and other information specialists to make them useful to us.

Special collections have thus seen a change in the way money for our field is being allocated. There seems to be a smaller percentage of it for buying books and manuscripts and other media and more for electronic materials. Such a shift has made us try to use our resources with greater care and circumspection. Of course, it has also increased the amount of materials we now have at our disposal (the new digital stuff), increased the use of the collections (as we indicated), and thus required us to seek further education to enable us to handle these new technologies.

The new technologies, further, have demanded that institutions rethink their hierarchies and personnel structures. Systems departments and digital specialists are now more prominent in our institutions, requiring realignments in human resources and reallocations of funds. These changes will affect us physically and even psychologically as we must adapt to new kinds of colleagues and new configurations of our space. All this must be accomplished while trying to carry out "business as usual": the normal tasks and responsibilities that have been our way of operating for decades.