With its majestic Corinthian columnar entrance, the Rauner Special Collections Library seems more like a temple than a repository for old books. Inside there is abundant light. White, crisp and confident, classical lines and ornaments adorn the ceiling coffers, the balustrade of mini columns, and the four massive Corinthian pilasters, which together frame an almost improbably vast and clear space. The 1965 galleries on both sides of this space allow a privileged view onto the Baker Lawn and Rollins Chapel. At the heart of Rauner are the stacks: a four-storied crystal palace of memory, filled with the most venerable and valuable books. The Hickmott Collection, for example, with original editons of the works of Shakespeare, may be worth more than the combined value all the books in the Dartmouth Book Store, store included!
Reading five times re-edited paperback versions of venerable classics is often not sufficient. Sometimes the actual, physical book, the notations, the paper, the hand produced illustrations, even the cover, is more powerful and important to new research than the words the book contains. In the stacks are books that allow for a full communion between living book and living reader, a tactile and visual experience that is becoming increasingly rare.
There are books from the Middle Ages encrusted with barnacular jewels and gold, like some witch's recipe of spells, the pages themselves alive with strange, magical arts and colors. Cuneiform tablets from the ninth century B.C., ancient religious scrolls, pages of the Gutenberg Bible, gold-leaf illuminated manuscripts, the diaries of Daniel Webster, early photographs of Winter Carnival, unpublished letters of College presidents, -- everything in Special Collections is accessible to students in the reading room.
The work of organizing, and cataloguing, and making accessible the vast amount of material stored inside the stacks goes on down below, in the basement, underneath the light and airy reading room. Special ID cards are needed to access this most important part of the library (Security is tight: No student workers have these cards. Even President Wright would have to be given a special guided tour if he wanted to browse the stacks. Security is important because books are most vulnerable when they are in the midst of being re-catalogued or sent off for repairs.)
The work that goes on in this lower part of the library is truly awesome. New materials, student publications, newsletters, treasury records, Hanover history, photographs, posters, acquisitions from auctions and donations, a tidal wave of information on printed material, that has done nothing but accelerate, must be processed, catalogued, and sometimes even bound. Older materials must be examined for repairable damage and maintained at the right humidity and temperature. Sometimes whole collections need to be reorganized. Whether it is a matter of physically moving files into safer, accessible storage or describing a collection on a computer database, there is constant work going on in the basement and tunnels below the calm and quiet Special Collections reading room.
One of the most important lessons I have learned working at Special Collections is knowing what to keep and what to not keep, what to record as preserveable information, and what should not be recorded, or literally thrown into a trash heap of history. For example, when cataloguing The Dartmouth into a database, it is impossible to mention every single article written. There is not enough room in the collection for printouts of every sent blitz, not enough room for every excellent paper, nor enough room for all the thousands of campusphotographs. It is here in the archives where the first and most irrevocable decisions about the hierarchy of history (the relative importance of events in the past) are made. One could argue that in an ideal situation the beautiful sunset on the green that June 1963 evening, recorded on 20 photographs, should be preserved forever, just as much as editions of Chaucer's or John Ruskin's works should be preserved forever. Yet in the end, potential for use is more important than judgements about implicit value. Space must be made available for things higher on the priority list.
Therefore, the responsibility of the archivist and his/her assistants is profound. In the decision of an archivist lies the fate of our memories. What is self, what is humanity, absent of memory? Neglected books die. Like decaying bodies, books easily return to dust. Without temples to memory like Rauner Special Collections, the purpose of our lives might involve little more than reading prints in shifting sands.
