American Eclipse

David Baron, American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018.

During long days at the James Madison Memorial Building, across from the U.S. Capitol, I requested box after dusty box from storage and discovered a priceless lode; faded, handwritten letters; dog-eared news clippings, telegrams and train tickets, photographs and drawings; and fragile, yellowing diaries that retained the observations, dreams and desires of people who, like me, found magic in the shade of the moon. As I read these aging documents in the sterile glow of fluorescent lights, I grew immersed in a narrative far richer than any I had imagined.  Those relics revealed a tale not just about eclipses, but about how the United States came to be the nation that it is today. [p.xii] 

COMMENT

     Libraries often measure the value of collections with use statistics. The word "dusty" typically indicates that something has not been recently moved and therefore it is obsolete and unneeded— a target for weeding in order to free up valuable space for “better” uses than “book storage” ("storage" being another word that indicates an item not actively circulating even though it is on an open shelf). By contrast, in the context of this historical archive dusty boxes are a priceless resource precisely because they have not been used. These stored boxes contained history that had been waiting unread since 1878.  Disconcertingly, the fact that an item has gathered dust might indicate a lack of value (at least within the specific community served by the library), or it might indicate an exceptional opportunity for a researcher.Librarians generally deal with this cognitive dissonance by dividing libraries into "stacks" that value usage above all and "special collections" that specifically value rare and unique items regardless of use.

      The problem is, librarians can make mistakes when they decide how to interpret dust. In one book-weeding dust-up [1] librarians tossed a set of rarely-used Chinese language books. The librarians defended their action because "the recycled volumes were not rare" and "only one or two professors... were able to read the classical language in which they were written."  Of course, all foreign language material has an inherently limited audience. The fact that the librarians couldn't read the language probably should have prompted them to defer to someone who could. Instead, they deemed classical Chinese scholarship old-and-in-the-way of a new Center for Student Life, re-purposing dusty stacks for academic offices, multi-purpose rooms and a cafeteria.While a cafeteria probably will get more use than Chinese books (everybody eats), it also replaces an opportunity for scholarship with a far less educational opportunity for lunch.

      Some librarians (I'm one) believe that in the age of the internet when many books are fairly easy to get stacks should become more like special collections. The dusty books that lack immediate value could be cleared away in order to make space for dusty boxes full of hidden treasure. The only obstacle is, in order to do that librarians would need to write an active collection policy to use in tandem with their weeding guidelines. Due to bureaucratic divisions between stacks and special collections as well as pressure from space-hungry outsiders who want to colonize library space they typically don't.  Most libraries engaged in massive weeding projects have a policy that says what to get rid of, but no policy for what is essential to keep. 

[1] Bluemle, Stefanie R., and Carla B. Tracy. "The lives of books: Legacy print collections and the learning-centered library." College & Research Libraries News 75, no. 10 (2014): 560-581.