Sender: Rare Books and Special Collections Forum <EXLIBRIS@RUTVM1.BITNET>
I am about to give the 1991 Malkin Lecture at Columbia, and I thought
readers of Exlibris would be interested in seeing, and I hope
commenting on, the reading version of the text--which follows.
-Terry Belanger
Columbia University SLS
The Future of Rare Book Libraries
The 1991 Sol. M. Malkin Lecture in Bibliography
by
Terry Belanger
16 December 1991
Mrs Malkin, Dean Wedgeworth, ladies and gentlemen: Ac-
cording to the Chinese lunar calendar, we are just now com-
ing to the end of the Year of the Goat (hold that thought,
please). For me, however, 1991 has been the year of the Crys-
tal Ball.
In February of this year, I gave a lecture entitled ``Reflec-
tions by the Captain of the Iceberg'' to the Colophon Club of
San Francisco in which I made various prognostications re-
garding events in the rare book world during the next ten
years. This lecture will be published in a few months by the
Bibliographical Society of London as the coda to a volume of
essays celebrating the centenary of the Society.
Then in March of this year, at a conference in Iowa orga-
nized by Timothy Barrett to celebrate the 300th anniversary
of the introduction of papermaking into the United States, I
gave a talk which I was asked to repeat in September at the
Madison, Wisconsin, ``Whither the Book?'' conference orga-
nized by Barbara Tetenbaum: my title there was ``The Future
of the Book (If Any).'' This talk will appear in print either in
the proceedings of the Wisconsin conference or (if those pro-
ceedings are not published separately) then most likely in W.
Thomas Taylor's new journal, Bookways.
Last month, I gave a Hanes Lecture at the University of
North Carolina, on ``Education for Books as Physical Ob-
jects,'' and I read a revised version of this paper, in which I
had a fair amount to say about the future of rare book librari-
anship, a week later at the Houghton Library at Harvard; this
lecture will eventually be published by North Carolina. I was
honored to have been invited to deliver the 1991 Hanes Lec-
ture; I have fewer reasons for pride on being invited to deliv-
er this, the 1991 Malkin Lecture, given the composition of the
selection committee~and (speaking of the Malkin Lecture)
I wish to point out that in this room with us tonight are Mar-
jorie G. Wynne, Roger E. Stoddard, Lucien Goldschmidt, and
G. Thomas Tanselle, the Malkin Lecturers for 1987, 1988,
1989, and 1990 respectively: welcome back to Room 506, all
of you~all of you so carefree tonight, too.
If I have no reason for self-congratulation on being invited
to speak to you tonight, nevertheless I am pleased have the
opportunity to round off my collection of 1991 FutureSpeaks
with a meditation on ``The Future of Rare Book Libraries.''
In a somewhat more formal version, this lecture will be pub-
lished next year by our very own Book Arts Press of the Uni-
versity of Virginia: as usual, elegantly designed by Paul Hoff-
man and elegantly printed by the Stinehour Press~speaking
of which, Stephen Stinehour, the President of the Stinehour
Press, is here tonight: it's a pleasure to welcome him to Room
506, too.
There are few better ways of making a fool of yourself than
by trying to predict the future. In 1965, the political scientist
Karl Deutsch was asked to speculate about life in the year
2000, then 35 years away. His assignment, he said, was like
being asked to talk about the year 1800 from the vantage
point of the year 1765 (predict the coming of steam power
and the effects of industrialization, the revolutions in France
and America and the rise of mass armies), or to talk about
the year 1900 from the vantage point of the year 1865 (pre-
dict the use of electricity as a source of energy and the devel-
opment of the internal combustion engine, the rise of labor
unions and the high-water mark of imperialism and colonial-
ism). But if predicting the future is a foolhardy undertaking,
it is not always an impossible one; and the exercise is a poten-
tially useful and possibly essential mechanism for dealing with
areas of concern in which rapid change is occurring.
