The Beinecke Library has received from Frederick R. Koch, Yale 1961 MFAD, one of
the largest and most remarkable collections of literary and musical manuscripts to have been
assembled in the past few decades. Its music component includes manuscript scores, autographs,
and correspondences by and relating to composers from the 17th to the 20th century: among the
composers represented by major holdings are Handel, Boccherini, Schumann, Liszt, Berlioz,
Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, Bizet, Hahn, Satie, Wolf, Mascagni, Puccini, Leoncavallo, Respighi,
Falla, Strauss, and Stravinsky. The collection includes virtually complete musical archives for Sir
William Walton and for the early 20th-century Italian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. There
are hundreds of letters from Verdi to his friend Count Opprandino Arrivabene and to Francesco
Maria Piave, the librettist of ten of his operas, including Rigoletto and La traviata. Wagner is
present with letters, songs, and drafts of the texts for Lohengrin and Siegfrieds Tod. The rich
Offenbach collection includes one of the most important scores for the Tales of Hoffmann.
Complete manuscript scores for Gounod's Le médecin malgré lui and Franck's oratorio Les
Béatitudes are present, as are major works by Massenet, among which Hériodiade, Thérèse,
and his orchestral suites.
Among the collection's greatest treasures are Debussy's manuscript for Pelléas et Mélisande and much of the small output of Duparc, including the songs Phydilé, Le manoir de Rosemonde, and L'invitation au voyage. Other French composers represented in depth are Ravel and Poulenc.
Along with French music, French literature is splendidly represented in the collection with a large number of letters and manuscripts by Marcel Proust and an extensive Cocteau collection, as well as significant material by Hugo, Daudet, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Sacha Guitry, Radiguet, and Jean Genet.
An important ensemble of letters from William Beckford to the antiquarian bookseller George Clarke, an unparalleled collection of drawings and manuscripts for several versions of Edward Lear's Book of nonsense, and a large collection of manuscripts by A.A. Milne are among the English literary manuscripts. The Oscar Wilde material includes Robert Ross's working typescript for the posthumously published De Profundis. There are early letters by W.H. Auden, the diaries of Noel Coward, and the archive of Robin Maugham, including significant material about his uncle W. Somerset Maugham.
American literature is represented by a distinguished collection of Henry James letters, the original, corrected typescript of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and one important correspondence from James Merrill. Finally, there is a valuable and intriguing collection of historical documents relating to Frederick the Great, George IV, Leopold I of Belgium and his wives, Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie, Maximilian of Mexico, and the Stanford White murder trial.
Currently on deposit, the collection is available to scholars, preferably by appointment, during the Beinecke Library's regular hours.
Vincent Giroud
Nota Bene Vol XI, No. 2 (Spring 1997)
Periodicals Contents Index (PCI) is an electronic index to the contents of thousands of periodicals in the humanities and social sciences, from their first issues to 1990/1991. All articles as well as book reviews, obituaries, and other notes are indexed. PCI currently indexes over seven million articles in 1,759 journals. Within a few years the index will encompass 3,500 journals and fifteen million individual articles. The scope is international, including journals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and other Western languages.
PCI provides unique coverage of journal literature. Electronic access to current and recent articles has been available for many years. They rarely, however, index complete journal backfiles which often extend back into the eighteenth century, and most focus on a limited number of languages and disciplines. PCI thus supplements in important ways such indexes as Arts and Humanities Search, the MLA Database, Historical Abstracts, and American History and Life. The fields covered in PCI include: Anthropology, Archaeology, Area Studies, Art and Architecture, Black Studies, Economics and Business, History, Linguistics, Literature, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Religious Studies, Social Sciences, and Women's Studies.
The Yale community now also has unlimited electronic access through Project Muse to the full text of more than forty journals published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics, including titles such as ELH, Modernism/Modernity, Philosophy and Literature, World Politics, American Quarterly, Reviews in American History, and American Journal of Mathematics. Also available are two journals published only in electronic form: Postmodern Culture and Theory & Event.
