News from the Yale Library News from the Yale Library
I arrived on August 1 of this year, new both to Yale and to the environment of American
research libraries. Nearly four months into the job, this seems a good time to reflect on the
organization I have joined.
The most obvious truth is that I have joined not just a great library but a great university. At this particularly vibrant stage in its life, I have been learning the reality behind the reputation. I meet people whose commitment to Yale is what makes it so successful and, at the same time, so humane. Each event in the kaleidoscope of the tercentennial year revealed another facet of Yale's traditions. Alongside the celebrations, the University's response to the terrible events of September 11 and their aftermath demonstrated its role as a community and within the broader community in ways that I found humbling and impressive.
Large research libraries serve their communities in many ways. The question that interests me is what makes a large research library into a great one?
Serving patrons
A library's primary task is to provide access to the world's fund of knowledge, meeting its patrons' myriad needs for information with systematic, up-to-date catalogs and well-ordered shelving. But a great research library also presents its users with sources of knowledge they did not know they needed and opportunities to make connections they had not imagined. It builds and maintains a deep and wide-ranging collection of print and microform resources as well as strong collections of unique and rare materials. Increasingly of late, a research library augments these traditional collections with access to electronic materials, including large and costly databases to which individual scholars would have difficulty gaining access. These aspirations challenge a research library to continue meeting the demands of traditional library use while innovating along with current research and anticipating the needs of future scholarship.
A resourceful staff
Yale Library staff are resourceful in meeting both new and old demands. They have guided the retrospective conversion of the library's catalogs to fully automated form, a process that is nearing completion. They are currently planning for "Orbis 2," a new library management system that will improve services, and they are working to alleviate the overcrowding in some collections. At the same time Yale librarians have set the standard for new purchasing and licensing arrangements for electronic materials and have worked with faculty to produce exciting initiatives in digital imaging. A close relationship with the Mellon Foundation's new ArtSTOR and a generous grant from the Getty Foundation will intensify the interaction of faculty, students, technical experts and librarians to produce a new generation of classroom and teaching resources. Librarians and faculty are just beginning collaborations to create new sets of materials based on Yale's traditional strengths.
Library managers are developing a strategic framework for the next five years that will combine traditional services and new directions.
Renovations
In the next few years, the library will be better and more effectively housed. Divinity School renovations will include improved library space. There will be a second Library Shelving Facility, and the Arts libraries will be re-housed in the new Arts and Architecture complex. I hope to see successful fundraising for Phase 2 of Sterling Library renovations that will significantly improve the undergraduate experience of studying at Yale. Plans for a new Social Science building would provide an integrated service for one of the most swift-moving clusters of disciplines the library serves.
The library at Yale and in the wider world
This library serves first and foremost the faculty and students of Yale. If librarians cannot meet their needs and surpass their expectations, no wider ambitions will succeed. My personal contacts with colleagues in the library and throughout the University will always be what I enjoy most. But there is also a broader community to serve.
The Yale University Library is a leader in both regional and national library networks. Beyond these, it is one of the largest libraries in the world and holds quantities of material that no researcher of any nationality will find elsewhere. It is vitally important that Yale's library should play its full part in all these spheres. The internationalization of Yale, the goal the University has set for its fourth century, includes a crucial role for the library. It is possible now to share unique resources via the Internet, and while doing so to develop and complement collections in print and manuscript. Yale's magnificent library resources, mediated by the work of world-class faculty, students, and librarians, can support learning and scholarship in new ways.
The library's ambitious program will build on solid achievements and the dedication of its excellent staff, working closely with all parts of the University to bring together the resources of this close-knit academic community. For me, it is an extraordinary privilege to have arrived here at such a moment of opportunity.
Alice Prochaska, University Librarian
Nota Bene Vol XV, No. 3 (Fall 2001)
Libraries and other subscribers often find aggregations attractive because subscription costs for such packages can be significantly lower than subscribing to individual titles of interest. However, these collections can also have drawbacks. For example, they may not provide the most recent issues. Also, titles are not always fully present in an aggregation; book reviews, letters to the editor, or similar content might be excluded, as might illustrations or charts.
Aggregations can meet some of the growing demand for electronic access to journals, magazines, and newspapers. In particular, they can supply titles whose publisher does not yet provide online access to the complete journal, titles whose older years are not otherwise available online, or titles of marginal interest to the Yale community.
