Pin the Tales on the Donkay: The Life of Libraries by Don Krummel As Told to Linnea Martin - professional experiences of professor emeritus of library information science and music at Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Library Trends, Wntr, 1999 by Linnea S. Martin

BACKGROUND

   Libraries, where one takes on the smell of books, stale and attractive.
   Service with no motive, simple as U.S. Mail. Fountains and palms, armchairs
   for smokers. Incredible library where ideas run for safety, place of
   rebirth of forgotten anthems, modern cathedral for lovers. Library, hotel
   lobby for the unemployed, the failure, the boy afraid to go home,
   penniless. Switchboards for questioners: What do you know about unicorns?
   How do you address a duchess? Palladian architecture of gleaming glass and
   redwood. Window displays of this week's twelve bestsellers. Magnificent
   quarters of the director, who dines with names of unknown fame. Lavatories,
   rendezvous of desperate homosexuals. In the periodical room the newspapers
   bound with a stick, carried like banners of surrender to pale oak tables.
   Library, asylum, platform for uninhibited leaps. In the genealogy room the
   delicate perspiration of effete brains. Room also of the secret catalogue,
   room of the unlisted books, those sought by police, manuscript room with
   the door of black steel, manuscripts stolen in delicate professional theft
   from abroad, sealed for seventy-five years. Sutras on spools of film. And
   all this courtesy and all this trust, tons of trash and tons of greatness,
   burning in time with the slow cool burning, burning in the fires of poems
   that gut libraries, only to rebuild them, more grand and Palladian, freer,
   more courteous, with cornerstones that say: Decide for yourself.(*)
   (Shapiro, 1964, pp. 20-21)

I first met Don Krummel at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August 1992 when I was on a tour of library schools in the Midwest. Curt McKay, assistant to the dean, encouraged me to sit in on classes to get a feel for education at Illinois. Krummel's course on American research libraries fit my interests and my schedule. I remember taking a seat near the door. No matter how short classes generally are on the first day, I thought it provident to provide myself with a quick exit. Every librarian I had spoken with in the process of researching my career choice told me library school ranked at the top of tedious times in their professional life: "It's what you have to go through to become a librarian," they said, "don't expect to like it and don't be turned off from the profession when you don't."

The class was large. Professor Krummel discussed the syllabus and the format of the course and what students could expect to get out of it. It was clear that his standards were high and one could anticipate doing quite a bit of work for his course throughout the semester. It was also clear that he viewed the territory of academic research libraries to be a fertile one that included texts, people, institutions, and the dynamic ways in which they come together. Toward the end of class, he gave students a handout of a list of gifts of various kinds that had been offered to academic libraries: "Don't spend more than ten minutes on this," he said, "just decide whether or not you'd take the items offered and why or why not. Expect that whatever your decision, I'll take the opposing point of view, not because there is necessarily anything wrong with your argument, there aren't right or wrong answers to many of these questions, but because there are many things one needs to take into consideration" (Krummel, lecture, August, 1995). One of the items on the list was an x-ray of Ernest Hemingway's ulcer.(1)

Now, six years and four classes later (I didn't start library school the following fall), as a candidate for a Certificate of Advanced Study at the University of Illinois, I am engaged in an oral history project focusing on Don Krummel's professional life. Who is Don Krummel, why is this project important, and what relevance does it have to the profession at large?

Krummel's e-mail moniker has, according to his latest count, fifty-eight possible interpretations (Krummel, personal communication, September 18, 1998). All of them, or at least all those I've thought of, are keys to his professional identity and outlook, including the fact that fifty-eight may be a very short list? "Donkay" resonates with associations. Do I hope that if I pull the tail on the donkay he will kick up a storm of gold dust and it will settle on me? Am I trying to pin the tail on the donkay so that finally, once and for all, I can close the textbook and set out on my own professional journey? Or, do I sincerely believe, after my exposure to Krummel and his teaching, that he is a person of unusual insight into his profession with interesting stories to tell that should be shared with a larger audience? Probably all three.

A veteran and historian of the profession, Krummel was educated at the University of Michigan. He served as reference librarian in the Music Division of the Library of Congress (1956-1959), and as head of reference at the Newberry Library (1962-1964) and associate librarian there (1964-1969). Since 1970 he has been a professor (now professor emeritus) of library science and music at the University of Illinois. He was named a University Scholar (1991) and was the first Centennial Scholar of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (1993). His principal music interests include printing, publishing, and early American music (Sadie, 1980, p. 283). He is the author or editor of between eight and fifteen books (depending on what one calls a book), nearly a hundred articles, and several hundred reviews, and is now at work on a new book on the history of bibliographic records. In addition to bibliography, he is also interested in library history, research library collections, and rare books. His concerns and audience are not as esoteric as one might assume. In an article for the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette he wrote: "We judge people, sometimes by the books they own, more often by the ones they quote for us, and always by the ideas they select from the books they have read" (Krummel, 1978, p. A2). This statement could apply equally to a person's choice of friends or television programs.