An Interview with Terry Belanger of the Rare Book School,
Recipient of $500,000 MacArthur Award
- By Michael Stillman
Terry Belanger of the Rare Book School
By Mike Stillman
Money talks. When he was awarded one of the $500,000 MacArthur Foundation awards, Terry Belanger's name suddenly was heard by all kinds of people with little connection to the world of rare books. Of course, Mr. Belanger was already quite familiar to those deeply involved in the collecting and trading of rare and antiquarian titles. As Director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, there is probably no one more knowledgeable in the field today. Still, just as there is likely no ABAA member or rare book librarian who does not know or know of Mr. Belanger, there must be 10,000 Abebooks and eBay dealers who do not. For them, half a million dollars served as an introduction.
Mr. Belanger received his award for the work he has done in education, for the history of books and printing, rare book librarianship, and antiquarian bookselling. The Rare Book School he heads up is the premier training grounds for those who will continue this mission in the years ahead. However, he is quick to look at the award as recognition of the importance of what he does, not some sort of personal honor. In a sense, this is an award in which all of us who are in some way connected to the preservation of old books share. It is recognition that antiquarian books are more than quaint relics of the past, but a part of who we are, worthy of our efforts at preservation. Of course, only Mr. Belanger gets to spend the money, but spiritually we all share in the prize.
Being named a MacArthur Fellow provided the perfect segue to an interview with Mr. Belanger. Despite being a specialist in things antiquarian, Terry Belanger is equally expert on the issues of today, many of which arise out of the huge technological advances of the past two decades. We asked about current issues and concerns, such as online bookselling, digitization of books, and the role of rare book libraries in a rapidly changing environment. Some of his answers may surprise you. All are worth hearing because, no slight intended, he almost surely knows more about this field than either you or I.
First, for those still unfamiliar, here is a brief account of the Rare Book School and its director. Terry Belanger established the Book Arts Press at Columbia University in 1971, and was serving as Assistant Dean in its School of Library Service in 1983 when he started the Rare Book School. Columbia was considering closing its School of Library Service. The Rare Book School offered an opportunity for Columbia's school to reach and educate others who could not participate in the degree program, providing added justification for keeping the library program alive. The RBS succeeded in educating many times as many students as was possible through the limited access degree program.
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An Interview with Terry Belanger of the Rare Book School,
Recipient of $500,000 MacArthur Award
- By Michael Stillman
none
Columbia did choose to close its School of Library Service a decade later. However, the Rare Book School did not choose to join the library school in shuttering its doors. Mr. Belanger simply up and moved it to Virginia. The University of Virginia offered him an appointment as a University Professor, an interdisciplinary post without fixed responsibilities. It allowed him to reopen the Rare Book School as an officially unaffiliated school in Charlottesville (a formal relationship with the University which will still afford the Rare Book School its independence is expected later this year). Meanwhile, the school continues to thrive and grow. It now offers courses in Baltimore, Washington and its old hometown of New York, along with Charlottesville. Additionally, it has helped to set up similar schools in France, New Zealand and Australia, with another scheduled to open on the U.S. west coast in Los Angeles in 2006.
The MacArthur Fellowships, one of which Mr. Belanger received, represent an unusual type of award. Funded by the independent MacArthur Foundation, you cannot apply for them, and there are no demands that come with them. An anonymous panel of experts chooses individuals who show exceptional creativity across many fields of work, from sciences to humanities to artistic fields and more. Their intention is to facilitate the recipients' achievements in the future, rather than being a reward for past accomplishments. However, it is a no-strings-attached award. Like other recipients, Terry Belanger has complete discretion to decide how the award can best be used.
We asked Mr. Belanger how the award would assist the Rare Book School in reaching its goals. He responded that it will help in several ways. First, some of the award will go directly towards the RBS' endowment. Currently, the school is completing the "quiet" stage of a fund drive to increase the school's endowment by $2 million, with more than half of this amount raised already. Secondly, Mr. Belanger is hopeful that the award and the scholarship it acknowledges will help the school obtain a hearing with foundations and individuals when they ask for contributions toward the endowment. Additionally, these funds will be used to eliminate debts in the operating budget, fund various program expansions, and fund the endowment campaign. The latter means that 100% of money raised during the campaign will go to fund the endowment. None will be used to fund overhead of the campaign itself.