Project Muse offers a wide range of features such as hypertext links, Boolean searches, and the capability to create "hot lists" of frequently consulted journals or articles. It is possible to search the database by title, author, or subject, or to search the full text for any word, using Boolean operators. Each search can be performed in a specific journal or across several or all journals. Online versions of the journals are available up to four weeks earlier than their print counterparts; holdings typically go back two or three years, varying with the journal. Printing or downloading articles for teaching or research is both permitted and convenient.
Both PCI (http://pci.chadwyck.com/) and Project Muse (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/) are available from any computer on the Yale network.
Margaret K. Powell and Susanne F. Roberts
Nota Bene Vol XI, No. 2 (Spring 1997)
The Sterling Library renovation project is uncovering some of the building's best-kept
secrets. Six stories up behind the ornately-carved wooden cornice crowning the Main Reading
Room, carpenters working on the ceiling discovered worker signatures dating from the 1930's.
Away from the view of readers below, the signatures of the forgotten craftsmen responsible for
the room's magnificent woodcarving and finish work contain clues to their personalities and the
customs of the construction trades.
Hiding signatures in areas accessible only to fellow workers illuminates the relationship between the craftsman and finished work at Sterling. The practice also underscores the solidarity among craftsmen at the time of the Sterling Library's construction. In out-of-the-way places they preserved their legacies in a kind of workman's code, reserved for fellow craftsmen of future generations to recognize their accomplishments on display in the Main Reading Room below.
One worker named Coiro felt the need to include his place of residence in his tribute and inscribed his address on Lombard Street in New Haven. E. White, proud of his artistry in the Main Reading Room, signed with the title of "decorator" next to his name. Another worker, not content with a written signature alone, drew a rough self-portrait.
In December 1996, two carpenters discovered the signature of Hans Stroh, who in 1931 proudly marked his union book number below his name on a concrete slab above the roof's cornice. Although the area was scheduled for overhead ductwork that will eventually cover the signature, the two workers halted their progress in order to document it for posterity. Looking at the inscription in concrete, the woman carpenter assisting the photographer said in a soft, respectful voice, "It's a tribute to a brother worker, and we don't mind doing the extra work to save it." --AVR
Anthony V. Riccio
Nota Bene Vol XI, No. 2 (Spring 1997)
Drawings, paintings, prints, and writings by Native American authors and artists from the
eighteenth century through the present are on display at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library through June. Drawn from the library's collections of Western Americana, American
literature, and modern books and manuscripts, Tracing Their Marks: American Indian Writing
and Art from the Beinecke Library Collections documents the historical context of contemporary
Native American poetry, fiction, prose, and art.
Since before the American Revolution, Indian peoples have read and written both in their own languages and in English. In 1772, a New Haven printer published a sermon preached by Samson Occom, a Mohegan minister, on the occasion of the execution of fellow Mohegan Moses Paul for murder. Occom also published an Indian hymnal and an historical account of the Montauk Indians among whom he ministered. In the early nineteenth century, other authors, such as Pequot William Apes, Cherokee Cornelius Boudinot, Missassaugua Peter Jones, and Chippewa George Copway, arose within northeastern, southern, and midwestern Indian communities. Their moral fables, political tracts, personal memoirs, and poetry are on display.
At the time of the Gold Rush, one Cherokee author, John Rollin Ridge, moved to California to make his living as a professional journalist. He owned or edited ten different newspapers, including the San Francisco Herald, and published verse in numerous California literary periodicals. The exhibition includes a very rare first edition of Ridge's biography of Joaquin Murieta, California's famous Mexican social bandit.
The contemporary renaissance in American Indian literature is represented in the exhibition by selected manuscripts of James Welch, of Laguna poet and storyteller Leslie Marmon Silko, and of Abnaki poet, critic, and publisher Joseph Bruchac.
Tracing Their Marks includes examples of nineteenth-century Plains Indians ledger art as well as twentieth-century paintings and prints by Pueblo and Navajo artists of New Mexico. Ledger art grew from an indigenous tradition of hide painting. The desire of army officers and tourists alike to take home examples of Plains art led to new traditions, and many young men wrote their memoirs in both words and pictures. The drawings on exhibit include a series created by Etahdleuh, a Kiowa warrior sent to prison at Fort Marion, Florida, and another series by American Horse, a Dakota.