I am convinced that rare book libraries both in the United
States and worldwide are in fact at the beginning of a succes-
sion of cataclysmic transformations. The most important of
these changes will be caused by the increasing disinclination
of most general research libraries over the next several de-
cades to continue to maintain large, permanent collections of
paper-based books of any sort, rare or non-rare. This is not to
predict that research libraries are going to go entirely out of
the codex book business, but rather to say that they will in-
creasingly look upon their current book stock as a conveni-
ence collection, to be used and eventually disposed of without
remorse. Much of the paper-based information we use at
present is already generated from electronic originals owned
by publishers and by them constantly updated, corrected, ex-
panded, improved, and regularly republished in paper-based
form for the use of purchasers in a handy codex format. In
the future, readers are increasingly going to have direct online
access to electronic text and data files containing the materi-
als they require; and increasingly, they will perceive that they
do not ever need and do not ever want access in printed form
to the bulk of this material~a circumstance already routinely
the case with users of large online databases. The big change
is yet to come, because most journals and monographs are
not yet available to their end-users in machine-readable form.
But soon enough they will be; and then, there go the stacks.
I do not mean to suggest that our descendants are going to
be doing all of their reading from CRT screens; it is already
very easy to make a convenient printed hard-copy version
from texts accessible in machine-readable form, and it is be-
coming easier and cheaper to do so all the time. But the
more likely the master text is machine-based rather paper-
based, the more likely that paper copies are going to be used
and viewed as the temporary physical manifestations of a
permanent electronic ideal. We're already used to this idea:
when we buy a paperback copy of (say) a Hawthorne novel in
an airport book shop to read on a long plane ride in case we
don't like the movie, it's unlikely that we're ever going to
form much of an emotional relationship with the particular
copy of the paperback we've just bought. We may well have
another and better-printed or better-edited copy at home or
in the institutional library we generally use. The paperback we
just bought at the airport serves an immediate purpose and (if
it is brought home at all) is consigned to a back bedroom, or
a weekend house, or donated to the public library's annual
sale, or eventually just tossed out: an object which had a pur-
pose which it has now fully fulfilled. In no sense is the text of
the Hawthorne novel endangered by our carelessness with the
particular airport bookshop copy at hand. Expand this exam-
ple to include more and more of the books published today,
not only reference books but standard texts of all sorts and all
ages. The scholarly press is full of news of massive projects to
put into machine-readable form vast quantities of material
ranging from the collected works of every poet mentioned in
the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature to the
entire corpus of the literature of Latin and Greek antiquity.
Paper-based printed texts, especially as regards the current
monographic literature, continue at present to be indispensa-
ble; but every year from now on a little more of that litera-
ture will be available online, and every year more and more
of us will be using it in that form. It seems inevitable that
soon enough the texts of practically everything that anybody
is interested in, new or old, poetry or prose, popular or ar-
cane, boring or interesting, English or Sanskrit, is going to be
available online, the more so because of the simplicity of the
technology involved. The equipment necessary to convert a
printed paper-based text into machine-readable form is al-
ready relatively inexpensive, and the requisite technology is
becoming constantly cheaper and ever more ubiquitous. Au-
thor, subject, genre, period, and other special-interest groups
are forming everywhere (online, of course!), and it seems
entirely likely that (for example) every major edition of every
work of every author of every age in whom there is any gener-
al or academic interest will be available in machine-readable
form before very long~and if you grant this assumption, then
I think that you must then also agree that the university li-
brary, already changing quickly at the moment, is going to
change much more quickly still in the near future. Indeed,
university libraries are already under every kind of pressure
to convert their paper-based holdings into machine-readable
form; over the long or possibly even the medium haul, they
cannot afford the cost of maintaining ever-growing collections
of objects which require separate cataloging and physical pre-
paration, separate housing, separate housecleaning and pres-
ervation procedures, and separate access conventions.
These changes in general research libraries will have an
enormous impact on the future of rare book libraries. Until
not so long ago, a library's rare books have differed from the
library's other books simply in degree: rare books are more
valuable, or more fragile, or more scarce, or more brittle, or
more something than regular books, but still measured along
the same scale. General libraries have always been interested
in the contents of books whereas rare book libraries are more
especially concerned with the container in which those con-
tents are to be found; but they're all books, the same ele-
ments at both ends of the spectrum.
What is going to happen to rare book libraries when the
general research libraries to which they are connected begin
to lose interest in storing large numbers of paper-based
books, new or not so new, in their stacks? General libraries
have in fact been preparing themselves for moving out of the
codex book storage business for many decades, as one substi-
tute mechanism after another has emerged and become cheap
enough for widespread use. The increasingly pervasive avail-
ability of texts reformatted in electronic form will tip the
balance. As the use of information derived from machine-
readable sources accelerates in general research libraries, a
gulf will widen between them and their rare book depart-
ments, since almost by definition the contents of rare book
libraries do not consist of substitutes but of the real
McCoy~books valuable as objects because of their age, the
circumstances of their manufacture, their beauty, their asso-
ciations with former owners, their annotations or other inter-
esting signs of use, the non-reproducible quality of their de-
sign or their illustrations or their bindings~valuable as ob-
jects, as something you can pick up and hold in your hands.
