Rarities Online

Columbia University librarian James G. Neal beams as he walks past item after item on display in the school’s Butler Library, treasures drawn from the massive Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum. The collection is a veritable feast for theater scholars, including everything from rare first editions, sketches, and manuscript drafts to playbills, set designs, ornate masks, and some remarkable 19th-century handcrafted marionettes.

It is in unique collections like these that Neal sees a bright future for libraries. In fact, at the April 2005 Association of College and Research Libraries annual conference in Minneapolis, Neal told an audience of librarians that in the digital age, librarians are poised to enter a new “golden age” of special collections, spurred by digitization and greater online access to primary resources.

“Research libraries traditionally have been evaluated by how many volumes they hold, but the smallest library can eventually access as many volumes as the largest,” Neal explains, alluding to the advent of digital databases for contemporary resources. “In the future, I believe great research libraries will be evaluated more and more on their special collections.”

Indeed, digitization, high-speed connections, and suites of powerful new tools that allow students and researchers to interact as never before with collections are breaking them free from their climate-controlled exile and putting valuable special collections at the center of exciting new partnerships among librarians, faculty, students, and technicians. It’s still early—but already the results are remarkable.

At Columbia, initiatives like the Columbia University Libraries Digital Program bring together librarians, faculty, and technicians to create cutting-edge digital representations and research tools. This includes the Joseph Urban Stage Design Models and Documents stabilization and access project. Funded with a $207,289 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project preserves 240 three-dimensional stage models created by Joseph Urban for New York theaters between 1914 and 1933, including productions for the Ziegfeld Follies, the Metropolitan Opera, and a variety of Broadway theaters. The project also created digital images of related stage design documents and drawings that link to the existing online finding aid, making Urban’s work available to a worldwide audience via the web.

In July 2005, Stanford and Cambridge universities, staked by a generous $1.4 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, announced a similar effort to digitize and create tools to view more than 500 medieval manuscripts, as many as 200,000 pages. If that sounds like a lot, it is—roughly one- quarter of the world’s existing medieval manuscripts, which, until now, were usable by only a handful of scholars.

“As unique artifacts, these manuscripts are kept in a single room in Cambridge that is not open to the public,” explains Stanford’s Andrew Herkovic. Now, he says, the Parker on the Web project will “open that single room up to the entire scholarly community.”

With new projects starting seemingly every day, Alice Schreyer, special collections librarian at the University of Chicago, agrees with Neal’s assessment that libraries are on the cusp of a new “golden age” for special collections. “There have been marvelous joint efforts on several fronts,” she says. In the past, Schreyer notes, special collections could be rather isolated but no longer. “The most exciting thing about this 'golden age’ is creating partnerships with faculty and librarian colleagues,” she says. “What excites me most is how much at the center special collections has become.”

Still, for all the promise technology brings to the world of special collections, challenges also remain. How quickly librarians realize the potential for their special collections will depend on many factors: funding, innovation, institutional strategy, and, perhaps above all, Neal says, leadership.

The overarching challenge, Neal says, is what it always was: acquisitions. “Digitization is important,” he explains, “but if we don’t first remain committed to getting this stuff, these collections are at risk of being broken up and sold.”

While the Internet holds enormous potential for making historic collections increasingly accessible for teaching and learning, it has also made collections more available to private collectors. With the advent of online auction houses, libraries now compete increasingly with an aggressive, global, and growing private collector market. The result is that more owners today expect to be paid for their collections, and fundraising pressure on library administrators has increased. “It’s a big part of the job,” Neal says, and can be stressful, he concedes. “But it is a wonderful stress.”

Unlike collectors, who buy items piece by piece, Neal explains, libraries are not interested in plucking valuable historical jewels, because, out of context, they simply do not meet educational and research needs. “We’re interested in collections,” he says flatly. That includes collections he calls “distinctive,” or collections that may not be especially rare, or valuable, such as church records, scientific tools, or even oral histories, that nevertheless have important research value. As competition for the more noteworthy collections intensifies, pursuing distinctive collections cannot be allowed to flag, Neal stresses, lest important historical legacies be lost.

Karin Wittenborg, university librarian at the University of Virginia (UVA), which in 2004 opened a vast, 72,000 square foot, $26 million special collections library, agrees that the competition for collections is up. “But you can never stop collecting because you have limited resources,” she adds. “If you do, you’re out of the game. You can always find space or money, but you don’t get another chance to get a collection if it goes to someone else.”

Of course, once you procure a collection, as any archivist will tell you, the work really begins. And before any of this material can make its way online, collections must be evaluated, processed, cataloged, cared for, and often repaired. They also must be housed in an ideal physical space, and finding aids must be created. The effort is vital to scholarship but costly and time-consuming, hence many collections remain unprocessed—and unused—for years.