Once the Yale Library acquires an aggregation, librarians confront the need to make it accessible to those readers who want to use the titles it contains. Orbis, the online catalog of library holdings, is the logical place to record a title's availability. However, the contents of aggregations are large (some products gather more than 1,000 titles) and fluid (some titles are not permanent features of a collection), thus complicating the process of including the individual titles in Orbis.
Many aggregations do not even supply to subscribers a complete and current list of titles covered. For those that do, librarians first enter the titles in the list of electronic journals at: http://www.library.yale.edu/journals/. Then they begin the process of including the titles in the online catalog. Librarians negotiate to get title lists from vendors in an electronic format that is easily transferred into Orbis. When this is not possible, library staff must create Orbis records for the titles.
More and more materials are becoming available online, and the library will continue to acquire appropriate and cost-effective versions for use by the Yale community. That process includes efforts to ensure that Orbis and the lists of electronic resources are as complete as possible.
Kimberly J. Parker
Nota Bene Vol XV, No. 3 (Fall 2001)
My connections to the Beinecke Library go back almost thirty years, when I came here as an
assistant to Professor Cora Lutz, who had begun to catalog the collection of pre-1600 Western
manuscripts. The last of the three original Beinecke brothers, Frederick W., the great Western
Americana collector, had just died, and his brother E. J., collector of Robert Louis Stevenson
and illuminated manuscripts, had passed on the year before. "Fritz" Liebert was still in
charge. Between then and now I returned to the Beinecke many times, as researcher, cataloger,
exhibition organizer, and advisor to the collection of medieval and renaissance manuscripts.
My first impressions upon becoming director of the Beinecke last July were thus mixed with memories. It was, in a way, a homecoming with surprises.
The growth of the collections, for instance, is astonishing in sheer magnitude and glory. In just the last year, the Beinecke has added Walter Pforzheimer's collections (Molière, armorial bindings, Frank Stockton, intelligence service)--15,000 volumes strong--and the Frederick R. Koch Collection, surely one of the most outstanding gatherings of musical, historical, and literary autographs assembled recently. The Pforzheimer collections seem to me emblematic of the way the library benefits from the generosity and perspicacity of Yale's faithful alumni, while the Koch Collection is a prime example of one of those defining moments that creates new directions for our collecting.
The interior renovations at the Beinecke Library, undertaken in distinct stages throughout Ralph Franklin's tenure, may surprise an old hand, but--more essentially--they will help increase the Beinecke's role as a focal point for the humanities by providing additional conference, lecture, and teaching spaces. The new rooms are equipped with state-of-the-art electronic tools that allow an instructor or lecturer to work with and to manipulate large images of original materials. What in the past only a few could see at a time now an entire class can see at once. As one devoted to teaching, this excites me deeply.
The Beinecke staff has also grown, and I am impressed with their accomplishments and creativity. The group includes old friends and new colleagues. During my first few months, I talked privately with each and every member of the staff--a wonderful way of taking the pulse of the library. I was gratified to learn how much energy, dedication, and insight all staff members bring to their work.
Finally, I have initiated promising collaborations that are of great importance to the Beinecke's future mission. I have very much enjoyed working with Susan Hockfield of the Graduate School and with Michael Holquist, interim director of the Whitney Humanities Center. Both collaborations promise to be extremely productive as we strive for greater interaction between the library and the Yale community. The trustees of the Yale Library Associates, who traditionally meet at the Beinecke, continue to be devoted advocates, and the Beinecke family welcomed me with open arms even before the beginning of my appointment.
During the summer, the Beinecke senior staff helped me to develop a five-year plan for the library. Like my first impressions as director, the plan mixes old and new. It takes our core activity--the preservation of the documents of the past in their original formats--and builds on that central mission to fashion a bright future for the Beinecke Library as a center of inquiry and discourse for the humanities, both on the Yale campus and internationally.
Barbara Shailor, Director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Nota Bene Vol XV, No. 3 (Fall 2001)
In 1701, according to the story, ten ministers gathered at the Branford home of the Reverend
Samuel Russel; each brought a number of books and ceremoniously placed them on the Reverend
Russel's parlor table to mark the founding of the Collegiate School. The exact identity of
these books may remain forever obscure. However, the current Beinecke exhibition A Library
for Its Time gathers a number of volumes that may well have been at Yale since its beginning,
as they represent the sorts of titles appropriate to the principles on which the school was
founded. The exhibit also contrasts this early theological library with a selection of the
diverse materials collected by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to support the
research and curricula of its time.