General libraries are beginning to see rare book libraries as
something increasingly different from themselves, to think of
rare book libraries rather as museums whose patrons tend
more to look at books than actually read them; and, while the
place of museums in our culture in general is a well-estab-
lished one, their place on academic campuses and within
general research libraries is not so well established: many
educational institutions are going to become increasingly
dubious about the appropriateness of maintaining museums
of the book on their campuses. Indeed, I think that many
thoughtful general research library administrators are already
uneasy about the resources required for the adequate care
and feeding of their rare book departments, and that they
wonder whether the activities of such departments still fit
under the umbrella of the services appropriately provided by
the libraries for which they are responsible. In any event, and
whether or not library administrators are now interested in
this matter, it is certain that, soon enough, senior university
administrators are going to be fascinated by it, and for a
simple, compelling reason.
You will have heard: universities are short of money these
days, seemingly worse than ever. The reasons for the shortage
are many and various; they are as close as the pages of this
morning's newspaper. State and local governments, them-
selves strapped for money, have less to give the universities
they support; in the private sector, expenses are continuing to
rise faster than income, despite relentlessly steady tuition
hikes. In university libraries both public and private, the situa-
tion is grim at the moment, and getting steadily worse. Re-
search libraries continue to need to furnish services over a
constantly widening range while being provided, at least rela-
tively speaking, with constantly decreasing resources with
which to do so. Over the past two decades, for instance, li-
braries have had to open up enormous wedges in their budget
pies to pay for automation; very few institutions enlarged
their library's share of the total budget in order to pay for
these increased costs. Similarly, libraries are providing various
sorts of online services unheard of 20 years ago; they have
been relatively unsuccessful in finding new sources of money
with which to pay for these services, and the result is poverty
all around.
This problem is not a new one; academic and research li-
braries have been grimly aware for a long time of their inabil-
ity to keep up with the increase of human knowledge. They
have aggressively engaged in networking and resource-sharing
activities designed to help them cope with increased responsi-
bilities coupled with decreased funding; but the resources
available to them have by now shrunk to a point where rare
book departments within larger, general research libraries are
having to shoulder a much greater share of the burden than
has up to now been generally true. This has not until very
recently been generally so; throughout the 70s and most of
the 80s, rare book units have more often than not tended to
be protected from overall library budget and staff cuts; library
directors have given their rare book operations most-favored-
nation status, perhaps in part because rare books are attrac-
tive for enhancing the library's public relations base on cam-
pus. Moreover, directors tend to like the parties, the festivi-
ties, and the other excitements that rare book departments
can generate: an exhibition opening is easier to celebrate than
the acquisition of a new circulation system or the implementa-
tion of changes in an online catalog. Budget cuts in university
libraries have now been so severe for so long, however, that
rare book departments, too, are feeling the pain.
I want to quote to you from a letter I received a couple of
weeks ago from a former student of mine who is Curator of
Rare Books on the flagship campus of an institution generally
thought to be one of the better American western state uni-
versities:
You may [he writes] have heard some of the fiscal
horrors that are being visited upon us by the gover-
nor and the state legislators. The library is particu-
larly hard hit, and this has encouraged our director
to wield his battle axe, particularly because the posi-
tion of Head of Special Collections is vacant, and
thus there is no one around to object to what he is
doing. What he is doing is dismantling Special Col-
lections; he has already uprooted the Russian studies
collection; the curator will probably be turned into a
regular services librarian. My job is to go; he has
told me not to count on my job to continue after
1992. Rare books will be dumped on our state his-
torical collection, the literary manuscripts on the
University Archives. These are both departments for
which there is a mandate to maintain them, other-
wise he might be tempted to close Archives as well.
The position of Head of Special Collections will be
eliminated.
None of this is to save money; that is only the
ostensible reason. This is all politics, the director
working desperately to save himself and his position,
since he has had a great deal of public criticism for
some bad decisions. In the short term it may possibly
do him some good; in the long run it will ruin the
University's claim to be a research institution. The
VIP's at this institution who make the decisions are
all hard core scientists; they care very little about the
humanities and are perfectly ready to sell all the rare
books to the first dealer who shows up on the door-
step.
