Celebrating Research: Rare and Special Collections from the Membership of the Association of Research Libraries (review)

To commemorate its seventy-fifth anniversary, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) published a book displaying a robust array of holdings from 118 member libraries in the United States and Canada. Celebrating Research: Rare and Special Collections from the Membership of the Association of Research Libraries presents richly illustrated and highly readable profiles selected by Philip N. Cronenwett, Special Collections Librarian Emeritus, Dartmouth College Library; Kevin Osborn, Research & Design Ltd.; and Samuel A. Streit, Director for Special Collections, Brown University Library.

In his introduction Book Collector editor Nicolas Barker recounts ARL's history and his experience working with many collections in the volume. Special collections, he writes, "encompass the distinctive, the rare and unique, emerging media, born-digital, digitized materials, uncommon, non-standard, primary, and heritage materials" (5). Their purpose has shifted since ARL's 1932 founding, notes Barker: "Where once special collections were regarded as the top dressing on the solid cake of main library management, they are now regarded as distinctive signifiers, almost trademarks. . . . ARL libraries want to be known for their distinctive collections, not by some characteristic shared by every other library" (15). Indeed, the showcased collections are only a sampling of the substantial holdings of research libraries.

Arranged alphabetically by institution, the two-page profiles include a description of the collection's acquisition, development, and use and captivating photographs. The collections that are profiled cover the range of human achievement and experience in the arts, industry, and science. Several bear evidence of the cultural history of specific groups, including African Americans (Emory University), Chicanos (University of California, Berkeley), German and Jewish intellectual émigrés (University at Albany, State University of New York), Italians (University of Wisconsin–Madison), and women (Duke University). A full range of artistic expression is represented, including alternative press (University of Connecticut), comic art (Michigan State University), and New Orleans jazz (Tulane University). Some collections could be considered eclectic, such as that of public health films (National Library of Medicine), one on human sexuality (Cornell University), and another on the nineteenth-century spiritualist movement (University of Manitoba).

A final section summarizes the additional special holdings of contributing libraries and serves as a directory by listing contact information. The volume's subject and proper name index assists in identifying similar collections at different institutions.

The stories of the passionate individuals, driven to preserve memory, who amassed and preserved the material are as compelling as the collections themselves. For instance, the University of Alberta's twenty-three hundred volumes on North and South American aboriginals were collected by Gregory Javitch, a Russian Jew who fled Nazi-occupied France for Palestine, then immigrated to Canada. His experience moved him to collect books about the displacement and genocide of the indigenous civilizations of the Americas, which were donated to the university in 1980. Similarly, enthusiastic collector George Harry Beans, a seed company owner, knew no Japanese yet amassed a world-renowned collection of Tokugawa-era maps, now held at the University of British Columbia Library. Equally ardent librarians and archivists were instrumental in building collections: University of California, Irvine, librarian Anne Frank founded and almost single-handedly nourished the school's Southeast Asian Archive during her forty-year tenure. Donald G. Wilson, a librarian at University of California, Riverside, ignored initial ridicule in acquiring the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Utopian Literature, the largest publicly accessible collection in its field. Exuberant collectors have sometimes become curators, as in the case of Ruth M. Baldwin. The Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature at the University of Florida Libraries began as a modest birthday gift from her parents and grew to 100,000 children's books published from 1668 to the twenty-first century. Baldwin became the collection's curator in 1977.

Celebrating Research: Rare and...