Volume XIX, Number 2 (Fall/Winter 2005)

The Heart of Yale: Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of Sterling Memorial Library, 1930–2005

In 1918 John William Sterling, a wealthy Yale alumnus, 1864, bequeathed $17 million with only one stipulation: that Yale build "at least one enduring, useful and architecturally beautiful edifice, which will constitute a fitting memorial of my gratitude to and affection for my Alma Mater." At the time, University Librarian Andrew Keogh was coping with a collection that had doubled in size since 1905 to over one million volumes, and the University decided that the principal memorial should be Sterling Memorial Library.

A series of events will mark the anniversary of Sterling Memorial Library and celebrate the work of the entire library system, now housed in some twenty-two buildings. The inaugural event was the opening of a special exhibit in Sterling Memorial Library in mid September. Curated by Judith Ann Schiff, Chief Research Archivist, the exhibit of materials from Manuscripts and Archives features selected renderings by the architect, James Gamble Rogers, photographs of clay models of the ornamental sculpture by René Chambellan and of stained glass windows by G. Owen Bonawit, and letters and documents by University Librarian Andrew Keogh, Yale President James R. Angell, and early champions of the library. Photographs depict various stages of the interior and exterior construction of the library, along with documentation of the opening and dedication as well as the founding of the Yale Library Associates in 1930.

By the opening of the academic year 1930/31, Sterling Memorial Library, although not officially completed, was in operation. For nearly twelve years university administrators, librarians, and faculty had worked cooperatively with the architect, James Gamble Rogers, to create the finest library possible and a "fitting memorial"to its benefactor John William Sterling. For Andrew Keogh and his staff, it was an enormous task to organize a central library from three core buildings and collections scattered throughout the campus. Keogh’s only disappointment was that his request for a 5 million-volume facility resulted in capacity for only 3.5 million. In 1930, the library, with a seating capacity for 2000 readers, was completed at an expenditure of nearly $8 million, with an additional maintenance fund of $2 million provided by the Sterling Trustees.

While the building was taking shape, English professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker worked to encourage the donation of collections and funds. In a landmark address to the alumni in 1924, the beloved professor stated: "There are three distinguishing marks of a university: a
group of students, a corps of instructors, and a collection of books, and of these three the most important is the collection of books." He reminded the alumni that no university or civilization could exist without "the recorded thought of the past," and recounted Keogh's fear that the magnificence of the library building would overshadow its purpose. The librarian, only half in jest, had suggested that a motto be inscribed over the entrance, "This is not the Yale Library. That is inside." Tinker then pointed out to those alumni whose primary interest was teaching rather than research, "you must have teachers here who are men and learned men," and "a library of millions of volumes, with strange books in it, out-of-the-way books, rare books, and expensive books." The alumni listened to Tinker and Keogh. They donated generously, and thus the "Yale Library Associates" was born.

Since the opening of the old library in the 1840s the collection had grown from 20,000 volumes to nearly 2,000,000 by the time Sterling Memorial Library opened in 1930. Carved by the entrance are the words, "The library is the heart of the university," and the heart of the library was the collection of forty original books contributed by Yale's founding ministers. To honor them, the seventeen surviving volumes were hand-carried by librarians in a ceremonial procession from the old library and placed as the first books in the new library. As Sterling's lofty book tower and inner spaces extended the observer's vision, they also seemed to expand the concept of what a great library might contain. New types of library materials were acquired, including manuscript collections, maps, wartime ephemera, photographs, and sound recordings.

At the dedication in April 1931, President James Rowland Angell praised "the librarian, the architect, and the builder" who "conjured up a dream of surpassing majesty and then translated it into innumerable ingenious and gracious forms. Here is incarnate the intellectual and spiritual life of Yale.” His vision of the library as "a very temple of the mind" has been fulfilled. For seventy-five years, Sterling Memorial Library has been, as it will continue to be, the heart of the university, a magnetic force, attracting outstanding research materials and scholars and motivating their interaction in an inspirational setting.

