Organization and Service

Abstract

I N SPEAKING on the problem of . the organization of a university rare book room I am tempted to take as my text a statement I find in Andre Gide's Pages de Journal: "As soon as I do not differ, I keep silence." This is not to emphasize differences for the sake of differing, but is a recognition of the fact that there is little point to rehearsing those things upon which we all agree. The questions on which I am to speak are closely related to the basic precepts discussed by Mr. Wyllie and Mr. Powell. Obviously the objectives of the organization of a rare book collection are but the activation of the philosophy and the purposes of such a collection. My own "philosophy" of the rare book collection embodies in part an element of regret. I find it unfortunate that such a setup is necessary. The rare book collection places, in many ways, a false emphasis upon certain types of material, and distorts the general purposes of a university library when more or less arbitrarily chosen classes of books must be segregated for special treatment among traditionally lush surroundings. Would it not be better for all concerned if it were not necessary to have rare book collections at all? But the day when, they will not be called for is not yet with us. It will require, progressively through the ranks of the library ladder, stack boys who respect books as physical objects, catalogers who can discriminate between the relative importance of cataloging details,· reference assistants who see books as more than answers to readers' questions, and even library administrators who have the courage to make qualitative rather than quantitative comparisons. I do not mean to imply, however, that the entire university library should be run like a rare book collection. But only by setting up a rare book collection have we so far found the means of facing the problems· created by the need for the special treatplent of rare books in the face of the leviathan which the great university library has become. The very bulk of a sizeable research library loosens and demoralizes its standards, and to offset this the university librarian has happily recognized-or been shamed into recognizing-his responsibility to certain types of books, namely, those books, "those treasures whose emotional and intellectual values are so high that they are difficult to compute," to use one definition of the phrase "rare books." The establishing of techniques which minimize the personal element is apparently essential to the function~_ng of a huge institution, but the elimination of such personal elements, as far as a rare book collection is concerned, is a loss rather than an advantage. In the rare book collection a knowledge of techniques is far less significant than individual intelligence, and it is to preserve such factors that my own organization is designed. This is rather hard on the person concerned with supplying candidates for my staff positions, who finds it difficult to accept my insistence that I am more interested in intellectual potentialities