Among the unpublished manuscripts on display are previously unknown drafts of Choctaw tribal constitutions dating from the late 1850s; the correspondence of Choctaw delegates to Washington D.C. discussing their efforts to obtain from the federal government the compensation their people had been promised for signing the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek; the medical formulae and correspondence of various Cherokee people from the early twentieth century, written in the Sequoyan syllabary; and the extensively revised, autograph memoir of Lucy Thompson, a Yurok woman of the early twentieth century.
Tracing Their Marks is part of the Beinecke Library's efforts to document the roots as well as the current flower of American Indian history, literature, and art and to suggest the range of investigative work that can be supported by the library's resources.
George W. Miles
Nota Bene Vol XI, No. 2 (Spring 1997)
The Arts of the Book Collection has greatly expanded its holdings of the graphic work of
Fritz Eichenberg, a woodcut artist best known for his illustrations of Russian literature and
gothic tales during the 1930s and 1940s, and for his work as an illustrator of Dorothy Day's
Catholic Worker during the 1950s. The Eichenberg Trust recently gave the collection four
hundred original carved blocks and over six thousand works on paper by the German émigré
artist. The gift contains original artwork, sketches, monotypes, lithographs, watercolor
paintings, and artist's proofs of most if not all of the wood blocks in the collection. Like a
photographer's negatives, the blocks of this master of the woodcut illuminate the art and
technique of wood cut illustration, while working drawings and sketchbooks preview the design
process and proofs display the final product of Eichenberg's talent. Included in the gift is
correspondence relating to the published work, as well as personal correspondence and holiday
greeting cards exchanged by the Eichenbergs and a wide circle of illustrators, designers, and
woodcut artists. Of special interest is material relating to Eichenberg's work as a
cartoonist-reporter in Berlin in the 1920s.
The Eichenberg material augments the Arts of the Book Collection's rich holdings of original woodcuts, including blocks by Fritz Kredel, Bernard Brussel-Smith, and John Warner Barber, and cuts from illustrations to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. A major exhibit of the Fritz Eichenberg collection is scheduled for July 1998. [Editor's note: This exhibit is now scheduled for 1999.]
Bridget Burke
Nota Bene Vol XI, No. 2 (Spring 1997)
Course-specific sessions, in which a librarian introduces students to the basic sources for research in a discipline, can be integrated into research-oriented classes for both undergraduates and graduate students. These sessions, often taught in the library's new Electronic Classroom, present the basic electronic resources and usually the major printed sources for the discipline. Discussion with the faculty member and the subject of the course determine the exact content of the session. In many cases, librarians develop research guides or bibliographies of both printed and electronic resources and make them available over the Web for students' review. In the past academic year, librarians offered research sessions for over 90 courses across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences curriculum, reaching over 1,000 students. Faculty members can arrange such sessions with their department's library liaison. For a list of these liaisons, see the printed Selectors Directory in the Fall 1996 issue of Note Bene, or consult this list online at http://www.library.yale.edu/NotaBene/selector.htm.
Source-specific sessions introduce the Yale community to heavily used sources with a broad appeal across disciplines as well as to sources of central importance to specific disciplines. Sterling offers workshops on Advanced Orbis Searching and on the basics of searching Nexis, which in 1996-97 attracted 230 faculty and students. The Divinity Library, Government Documents Center, Social Science Library, Medical Library, and Science Libraries all offer sessions relevant to their disciplines, with topics ranging from "Introduction to Bible Software&qout; to "Structure Searching for Chemical Information." These are announced each term through the Weekly Bulletin and on the library's research education Web page (http://www.library.yale.edu/ref/eclass/researched.html), as well as through departmental library liaisons. Librarians have also developed online tutorials for Orbis and Nexis which are designed to be used both as stand-alone introductions to these tools and as quick reviews for those who attend one of the workshops; these are also accessible from the library's research education Web page.