Judith A. Schiff
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Amanda J. Patrick
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President Richard Levin announced this summer that Alice Prochaska has been named to a second five-year term as Yale's University Librarian. As leader of one of the world's most renowned research libraries, Prochaska is responsible for the administration of all of Yale's 22 libraries (except the Law library), along with nearly 600 staff. Levin noted, "During the review of the state and leadership of the Library, ably conducted by Dean Jon Butler, it became evident that there was enthusiastic support for Dr. Prochaska's reappointment. Colleagues cited with admiration her sensitivity and her devotion to energizing the entire staff in thinking about the future of the Library." The letter also spoke of marked improvements in morale, alongside the strengthening of both collections development and public services.

Previously Director of Special Collections at the British Library, Prochaska received her doctorate in modern history from Oxford University. She also serves on many national and international committees and boards, including the steering group of the Digital Library Federation and the Board of the Center for Research Libraries. She is a member of the Global Resources Advisory Committee of the AAU /ARL, (Association of American Universities /Association of Research Libraries) and various committees of the ARL. She addresses and organizes conferences and meetings on library and archival issues, both internationally and in the US.

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Yale's Department of Athletics and the University Library's Manuscripts &
Archives collection are pleased to announce that materials from the Athletics Archives will be transferred to the University Archives for preservation and research. The materials document athletics at Yale from the mid-1800s up through the present day. Included among the materials are photographs and moving images of sporting events, files detailing how individual games were played, bound volumes of press releases, printed programs on each team as well as for specific events, celebratory banners, team scrapbooks, and files on all intercollegiate sports teams, student-athletes, buildings, and traditions at Yale.

Shortly after the transfer of custody to Manuscripts and Archives, catalog records will be available internationally through the Yale University Library's online catalog ORBIS.

This project follows in the footsteps of a similar joint project to catalog and preserve more than 5,000 reels of motion picture films of athletic events dating to 1923.

Steve Cohen
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The Samuel H. Kress Foundation has awarded two grants to Yale totaling $37,500. One grant was awarded to the Lewis Walpole Library, a department of the Yale University Library located in Farmington, Connecticut. The library is a research center for eighteenth-century studies and the prime source for the study of Horace Walpole — the eighteenth-century British man of letters, scholar, and connoisseur — and of Strawberry Hill, his house near London. The LWL collections include significant holdings of eighteenth-century British books, manuscripts, prints, drawings and paintings, as well as important examples of decorative arts. The grant will be used to support a curatorial fellow who will develop an electronic database to identify and describe the many objects collected by Walpole for Strawberry Hill. The database will be an international resource for scholars and students of the period.

The second grant, awarded to the Lewis Walpole Library and the Yale Center for British Art, funded an organizational meeting to plan a major exhibition dedicated to Walpole's Strawberry Hill. The exhibition will be organized by the Lewis Walpole Library and the Yale Center for British Art in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Michael Snodin, Head of Designs Collection in the Word and Image Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum, has been asked to act as Guest Curator for the exhibition. Conceived by Mr. Snodin, this exhibition will, in his words, "recreate the experience of Strawberry Hill, which established the idea of the romantic interior crowded with objects that told stories and sparked imagination." Accordingly, the exhibit will bring together many of the finest and most significant objects from Strawberry Hill in order to suggest Walpole's orchestration of carefully selected collections arranged within themed rooms.

Margaret K. Powell
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Photographs and other archival material documenting the distinguished life and career of Yale College's first Native American graduate, Henry Roe Cloud, are part of a special exhibit in Sterling Memorial Library. After graduating in 1910, Cloud became one of the most recognized American Indian educators of the early twentieth century, improving social and educational opportunities for American Indians in the United States.

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A new website documents and promotes the library's international collections, projects, and activities. The initiative is part of the library's International Program, a key aspect of its strategic plan and one that supports the university's international strategy and objectives.

Behind the website lies a database containing information about the range of international activities in which the library is increasingly involved. These include: cooperative acquisition projects; donation and/or exchange of library materials; exhibitions; internships; preservation projects; and papers and presentations by library staff. The database currently has records on over 120 projects covering the years 2000–2005. Updated regularly, it can be searched by participant, collection, department, type of activity, location, year, or a combination of these categories.