Note that my former student attributes the decline of his rare
book department not so much to lack of money as to chang-
ing priorities within his institution. A shrewd characterization:
it's not simply that university libraries cannot afford to run
rare book operations any more; rather, it's that increasingly
they don't want to. In this attitude, they are joined by an
ever-increasing number of metropolitan public libraries: this
month's American Libraries (for example) reports that por-
tions of the rare book collection at the Kansas City, MO,
Public Library will go up for auction early next year. The
Library's director comments, ``This approach will result in the
materials being placed in collections where they will be appro-
priately preserved and any research value fully realized, while
yielding a potentially significant exchange on these assets for
the library's endowment fund.''
We must remember that for most readers, the change from
paper-based information sources to electronically-based infor-
mation sources will be a great improvement over the present
situation; information will be cheaper and more widely and
easily available to them in more places; once acquired, it will
be easier to manipulate: to copy, excerpt, index, translate,
store, and retrieve. We must not let whatever personal affec-
tion we have for books as physical objects blind us to the fact
that most persons are, when push comes to shove, quite free
of emotional relationships with the physical containers by
which their information needs are met.
The end of the book as physical object in libraries academic
and public is not quite yet in sight. At least in the foreseeable
future it is unlikely that all machine-readable texts will invari-
ably work better than any paper-based ones. Printed books
are going to continue to be produced for a good long time to
come, especially those with complicated formats; top-of-the-
line firms (like the Stinehour Press) which specialize in illus-
trated books will prosper. Still, slowly but surely we are begin-
ning to view codex books in two, quite different ways: on the
one hand as convenient and disposable print-outs, and on the
one hand as art or museum objects. Libraries are susceptible
to fashion; what one library does, another library will imi-
tate~in general, research libraries are a lot more like each
other than they are different from each other. Just as soon as
the technology allows~or perhaps a bit sooner~trend-setting
research libraries are going to go out of the permanent paper
storage business, and the great majority of other libraries will
follow them, lickety split. Most research libraries will not want
to maintain much more than convenience collections of pa-
per-based materials, and they will begin the substantial deac-
cession of their present book holdings in successive decima-
tions which will include at least many of their rare books. We
are about to enter a period in which we shall see the whole-
sale destruction of institutionally-based rare book collections.
Not everything will go; an institution is likely to retain in
their original physical formats materials which are part of its
own history. Books notable for their physical beauty or their
sentimental appeal will have a good chance of retention.
Books which are particularly good examples of their physical
genres or formats will routinely be retained: books in original
bindings and in fresh condition, for example. A local connec-
tion or relevance will become more and more important as a
measure by which to determine the retention or discarding of
paper-based books; the focus of special collections will more
and more follow regional lines. Professionally-trained rare
book librarians are themselves going to have a major role to
play in the downsizing of their collections, for they are the
persons best-trained to make the decisions on what books
should be retained in their original formats, and what books
should be deaccessioned. In the more or less immediate fu-
ture (that is to say, during the next decade) rare book librari-
ans will be asked to contract their on-campus book stack
space. They will thus need to establish classes of books which
can be sent to remote storage. Over the longer haul, they will
have to set up criteria for separating their rare book sheep
from their rare book goats, permanently deaccessioning a
great many sheep, retaining a modest number of locally rele-
vant goats. (Remember? 1991 is the Year of the Goat.) Many
of these deaccession decisions cannot intelligently be made by
a single institution in ignorance of what other institutions are
doing along the same lines; if we don't work together, then
we'll all tend to save the same classes of materials, and we'll
all tend to throw out the same classes of materials. Few cop-
ies of the Shakespeare First Folio are going to be sent off to
sanitary land fill; but practically all copies of practically every
non-illustrated periodical are at risk, as is the great ruck of
just-plain non-splendid printed books from virtually all places
and periods, especially if they are in poor physical condition.
Physical bibliographers are well aware that the story a book
has to tell does not end with its text. At this podium on a
similar occasion exactly a year ago, Tom Tanselle eloquently
set forth the ways in which a book and a work, the container
and its contents, are different. In his 1990 Malkin Lecture,
he described the current national enthusiasm for what is
called preservation microfilming, and he argued that the
originals should be retained even after they have been
filmed. Microfilming as a preservation mechanism has great
limitations. We can with absolute confidence expect that our
ability to reformat library materials will continue to improve.