Internet sessions, which the library began to offer two years ago, now range from a set of four introductory workshops on the Research Workstation (for both Netscape and Lynx), Internet Search Engines, and Scholarly Communication, to a wide-ranging series of sessions covering Internet resources for specific disciplines from Art History to Women's Studies. The introductory workshops are offered a number of times each semester and, like the Orbis and Nexis sessions, are publicized through the Weekly Bulletin and on the library's research education Web page; online tutorials are accessible from this page as well. Sixteen discipline-specific Internet sessions have been offered during the Spring term and will become standard offerings in subsequent terms.
Suzanne K. Lorimer
Nota Bene Vol XI, No. 2 (Spring 1997)
The following questions and answers are excerpted from exchanges at recent meetings called by the Advisory Committee on Library Policy to discuss off-campus shelving. Committee Chair Professor John Mack Faragher presided at most of the meetings. The full list of questions as well as additional information about this undertaking, including the Working Group's Final Report of October 1996, are available at the Web page for the project: http://www.library.yale.edu/Administration/Shelving/ocs.html. Copies of the report are on reserve in CCL.
Q: What motivates the library to think about non-browsable off-campus shelving?
A: The Working Group was motivated by three considerations: severely crowded library shelves,
poor preservation conditions for much of the collection, and the high cost of browsable shelving.
Existing collections seriously overcrowd the shelving available at several library units.
Collection growth alone requires 1.8 miles of new shelving annually, but none is being provided.
Planning for the new Music, Arts, and Divinity libraries also requires shelving beyond what is
provided on-site at those units. Sterling Memorial Library and the Seeley G. Mudd Library are
both over-full.
Large portions of the university's world-class collections are kept in environmental
conditions that range from marginally adequate to positively damaging. Overcrowding on the
shelves is itself damaging to books.
Browsable, on-campus shelving is ten times more expensive than non-browsable
off-campus shelving.
Q: Why is it so much less expensive to build non-browsable off-campus shelving?
A: Non-browsable shelving requires vastly less aisle space than browsable shelving and uses the
cubic space occupied by books much more efficiently. In addition, off-campus land is less
expensive, and the building itself is less costly because it does not require the attention to
exterior appearance necessary for on-campus construction.
Q: Is the construction of an off-campus shelving facility a decided matter? What is there still to
talk about?
A: The decision to construct the facility was made by the Provost and Vice President for
Finance, drawing upon the recommendations of the Working Group and the Advisory Committee
on Library Policy. What is open for discussion are the principles for selecting material to be
shelved off campus and the kinds of service needed by faculty and students.
Q: Where will the new facility be located? Why not locate the new shelving facility in some
existing building relatively near to campus?
A: No decision about site has yet been made. The needs for library shelving (including floor
loading capacity and exacting environmental controls) are quite specialized and rarely met by
existing structures.
Q: What will the process be for securing faculty input on decisions about the material to be
shelved off campus?
A: Librarians and the Advisory Committee on Library Policy are still developing proposals for
this process. It will be active and consultative, will employ established channels of
communication between faculty and library staff responsible for collection development, and will
be based on usefully detailed descriptions of what might be located off campus. The Advisory
Committee on Library Policy will monitor the development of selection policy and procedures.
Faculty and others are urged to register their suggestions with Ann Okerson, Associate
University Librarian for the collections (ann.okerson@yale.edu; or 432-1764).
Q: If I want to see briefly, but at one time, a large number of books shelved off campus, can I? If
I need to use a large number of books shelved off campus for a course or seminar, can I get them
back on campus for a semester or a year? If it appears a volume should be permanently returned
to on-campus shelves, will this happen?
A: Yes to all three questions.
Q: Most of the books I work with are infrequently used. They are a particularly rich source for
innovative research. Will they all be moved to off-campus shelving?
A: No. Some will undoubtedly be moved, but excellent delivery services will ensure that these
books remain available within 24 hours or less of a request for them. The Working Group
emphatically asserted that no discipline would be disproportionately affected by off-campus
shelving decisions.
