Changes in Rare Books Librarianship: new opportunities for a user-oriented and cooperative approach (original) (raw)
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The Continuing Development of Special Collections Librarianship
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In this paper I would like to share my experience in devising ways to encourage people unacquainted with rare books to discover them – especially children and young people. I will refer to my experience, which is based mainly in Italy. In particular, I am going to describe the methods and content of training courses for librarians that I have conducted on this subject. The aim of these courses is on the one hand to highlight the value of rare collections in order to make them better known and to revamp them, and on the other hand to explore ways to promote reading. My opinion is that librarians are the key figures in acquiring knowledge of rare book collections as they play a major role in the dissemination of knowledge and in the promotion of reading. Therefore, my aim is to raise awareness of the fact that the rare book collections in libraries can be excellent tools for the promotion of culture across all age groups. No one questions the importance of exhibitions or catalogues, but it is clear that those activities engage only a small number of people, i.e. scholars or enthusiasts. It is thus up to librarians to find other tools and means to publicize the rare book collections in their libraries. In Italy, for instance, there exist various educational events linked to rare books, but their number is still too small and their potential not yet fully exploited. The proposed training courses stem directly from my experience, as I have worked for many years on manuscripts and rare books collaborating with, among others, the Italian governmental office for books and libraries and the official cataloguing institute, Istituto centrale per il catalogo unico (ICCU). I have taken part in various cataloguing projects ‒ among the most recent, one on manuscripts preserved in the archives of popular writings in Trento, and the census of mediaeval fragments in the libraries of the Trentino region of Italy. Finally, I have been teaching codicology as a contract professor for several years at the University of Trento (Italy). * Very special thanks to my friend, Elisabetta Morelli Vilday, who helped and above all, supported me with her competence not only during the translation of the paper, but also by continually 'provoking' me with lively discussions about the text.
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In the early 1970s, when I began to teach at the Columbia University School of Library Service, I quickly discovered that, though the literature of historical and enumerative bibliography was immense, the literature of rare books and manuscripts librarianship itself—whether separately considered or taken as a part of research librarianship as a whole—was virtually non-existent. Since I was at the time almost entirely innocent of any knowledge of rare book librarianship, my need for information was great. I found myself taking to the road to inform myself by personal observation. In recent years, I have continued to spend . . .
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Afterword: Special Collections in the Twenty-first Century
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ON 16 DECEMBER 1gg 1, I gave the seventh Sol M. Malkin Lecture in Bibliography on “The Future of Rare Book Libraries” at the School of Library Service (SLS) ,Columbia University.” (In assessing this honor, bear in mind that I am the person principally responsible for selecting Malkin Lecturers.) The Book Arts Press published the first six Malkin Lectures as separate pamphlets, most of them elegantly designed and printed by the Stinehour Press-but not mine: The Trustees of Columbia University closed their SLS at the end of the 1991-92 academic year; on the day I gave the Malkin Lecture, I contented myself by putting its text onto ExLibris, the (then new) electronic bulletin board, and I moved on to deal with other matters. There has been some continuing interest in the lecture in the dozen years since it was first given. In 2002, I reprised it at UCLA and at Rare Book School in Charlottesville, with commentary-with the result that I am now receiving requests for both lecture and comm...
This paper looks at current and legacy cataloging practices for collections of rare books with archival elements at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It considers three types of "archival" rare book collections: 1) the personal libraries of writers; 2) personal (research) collections; and 3) large collections of related materials. In considering eight representative collections from two institutions, it answers the following question: How do past and current description practices for "archival" rarebook collections in two ARL libraries in North Carolina compare to the way recent scholarship has proposed these types of collections be described? This paper develops a clear picture of how these types of rare book collections are made visible at these two institutions.