The sorts of books that comprised the earliest Yale library were, for the most part, printed in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of the books were written in Latin, then the lingua franca of scholarship, but a few were probably in English.
As reconstructed by the exhibit, Yale's founding collection documents neither the great expeditions of the age of discovery nor the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Not a line of Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Ben Jonson is to be found. The books Yale's forefathers brought together in 1701 constituted, with the exception of a few historical and philosophical works, a theological library. The Bible is of course present, in the Latin translation of Immanuel Tremellius and Franciscus Junius (Geneva, 1590), as well as the works of Saint Augustine, a ten-volume edition published in Basel in 1569, the gift of Yale's first rector, Abraham Pierson. The works in English are all commentaries on books of the Bible, for example, Andrew Willet's commentary on Genesis (London, 1632).
Swiss reformers associated with Ulrich Zwingli are prominent in this hypothetical first library, but the focal point of the collection is Calvinism. Pride of place thus belongs to Calvin's Institutio Christianae religionis (1536), present in a 1606 edition printed in Geneva that bears on its title page the ownership inscription of Yale founder James Pierpont.
Three hundred years later, the Beinecke Library is still an avid collector of sixteenth and seventeenth century books. Works from this period on astronomy, cosmography, costume, navigation, fencing, and hunting are to be found among recent acquisitions along with how-to manuals, scientific treatises, and literary works from poetry to popular street plays.
But modern collecting practices encompass other periods as well. The exhibition includes an illuminated manuscript, representing the Beinecke's large collection of medieval and Renaissance codices, and several incunables, books printed in the West between the appearance of the Gutenberg Bible in 1455 and the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Twentieth-century literary archives and the artistic/literary products of Modernism are represented in the exhibition by Marinetti's "metal book" and selections from the papers of Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, and the Theatre Guild.
The second half of the Beinecke exhibition demonstrates that a modern rare book library collects more than books. Musical scores, a selection of rare photographs, and art works by Georgia O'Keeffe and Charles Demuth represent some of the non-print formats on display.
Christa A. Sammons
Nota Bene Vol XV, No. 3 (Fall 2001)
As a Tercentennial gesture, the Yale University Library has donated microfilm of the
historical backfiles of the New Haven Register and the New Haven Palladium to the New Haven
Free Public Library to complete its collection of these important documents of local history.
Although the Yale library has a long-standing commitment to provide local residents with
access to its collections of city newspapers, such access has not always been simple. To
remove barriers, Ann Okerson, Associate University Librarian, and Alan Solomon, Head of
Research Services and Collections, arranged to acquire the microfilms for the city's library.
To celebrate this donation, the public library hosted a small event on August 26, 2001, for staff from both libraries. Attendees made brief presentations about the resources offered to the community by each library and discussed collaboration to improve services to residents of New Haven and scholars at Yale.
Danuta A. Nitecki
Nota Bene Vol XV, No. 3 (Fall 2001)
Susan Wheeler, Five hundred years of medicine in art: an illustrated catalogue of prints and drawings from the Clements C. Fry Collection in the Harvey Cushing / John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2001.
The Clements C. Fry Collection is among the largest and most comprehensive collections of art related to the history of medicine. Its two thousand prints and drawings span five centuries and represent the works of over six hundred artists, among them Pieter Bruegel, Rembrandt van Rijn, Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, Honore Daumier, and Kathe Kollwitz.
The collection surveys the general, non-didactic historical iconography of medicine and health care. Doctors visiting their patients, satires of therapeutic fads, polemics on vaccination, temperance propaganda, anatomy in art, childbirth scenes, hospital façades, and images of disease are among the scores of subjects represented. The collection also reflects the professional interests of Dr. Fry, a Yale psychiatrist. It brings together many works related to mental illness, including images of patients, psychiatric institutions, and therapeutic practice.
The catalog contains over 1,600 small black and white images of the prints in the collection and has an extensive set of indexes.
Toby A. Appel
Nota Bene Vol XV, No. 3 (Fall 2001)
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Last Revision: January 23, 2003