ebb and flow: the migration of collections to american libraries: a report

Ebb and Flow: The Migration of Collections to American Libraries: A ReportAuthor(s): Richard W. OramSource: Libraries & Culture, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Spring, 2005), pp. 145-148Published by: University of Texas PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25541907 .

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Ebb and Flow: The Migration of Collections to American Libraries: A Report

Richard W. Oram

The 45th Annual Preconference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries took place at Yale University from 21 June through 24 June 2004. It focused on the

international origins of special collections in U.S. repositories as well as

current ethical and management issues surrounding these materials.

The plenary sessions began with Alice Prochaska (Yale Univer

sity) presenting a paper entitled "Some Issues Relating to the Own

ership of Manuscripts." Taking her cue from similar remarks she made

at the conclusion of the 2003 RBMS Preconference, Prochaska noted

that many special collections have a complex history of ownership and therefore might be said to belong to more than one country. In

effect, they "contain the DNA of our shared past," and ownership thus implies a responsibility to share them with the citizens of other

lands. The consideration of ethical issues deriving from the owner

ship of foreign collections first came to the fore after World War II, and since then many countries as well as UNESCO have developed

policies on the proper exportation of national cultural treasures.

James Raven (Essex University) took an historical overview in his

paper, "Transatlantic Migrations in the Colonial Period." He reviewed

the principal sources of statistical data (most notably, customs records, which include information on the weight of books arriving in America) on exports from London, the origin of most of the books that reached

North America. By the beginning of the eighteenth century New En

gland alone accounted for about of a third of English book exports. Colonial readers wanted to acquire the same books that were fashion

able in the mother country, and by 1773 the export trade accounted for

182,000 volumes, or 5 percent of the total British book trade.

The second day's plenary sessions began with a talk by Robert Parks (Pierpont Morgan Library) on the outsized role played by J. P.

Morgan in the migration of rare books and manuscripts from

Libraries & Culture, Vol. 40, No. 2, Spring 2005 ?2005 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819



146 L&C/Ebb and Flow

England to America. Parks considered whether Morgan revolution ized collecting taste in the United States during the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries or merely reflected it. Although his taste in rare materials and what constituted "high art" was fairly con

ventional, Morgan did introduce some substantial changes in the

collecting of cultural materials. Chief among these was his use of en

bloc acquisition of major treasures from England. The British popu lar press and cartoonists pictured Morgan as a cultural pirate. In one

cartoon he was pictured as a sort of supermagnet, sucking cultural

artifacts from England and the Continent and depositing them in his

New York and London homes. Such behavior was bound to stir up some resentment of American wealth. Morgan's collecting

was im

plicitly criticized in a little-known short story by Henry James, "The

Outcry." Of course, Morgan was and continues to be regarded by some as one of the great cultural benefactors because he donated his

rich collections of art and literature to the library bearing his name.

Michael Winship (University of Texas at Austin) examined the de

velopment of some American libraries in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries. Yale, with a sizable collection of around 60,000 volumes in

1859, according to the Manual of Public Libraries, was from its inception successful at attracting a series of gifts. These donated collections often

contained large numbers of English books, but, like most gentleman's libraries, they tended to emphasize the current, the practical, and the

utilitarian. Because it was based on gifts of private libraries, Yale's de

velopment tended to be sporadic, and significant gaps in certain sub

ject areas existed until the professionalization of librarianship and the

advent of systematic collection development in the mid-nineteenth

century. American libraries did not use the national libraries of Great

Britain and France, which were based on large core donations, as their

model. Instead, they should be regarded more as collections of much

smaller collections.

Thomas F. Staley (University of Texas at Austin), director of the

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, reviewed his institution's

relatively brief collecting history. The Ransom Center's explosive

growth beginning in 1957 was made possible by Harry Ransom's en

bloc acquisition of many collections. Inevitably, the acquisition of

its cultural treasures on such a grand scale was bound to stir up some

hostility in Britain. However, most British scholars accepted the fact

that manuscript collections are well cared for and accessible in Aus

tin. The possession of such collections carries with it the obligation to make them widely available through cataloging. Today, the chal

lenge is to maintain all the traditional services of a special collec

tions library while adding new programs. Technology is not an easy



147

solution, but in certain cases (such as the digitization of Texas's

Gutenberg Bible) it is possible to expand the reach of a research

library into totally new audiences at home and abroad. The Ransom

Center's current thrust is the expansion of its public programming and related activities. Such new initiatives can, however, only be financed through substantial fund-raising efforts.

Anthony Rota, of the firm of Bertram Rota Ltd. in London, delivered a paper entitled "Building a Fence round a Cloud, or How to Define a

Collection." He referred to his firm's efforts in building substantial col lections of manuscripts in the United States and Canada during the past

fifty years. The most famous of these collection-building initiatives was

undertaken cooperatively with the University of Texas. Rota did not re

gard his efforts on behalf of this library as in any way destructive of British cultural heritage; to the contrary, the center's collection develop ment made literary manuscripts more easily accessible.

On the final day of the conference Robert McChesney, founder of the Afghanistan Digital Library, spoke about his efforts to preserve and make accessible some of the earliest published Afghan texts. Most of the country's first imprints were used to disseminate laws and regu lations and served to unite a factionalized society. Later, literature and translations of foreign works began to appear. Library development

was halted and reversed beginning with the civil war of the 1980s and the subsequent takeover of the country by the Taliban, which destroyed

much of Afghanistan's cultural legacy. Looting of the Kabul public and

university libraries represented the nadir of this unfortunate country's library history. By the early twenty-first century most of Afghanistan's earliest publications

were impossible

to find in U.S. or Russian librar

ies. As a result of the Afghanistan Digital Library's initiative, several libraries and private owners agreed to lend their copies of these works for digitization. So far, twenty-four books have been preserved and

made widely accessible in this fashion, reversing some of the Taliban's cultural depredations.

Mike Kelly (New York University) summed up the plenary ses sions with reference to the famous gift of "forty folios" that came to

Yale University as the cornerstone of its great library. Most of these volumes had originally come from Great Britain. In the same fash ion the wealth of special collections in American libraries derives in

large part from many streams emanating from other countries, espe

cially the United Kingdom. Possession of these treasures with for

eign roots carries with it an ethical obligation to share them with the entire world. Even Pierpont Morgan was aware of this obligation and founded a research library and museum to make these materials available not only to scholars but to the public at large. Today the



148 L&C/Ebb and Flow

need for openness and outreach by American libraries is just as clear, and new tools such as digitization make this possible on a scale pre

viously unimagined. In addition to the plenary sessions, the "Ebb and Flow" confer

ence featured presentations of short papers and some panels on re

lated topics. These included "Restitution of Library and Manuscript Collections in Post-War Europe: The Offenbach Archival Depot" (Anne Rothfield, National Library of Medicine), "The Bancroft Li

brary and Mexico's Bibliographic Disasters of the 19th Century"

(Walter Brem, University of California, Berkeley), and "The Diaspora of Music Special Collections: European Music in the United States

and American Music in Europe" (panel led by Karen Spicher, Yale). Other presentations were based on studies of collections particularly rich in foreign materials, such as Yale's W. S. Lewis Walpole Library and Osborne Manuscript Collection and the Immigration History

Research Center at the University of Minnesota.



ebb and flow: the migration of collections to american libraries: a report

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