∞ Anthro Library (and a digression)

553 Words filed by Frank @ 05:53 | 21-Mar-07 in libraries |

Toured the Anthropology Library here at UC Berkeley this morning. I’d been before (mostly to poke around the stacks and to pick up the only available campus copy of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory), but not as part of a formal tour group.

I like this library a lot. I like its cramped stacks and its narrow stairwells and passageways. I like the fact that it has a dumbwaiter. But that’s me speaking as a library user (and an increasingly rare one at that) who has a stubborn love for antiquated libraries and their often byzantine physical setups.

The one time that I had the privilege of visiting (and using for research) the Bodleian Library 20 years ago, I was in absolute awe of its grace, its antiquity, and its fussy fustiness, but in the transformational era of the internet, there are increasingly fewer and fewer library users who are enamored of that set of qualities.

Even the glorious grand Bodleian now has a website, and it also has a mission statement, part of which says that the library will “always aim to develop and maintain an understanding of the needs of its users and potential users and respond to them.” How long that mission statement has been in existence I don’t know (seems like 1995, judging from the webpage), but it’s hard to believe that it was in place when I was using the library and had to read and sign the following declaration, handed to me by a stern porter, just to gain admittance:

I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.

And that was before I’d even filled out all of the other paperwork and made all the proper curtsies that I needed to make in order to handle within authorized eyesight the volumes that I wanted to peruse. An experience not to be missed (in my opinion), but partly because of the exquisite frisson of terror in it, the feeling that I was a common interloper treading on hallowed ground who needed to have my place in the scheme of things severely underlined and bolded.

It was really in some ways akin to that wonderfully terrifying scene from “Citizen Kane” in which Jerry Thompson visits the Thatcher Library and the forbidding crone at the entrance does everything short of asking him for a pound of flesh before she lets him through the crypt door.

Anyway — back to the Anthro Library. The library has 91,000 items in its collection, some of which it’s having to move off-campus to storage because of the campus’s chronic space shortage problem.

The librarian pointed out that this is only one of three formally instantiated anthro libraries in the US — the others being at Harvard and Penn — a fact that surprised me. It’s neat to work on a campus with one of the few operating anthro libraries still around.

Oh, and updating the last post — Pasadena did eventually pass the library tax renewal. Good for them. My hometown did the right thing. ★

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