The list of reformatting devices employed by libraries during
the past century is a long one: photography, the photostat,
microfilm, cheap offset lithography, xerography, video disc
technology, the electronic digitization of texts and now of
images: microfilming, after all, is simply one of the chronolog-
ical steps along the long preservation way. Later generations
of students will always need access to the originals in order to
derive new levels of information from them as the feasibly
available technology improves. It is the responsibility of rare
book librarians to see that suitable copies do survive. Rare
book librarians must take the responsibility for devising re-
gional, national, and international plans for ensuring the
survival of representative examples of the widest possible
range of materials retained in their original physical format.
They will not be able to save much of anything in its original
format; but they must find ways to save something of every-
thing.
Rare book librarians can, and must, do more than this. They
must embrace a new role as curators of museum objects, and
expand that role. There isn't room for many museums of the
book as such either in this country or worldwide; there is,
however, far more room for museums of the history of com-
munication. We need to work toward the creation of insti-
tutions concerned with the history of the communication of
ideas whether through books printed and manuscript or
through graphic images, or through film and video, or
through digitized images and sounds~in short, we need to
take as our province and responsibility the history of words
and~and especially~the history of the physical entities which
now serve or which have served to transmit those words.
This mission overlaps that of art museums, but only to a
limited extent: by and large, art museums are not generally
concerned with the history of words as such. There is an
overlap between book museums and art museums in the area
of visual images, but the redundancy is one that we're already
used to and know how to deal with; you are as likely to find
a copy of an old engraving or other print in a large research
library as in a large art museum, and the chances indeed are
that the library will have cataloged the print better (and thus
make it more accessible) than the museum has, especially if
the print originally came out of a book.
By no means all universities are going to get out of the rare
book business, even if (if I am correct) most institutions now
possessing rare book collections are going to downsize them,
and many more are, indeed, going to leave the field altogeth-
er. Rare book librarians are going to have to cope with the
fact that their institutional bases and funding sources are
quite likely to shift, and they are going to have to be increas-
ingly adroit at finding new homes for their collections and
new justifications for their retention in their original physical
formats.
Institutions change and adapt, or they fail: I remind you that
the idea of college and university collapse is not a new one in
this country; G Edward Evans has suggested that at least as
many colleges and universities in this country have failed as
have survived during the last three centuries. Remember
please that our society has historically tended to be quite
unsentimental in its insistence that one generation make way
for another~perhaps this is nowhere more clear than in New
York City, where the life expectancy of physical structures
tends to be very limited indeed. Vast numbers of old books
have thus far been acquired by and housed in our nation's
libraries, first, because the best way to get access to the con-
tents of those books was by owning actual copies, and, sec-
ond, because the cost of maintaining those books in their
original formats was thought to be bearable. But now there is
another way, and we must deal with the changes the new way
will create.
You may be thinking that these changes are too drastic to
occur quickly. But remember what happened to wood engrav-
ers between about 1870 and about 1890, a 20-year period
during which the photographically generated photo-engraving
virtually wiped them out as a profession. Remember that in
1900, almost nobody had access to an automobile in this
country; less than a generation later, almost everybody did.
Change can happen quickly we have to guard against the
belief that things will change, but not too much, and not too
fast.
My colleague on the School of Library Service faculty, Jes-
sica Gordon, likes to point out that one of the chief difficul-
ties in predicting the future lies not so much in getting the
facts right as in predicting an accurate timeline; in the 60s,
for example, it was predicted that computers would put peo-
ple out of work, something that did not happen to any partic-
ular extent either in the 60s or even in the 70s, though we
were getting used to the notion. In the 1980s, when comput-
ers did begin to put people out of work, the idea was by then
a commonplace one, and it was accepted without much social
unrest, as a fact of life.
Tonight I have predicted a future in which a new world of
electronically-generated information will supersede our pres-
ent world of print-based information, but I may very well have
my timelines wrong; these changes may not happen as soon
or as much over the next 30 years or so as I think they are
going to. O Lord, you too may be thinking to yourself, make
me wholly machine-readable~but not yet. But as you pray,
please bear in mind the possibility that though my timelines
may be wrong, my conclusions are probably not: sooner or
later, the book is going to go the way of the horse.
Thank you very much.
The 1992 Sol. M. Malkin Lecture in Bibliography will be
given in December, 1992, in the Dome Room of The Rotun-
da at the University of Virginia by Professor Robert Darnton
of Princeton University.