In today's cyber age, compiling information has never been easier for the average Dartmouth student working on a research paper. But we all know there was an age before the digital, before millions of books, articles and periodicals could be accessed with a simple click.
Anyone who has ever been to the stacks during finals knows how digital scholarship permits students to leave things until the last minute. When you can search a term on JSTOR, download a PDF or highlight a quotation and copy and paste it into your paper all in a matter of minutes, why would you ever plan ahead? But of course, scholarship at Dartmouth was not always this easy.
While Dartmouth's library system which was comprised only of Baker Library and the stacks at the time originally operated under the Dewey Decimal System, it switched to the more efficient and innovation-friendly Library of Congress system in 1964, according to a memorandum from the Office of the College Libraries on Oct. 12, 1964. This was an enormous switch for the College, which boasted the largest undergraduate library in the nation with 880,000 volumes and growing at a rate of 24,000 volumes per year, according to a library instruction flyer from September 1946.
The library relied on a card catalogue system, as did most pre-digital libraries of the time. Large cases located in Baker Hall contained hundreds of thousands of cards with call numbers, arranged alphabetically and by subject, according to the flyer.
"You could open the drawer, find your subject and physically see the volume of information on that subject," former history professor and unofficial historian of the College Jere Daniell '55 said.
Another tool the modern student has at his disposal is Borrow Direct, a system that connects the libraries of all eight Ivy League universities andthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology.With the inception of Borrow Direct, students went from having a few million to 50 million volumes at their disposal. If a student's internal search is fruitless, with a few clicks and an automatically filled-out form almost any book or document can be sent to Dartmouth in a matter of days. Before Borrow Direct, students were allowed to request loans from other libraries but only for extenuating circumstances. A memorandum from the 1950s said that interlibrary loan services would only be provided to seniors or juniors writing culminating theses, but even then, students had to obtain a professor's signature and a declaration that the item was vital to the student's research.
Understandably, the transition to the digital age was difficult and expensive for Dartmouth. Rather than purchasing a commercially developed system, Dartmouth elected to develop its own automated cataloguing system. The initial years of the digitized cataloguing system were accompanied by 30-page manuals describing Boolean codes and general layout features of the extremely complex infrastructure.
In retrospect, though this academic migration into the digital age may seem like an obvious step for the College to have taken, there was still sharp resistance to adopting the new system. Students argued that digital resources encouraged intellectual laziness, allowing students to avoid actually engaging in their subject's literature and discerning what scholarship is sound or relevant. Instead, the digitally-inclined student could download files into a folder and collect books without ever understanding the context from which those resources came.
Daniell said that these arguments were especially potent in the history department.
"In the study of history, voice is very important," he said. "When you are reading history, you have to be very conscious of the quality of that voice."
Daniell, who has spent a portion of his career studying the history of Dartmouth itself, also said there is information that is simply not available on the Internet. He cited the study of Dartmouth College as a salient example of a topic of scholarship that could not be adequately researched using only digital resources.
As students with essentially no experience with the pre-digital age, it can be hard to understand just how scholarship was done before computers and the Internet, let alone appreciate its value or consider it as an alternative way to research. But just as acquiring information has never been easier, disseminating it is also just as simple. A sense of false credibility can be dangerous in scholarship.
The migration to the digital age seems to have benefitted all parties involved in research, including the library itself. Before the library went digital, an October 1974 article in the Sunday Herald Advertiser, for example, reported that one book in Berry Library ended up being overdue for 67 years. But looking back to an age of manual research further emphasizes the need to understand where information comes from. So the next time you're in the 1902 Room at 5 a.m. surfing Google so you can write a 10-page research paper in one night, try checking out a book. Who knows what you'll find?