Most of the library's international projects are conducted in cooperation with institutions or organizations outside the United States, which are listed, with contact information, in the website's Partners section. The News and Upcoming Events section reports on current international activities. International librarians, archivists, and information professionals who come to Yale as interns or professional visitors are portrayed in Profiles. A Documents area lists articles, papers, and presentations by library staff members that deal with issues of international librarianship or were delivered at an international meeting. Soon, the section will contain a full-text archive of materials documenting this aspect of the library's work.

Developed by Graziano Krätli, International and Collections Program Support Librarian, the website is available at: www.library.yale.edu/international.

Works by renowned artist Mark Podwal are currently on display in this exhibit in Sterling Memorial Library, co-sponsored by Yale University Library's Judaica and Arts of the Book Collections. Podwal, a native New Yorker and Clinical Associate Professor of Dermatology at New York University School of Medicine, was a gifted artist even as a child. As he states, "It started with an illness, perhaps just a 'bad cold' that caused me to miss the first days of kindergarten. As a result, my name was not on the class roster. When my teacher read out the attendance list, as she did every morning, my name was never called. Until the day my teacher noticed my drawing of a train, I was invisible to her. And so it seemed to me, at the age of five, that my existence depended on my art."

Podwal has authored and illustrated a number of books, including Jerusalem Sky, A Book of Hebrew Letters, A Jewish Bestiary, and A Sweet Year, in addition to collaborating with such authors as Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick, and Francine Prose. His drawings have appeared in the New York Times since 1972. He has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Prague, and Jerusalem, and his work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Harvard Fogg Museum, among many others.

The exhibit includes original paintings, drawings, and prints, many of which were used as book illustrations. Books that Podwal illustrated for Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel are also on display. A reception, featuring remarks by Wiesel, was held on September 27 in the Sterling Memorial Library lecture hall. The exhibit is open to the public until the end of October.

Amanda J. Patrick
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An exhibit in Sterling Memorial Library highlights the distinctive and colorful German tradition of illustrated books for children from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recent collecting by Dale Askey, until recently Librarian for German Literature, contributed significantly to the library's holdings of such works.

In Central Europe, the tradition of children's literature developed out of seventeenth-century utopian aspirations. Moravian pastor and educator Jan Komensky Comenius believed not only that universal education would produce a utopian society, but also that learners needed to observe objects before grasping them in words. His influential Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658; translated into English in 1659 as A World of Things Obvious to
the Sense), developed pedagogy through pictures, and shaped a model of children's literature in which images played a central role.

Throughout the nineteenth century, illustrated books were considered a crucial means of social and political education. Illustrated fairy tales, both those collected by the Brothers Grimm and those composed by other authors, were produced during this time. Examples are on display in the exhibit. Included also are educational picture books, sentimental and instructive material, and even the well-known Struwwelpeter with its alternately punitive and moralizing content.

The display concludes with the efflorescence of picture books during the early decades of the twentieth century and considers the overlaps between visual modernism and children's literature.

The exhibit will continue until the end of October. A public lecture entitled "The Politics of Picture Books: Illustrated Children's Literature in 19th and Early 20th-Century Germany" will take place on Wednesday, October 26th at 1pm in the library's lecture hall. For more information, contact: Katie Trumpener (Professor of Comparative Literature and English)
at: katie.trumpener@yale.edu or Martin Blumenthal-Barby (PhD candidate, German Literature) at: martin.blumenthal-barby@yale.edu.

Katie Trumpener
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Nearly everyone who is involved with books knows about acidic paper and has seen paper that is so brittle that a simple touch causes it to break. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the demand for paper exceeded the supply of linen and cotton rags, forcing papermakers to use wood as a source for cellulose fiber. Over time, substances from this manufacturing process degrade the paper. Preventing acidic paper from becoming brittle through mass deacidification is a cost-effective means of preserving collections in their original form. Volumes are treated to neutralize acids present in the paper. In addition, an alkaline buffer is added to neutralize any acids subsequently absorbed into the paper from air pollution or byproducts of aging. Mass deacidification allows a large number of volumes to be efficiently treated at one time. Since 1998, Yale University Library has been sending collections to Preservation Technologies in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania. Items from the Government Documents, Burmese Literature, Near East, Historical Texts, and Historical Sound Collections have been treated.