Making these existing collections if not immediately available through digitization then at least visible through bibliographic records on the web has emerged as perhaps the major challenge for libraries in realizing the golden age of special collections. “Of the top 25 research libraries,” says Wittenborg, “probably all of them” have large backlogs of unprocessed collections.

Indeed, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), which formed its Special Collections Task Force in 2001, reported in a 1998 survey of 100 libraries that, on average, one-third of special collections holdings remained unprocessed. Further, roughly 44 percent did not allow researchers access to those unprocessed collections. It presents some interesting questions for library leaders—how much time and money do you put toward getting processed collections online vs. processing them?

In September 2003, ARL hosted a conference that brought together nearly 200 librarians to begin formulating a strategy to make these collections visible online. Although the task force suggested a “preliminary records format” idea to expose unprocessed special collections, that proposal drew immediate criticism from archivists.

“When it is understood that a single cubic foot of material typically contains up to 3000 pages of documents, and collections requiring processing may, in turn, comprise hundreds of cubic feet, the problem of hidden collections is not reducible to merely preparing minimal catalog records for unprocessed holdings and disseminating those records on the Internet,” read an open letter from the Committee on Institutional Cooperation’s (CIC) archivists group, an academic consortium of 12 research universities, including the 11 members of the Big Ten Conference and University of Chicago.

Getting those records on the web, however, is vital, says Schreyer. “If a collection is not represented online, it is a hidden collection.” By “represented online,” she doesn’t mean putting up digitized copies of all collections but offering bibliographic information online. “To my mind, a big piece of the golden age is the special collections and research library communities recognizing and accepting the responsibility that we need to provide online access to information about our holdings.”

One of the ways librarians must meet that challenge, Schreyer says, is by reexamining how collections are processed. “We are working very hard, in a sense to redefine what we mean by a processed collection, most importantly, acknowledging this is not one size fits all. We must look at each collection—what type of access does it need? Is it item level? Is it collection level? Is it a combination? And then we must try to be as flexible and creative as possible.”

This is no small feat and a source of some tension between archivists and librarians—especially considering the collision of physical and online needs in special collections. The assumption, Schreyer explains, is that the less fully processed a collection is, in the end, the more labor intensive it is for staff to provide physical access, and more reference assistance will be required. “In exposing these hidden collections we’re also exposing a lot of preservation challenges,” she says. “These collections are going to have preservation needs, and we [must] be mindful of that.”

Preservation, of course, also remains problematic. When libraries acquire collections, Neal says, they take on the burden to care for them forever. That is a multifaceted challenge. Digitization can be beneficial—but then no digital document has yet shown it can last as along as ink on a piece of good old deacidified paper. There also exists the thornier challenge of preserving the output of today’s “born digital” collections—much of which in essence will make up tomorrow’s special collections. Yesterday’s letters today are emails—and just how will special collections librarians preserve, for example, the Steve Jobs Email Collection? “We don’t really know,” says Neal. “Print them out?” he suggests with a chuckle.

Despite the challenges, the upside for libraries, researchers, and students worldwide is limitless—certainly considering the vast amount of materials in library collections. Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library alone owns over 500,000 rare books in some 20 book collections and almost 28 million manuscripts in nearly 3000 separate manuscript collections. In addition, Columbia has taken a particular interest in oral histories, stewarding a number of new collections through its Oral History Center, including a series of remarkable 9/11 collections. The library also boasts a huge array of letters and other document collections and recently acquired the archive of Human Rights Watch, a massive repository spanning 25 years of the organization’s investigations into human rights abuses around the world. That collection is now being processed and will be used “extensively,” says Neal, “in expanding research and teaching…in these and other areas of the university.”

Schreyer points to the Goodspeed Manuscript Collection Project at the University of Chicago. With a $250,000 award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services matched by $227,762 from the university, the project has created a remarkable digital collection of 65 Greek, Syriac, Ethiopian, Armenian, Arabic, and Latin manuscripts dating from the seventh to the 19th century, complete with software to scroll over and examine every part of the manuscripts in detail. The program, Schreyer says, began with a faculty member using the collection with a class but quickly evolved. “We really felt the research potential of the collection was of global interest to scholars, and we wanted to be able to share that worldwide,” Schreyer says. “It’s a collection that has not been heavily researched because it is all in Chicago.” It is now freely accessible, and such efforts epitomize the transformation of learning.

“It’s what Edward Ayers calls the 'democratization of history,’” UVA’s Wittenborg says, referring to Civil War historian Edward Ayers, dean of the UVA Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, “and it is just tremendously exciting.” Ayers is a famous example of how special collections have become integral to students’ work, says Wittenborg. “He shows his students things like Civil War diaries and they inspire interest and passion far beyond what any secondary textbook ever could.”

Andrew Richard Albanese is Editor, LJ Academic Newswire