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An Interview with Terry Belanger of the Rare Book School,
Recipient of $500,000 MacArthur Award
- By Michael Stillman
none
We turned to the topic of bookselling, in particular, the impact of the internet bookselling sites and eBay, half expecting a lament for the good old days when personal relationships dominated the field. Terry Belanger is too practical for that. The RBS is itself a buyer of books. Obtaining the best prices, indeed finding the books at all, are more important to the school than nostalgia. While the RBS may study books of very great value, the books it buys are more often reference works, not enormously valuable, but nonetheless rather obscure and hard to find. Here is where Mr. Belanger feels the internet has made its major impact. He distinguishes between less expensive material and the highly valuable rare and antiquarian books priced at the $1,000 and up level, where the changes have been less significant.
"Change has certainly come in the markets for less expensive books," the RBS Director explains. "At RBS, we buy books all the time both via eBay and via the sites collected by bookfinder.com. Indeed, we buy more than we've ever bought before because it's now so easy to do so. Here's a case in point.
"RBS has a very good open-shelf reference collection of modern books on the subjects treated in our courses. Last year, Mark Dimunation of the Library of Congress called it the best such collection in North America. Before the mid-1990s, the books in the various sections of this collection were assembled piecemeal, sometimes over a long period of time, while I trudged from bookshop to bookshop carrying lists and looking for the titles we needed in Binding, Collecting and the Book Trade, History of Printing and Publishing, Illustration, Letterforms, Papermaking, and Typography.
"In the late 1990s, I invited Roger Wieck, Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan Library, to teach at RBS. University of Virginia's medieval manuscript collections are not strong, I had to admit, but I could tell him that at RBS we had recently assembled an excellent reference collection on his subject. We compiled a list of several hundred desirable titles, went after them via bookfinder.com, and $20,000 and three months later, had acquired virtually all of them. It would have taken us a decade or more to do the same thing before internet bookselling came along.
"Admittedly, it's increasingly hard to find knowledgeable used/academic/scholarly booksellers with open shops like George Allen (William H. Allen) in Philadelphia, or Bill Wreden (William P. Wreden) in Palo Alto. And that's a great loss. But I'm not sure how much internet sales have affected the sale of expensive old and rare books, especially those in the four-figure and higher range. The ABAA seems to be growing, not shrinking."
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An Interview with Terry Belanger of the Rare Book School,
Recipient of $500,000 MacArthur Award
- By Michael Stillman
none
Next we asked about the digitization of books. Digitization promises to make the contents of millions of old books, once available only to those with access to rare book collections, accessible to everyone. However, some librarians are concerned their hard copies of books may be considered irrelevant, and ultimately, perhaps they will be so deemed as well. Technology can be totally disruptive to the worlds we find familiar. As someone who appreciates the physical book as much as its contents, and who works with librarians regularly, you might expect Terry Belanger would not approve. If so, you would again be wrong. He very much favors the process, but with the caveat it should be in addition to, not in replacement of, the original formats.
Asked about digitization, Mr. Belanger describes it as "an enormous plus. The goal of providing the widest possible access to materials new and old is and has been at the heart of American librarianship for more than 150 years."
Still, he goes on to say, "In our enthusiasm for digitization, however, we must be careful not to throw out the baby along with the bathwater. Substitutional formats are just that, and we need to ensure that future generations continue to have access to the original materials, even after they have been put into electronic form. We have no business handing posterity photographs or photostats or microfilms or CDs or computer files of the complete run of, say, the New York Times, with the explanation that any of these formats has relieved us of the burden of preserving original copies. Every generation needs its own songs; every generation needs its own originals.
"This being said, I'm not sure we need to preserve as physical artifacts all of the several hundred runs of the George Smith/Thackeray Cornhill Magazine that currently exist in American libraries. We need to work out a national plan for the long-term survival of a reasonable number of original copies in their original format, advertisements and all."
A reasonable enough proposal, though we suspect he may have stepped on at least a small hornet's nest in library circles by suggesting a cooperative national plan for preserving antiquarian publications which hints that some copies might be superfluous. Mr. Belanger declined to take sides in another controversy now swirling around digitization: the dispute between Google and copyright holders over digital copying of old, out-of-print books that are still under copyright protection. Google would like to make such books digitally available, while some of those holding copyrights are vehemently opposed, even if the books are long since out of print. Says Mr. Belanger, "I'm just a tourist on this one."