Q: Will there be a reading room at the off-campus facility?
A: Yes, but the service model for the new facility will be strongly focused on the needs of the
on-campus reader. Few services will be provided at the off-campus facility and reading space
there will be quite modest. Readers will themselves have no access to the shelves and no special
paging of material will be done for on-site readers. We expect reader space at the new facility
will be used infrequently.
Q: Where will the University spend the money it saves by building off-campus shelving? Will
the new operating costs of such shelving be properly supported?
A: The least expensive response to the library's shelving needs is to do nothing--in spite of the
need to find nearly 2 miles of new shelving for each year's collection growth. This approach is
common in higher education. Yale is embarking on a different course, where we will be able to
build shelving as we need it because we are substantially lowering its cost. In solving the
shelving problem, the university is not saving money. It is taking on new costs--but costs lower
than they might otherwise be.
Library administrators and university officers understand clearly that the only way to
secure the significant economic advantages of off-campus shelving is for the new facility to serve
readers well and to operate in the way we say it will. The library's budget proposal for 1997-98
includes the first of the new operating costs for off-campus shelving as an addition to its base.
Further new operating costs will appear in future budget proposals. No final decisions have been
made about the university's 1997-98 budget, but the library is confident it will have the funds
necessary to operate the off-campus shelving facility.
Q: How can I identify books that are normally shelved next to one another, once they have been
moved to the off-campus facility?
A: The capability of Orbis to search by classification number leads to items with closely related
numbers in the Library of Congress classification scheme (CL) and in other classification
schemes used at Yale (CO). It is not possible to conflate the classification schemes in one online
search, just as it is not possible to see them together on the library's shelves.
Over the next eight years, 4.5 million online records will be added to Orbis so that Yale's
entire library collection will be represented there. As this conversion from cards to online records
progresses, a search by classification number will produce far more reliable results than visiting
the shelves. It will bring together items with closely related classification numbers shelved in
different libraries and shelved because of size on different floors of the same library. So as the
Orbis database is completed, searching by classification number will offer improved browsing of
the "virtual" shelves.
Q: Access to material shelved off campus can be no better than Orbis, the online catalog. What
are the prospects for improving Orbis?
A: There are two things wrong with Orbis.
1. Orbis is incomplete, lacking records for most material acquired before the mid-1970s.
No materials will be shelved off campus until they are appropriately represented in Orbis. The
library is now launching a massive retrospective conversion of its card catalog records to
machine readable form. When we are in full production, we will be adding 50,000 such records
to Orbis each month.
2. Orbis searching is sometimes not very user friendly. It is old software. Replacement
software is on the market, but it is not yet tested in very large libraries. Our strategy has been to
provide a friendlier Web-based front-end to Orbis and to make other enhancements, with the
hope that a mature replacement product will be available in perhaps three years.
Associate University Librarian Danuta Nitecki will be coordinating the implementation of the off-campus shelving project. She can be reached at 432-1818; danuta.nitecki@yale.edu.
Danuta A. Nitecki
Nota Bene Vol XI, No. 2 (Spring 1997)
The Divinity Library's Day Associates Lecture was presented by Prof. Lamin Sanneh on June 6th in the Marquand Chapel. Prof. Sanneh spoke on America's Example in the Establishment of Christianity in Africa: Antislavery and Antistructure.
In addition to coordinating the Yale-based meetings of the Yale-Edinburgh group, the Divinity Library is also contributing to the field of missions history by moderating an e-mail discussion group that now includes more than 100 participants, and by maintaining a website that documents resources related to the study of missions history (http://www.library.yale.edu/div/missgde.htm).
Martha L. Smalley
Nota Bene Vol XI, No. 2 (Spring 1997)
[ Nota Bene XI Menu | Nota Bene Home Page ]
![[Image]](thvacu.jpg)
SML renovation
![[Image]](thboatbp.jpg)
Bookplate of Casilda Ince Anderton
Copyright © 1997 Yale University Library
Last Revision: January 14, 2003