On October 20, Robert Strauss, Vice President of Marketing at Preservation Technologies, L.P., will talk about the process of mass deacidification. This presentation, "Yale Library's DeAcid Trip," is open to all and will be held in the Sterling Memorial Lecture Hall at 10:30AM.

David E. Walls
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The Yale Divinity Library hosted the fifteenth annual meeting of the Yale-Edinburgh Group on the History of the Missionary Movement and Non-Western Christianity on July 7–9. Eighty individuals from throughout the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as Costa Rica, Denmark, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, New Zealand and Nigeria, attended the meeting. The Yale-Edinburgh Group brings together scholars, including librarians and archivists, to exchange information about historical aspects of the missionary movement and the development of world Christianity, with special emphasis on sources for documentation. Political, social, diplomatic, and religious history converge to reassess the significance of the missionary movement and its worldwide effects.

The Yale-Edinburgh conferences have been held annually since 1992, alternating between Yale and Edinburgh and featuring a different theme each year. The theme of this year's conference was "Identity, Ethnic and Christian, in the History of Christian Missions." The Yale-Edinburgh Group is convened by Professor Lamin Sanneh of Yale and Professor Andrew Walls of the University of Edinburgh and coordinated by Martha Smalley, Research Services Librarian at the Divinity Library.

Scholars attending the Yale-Edinburgh Group meetings at Yale often extend their visits in order to allow time for research in the Divinity Library's Day Missions Library, a world-renowned collection documenting the thought, history, and practice of world Christianity. This year, for the first time, the Divinity Library used its newly established David M. Stowe Fund for Mission Research to support the travel and accommodation of a young scholar to attend the Yale-Edinburgh meeting and spend an additional week researching at Yale. The Divinity Library's first Stowe Fellow was John T. P. Lai, who recently received his doctorate from the University of Oxford, Wadham College, in the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Lai used his time at Yale to research the translation activities of English-speaking missionaries in China.

Martha L. Smalley
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In preparation for Cross Campus Library's upcoming renovation, intensive planning and a systematic project of book shifting are now well underway. Librarians and staff worked during the summer to move little-used titles to Sterling or to the Library Shelving Facility (LSF). Although the precise date is yet to be determined, CCL will close after spring term exams in May 2006. During this closure, CCL staff, collections, and services, including course reserves, the Teaching & Learning Space, the ITS Cluster, and the Technology Troubleshooting Service, will all be relocated to SML. The newly renovated Cross Campus Library is scheduled to reopen by the start of the fall term in 2007. The renovation will modernize CCL, "Machine City," and adjacent SML basement rooms, and will improve access in the SML nave.

Please visit the website for more information: www.library.yale.edu/renovaxn/phase2a/

Amanda J. Patrick
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Bomb Damage Update

In May 2003, a bomb blast disrupted normal life at the Yale Law School. Fortunately, no one was hurt. However, there was major damage to the classroom in which the blast occurred and the surrounding areas. Although this damage was quickly repaired, water from a broken pipe seeped into the rare book stacks, located directly below the blast area.

The library's Preservation Department responded immediately. Triage teams identified wet materials. Of the 20,000 rare books, 800 were found to have water damage. Slightly wet books were spread out and dried naturally within a few days. The remaining wet materials were recorded, wrapped in freezer paper, and carefully packed into plastic milk crates and frozen in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library's freezer. Freezing prevents mold growth and allows phased drying. Forty extremely wet, leatherbound books were sent out to be freeze-dried; the remaining 365 were dried naturally, with special care given to the vellum-bound volumes.

Now, two years after the incident, all books are safely back in the stacks of the Law Library.

Gisela Noack
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