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An Interview with Terry Belanger of the Rare Book School,
Recipient of $500,000 MacArthur Award
- By Michael Stillman
none
We then asked Mr. Belanger outright whether he considered digitization a threat to rare book libraries. This is not a new topic, as he has been addressing the issue for the past couple of decades. He sees this as a balance between the need to preserve original materials, the need to make their contents available to as many people as possible, and the reality that the local funding needed to support collections in rare book libraries is, in many cases, drying up. Digitization means, in the eyes of some institutions and contributors, less need to fund rare book collections. Mr. Belanger explains, "Perhaps the single greatest challenge rare book libraries have always faced is that their holdings, however important a part of the world's cultural patrimony, must almost always be supported locally. Throughout much of the twentieth century, American university research libraries were typically housed within institutions with ambitions to grow and improve themselves. The argument, 'our library is bigger than your library,' could be - and indeed was - used in much the same way as the argument 'our football stadium is bigger than your football stadium' was used; and research and rare book operations had a lot of support at the local level.
"The digitization of original research materials is changing the rules. Now, it's the number of online services a library subscribes to that's more likely to be the selling point, rather than simply the number of books the library owns. The scene began to alter significantly in the 1980s; by the 1990s, most American rare book and special collections were growing faster than their staffs, a situation that has continued and worsened in recent years. When measured against the growing size of collections, institutional support for rare book libraries is declining.
"I don't know that rare book libraries will change significantly what they do. They will continue to try to preserve original materials and make them accessible, just as they've always done. Their strong current emphasis, reasonably enough, is on making original materials more accessible through digitization. But be that as it may, collectively speaking, rare book libraries are not thereby absolved of their responsibility for the physical care of the original materials in their possession." He concludes, realistically and, undoubtedly, prophetically, "It's going to be tough."
As we said, this is not the first time Terry Belanger has spoken about the changes that electronic copies would bring to libraries. In 1991, he gave the Malkin lecture (still at Columbia then) on the topic of "the future of rare book libraries," and his words were as predictive as they were blunt. At the time he said, "I am convinced that rare book libraries both in the United States and worldwide are in fact at the beginning of a succession of cataclysmic transformations. The most important of these changes will be caused by the increasing disinclination of most general research libraries over the next several decades to continue to maintain large, permanent collections of paper-based books of any sort, rare or non-rare."
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An Interview with Terry Belanger of the Rare Book School,
Recipient of $500,000 MacArthur Award
- By Michael Stillman
none
He went on to say, "In the future, readers are increasingly going to have direct online access to electronic text and data files containing the materials they require; and increasingly, they will perceive that they do not ever need and do not ever want access in printed form to the bulk of this material - a circumstance already routinely the case with users of large online databases." And, in anticipation of what Google and others are doing fourteen years later, he comments, "It seems inevitable that soon enough the texts of practically everything that anybody is interested in, new or old, poetry or prose, popular or arcane, boring or interesting, English or Sanskrit, is going to be available online... He cautioned that the institutions that house rare book libraries would become less interested in storing massive amounts of paper, or as serving, in effect, as museums. Today, that locomotive of change he predicted, which was just starting to climb the mountain in 1991, appears to have reached the crest and is poised to accelerate full speed down the other side. Rare book libraries will need to justify their roles to administrators who are short on money and may not fully appreciate what they do. No wonder Mr. Belanger today says, "It's going to be tough."
Finally we asked about the recent spate of book and map thefts from rare book libraries. Would this force a change in the way they conduct their business? Interestingly, Mr. Belanger didn't think there was an increase at all. In fact, despite the recent high level of publicity, he feels that theft is actually decreasing. "Theft has been a problem in rare book and reference libraries ever since they first opened their doors," says Mr. Belanger, "and I have no sense - pace the recent map thefts, nasty as they are - that the rate of theft is increasing. I think, in fact, that the theft of valuable materials at major institutions is decreasing, in considerable part at least thanks to TV surveillance and the now routine practice of creating video records of rare book room activity.
"The Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS, the folks who do the annual pre-conference) of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL, a division of the American Library Association) has been working with the ABAA for decades in setting up reporting systems for stolen material, and several international reporting systems are now also in place. We're still losing a lot of material out of circulating stacks, and we need to do much better in restricting unsupervised access to materials with, um, eBay sales potential."
For those interested in learning more about the Rare Book School, their web address is www.virginia.edu/oldbooks. Courses are available year around, with many conveniently held during the summer months. One-week concentrated courses are offered so those with full-time jobs can still attend.
For those interested in Mr. Belanger's most prophetic 1991 Malkin lecture, you may find it online at http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/exlibris/1991/12/msg00116.html. Anyone involved with rare book libraries who missed it the first time should read it now, as the issues are even more urgent today than when the address was first delivered.
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