The Library and Memory

Friends of the Amherst College Library Newsletter, 31 (2004-2005): 4-5.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Armand E. Singer ‘35, professor emeritus of foreign languages at West Virginia University.  Professor Singer may not be the oldest living former library student assistant, but he is surely the most overworked, having regularly toiled 70 hours per week at the Converse Library for Kimball Morsman and E. Porter Dickinson.  He would eat, he told a group of fascinated library staff, standing up, so as not to be docked pay for taking a break.  However, in addition to remembering the hard work for little pay, “the Library,” he told us, “was a huge piece of my intellectual life.”

Thirty-five years later, African American students from Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke and the University of Massachusetts staged a takeover of Amherst College buildings – College Hall, Converse Hall, and the Robert Frost Library.  The library held a central place in these students’ symbolic representation of the academy.  By chaining and locking the library doors, they took control of the most material embodiment of the intellectual assets of the society in which they lived.

One of those students was Horace Porter ‘72, now professor of English at the University of Iowa.  In 1968, he was brand new at Amherst, the first member of his Columbus, Georgia, family to graduate from high school, one of the few African American students at Amherst.  Later he remembered retreating to the “quiet and comfort” of the Robert Frost Library after trips home to “the world from which [he] came.”  To Porter the library may have been a symbol of the college’s complicity with racist society, but it was a refuge nonetheless.

That idea of libraries as a place of academic refuge, of peaceful sanctuary, recurs, as do memories of the library as a place of transformation, where serendipity opened eyes, questions led to knowledge, or discovery catalyzed learning.  Students remember learning that they were not, after all, alone in the world because of some self-perceived difference.  They remember the power of touching an original document, words Emily Dickinson wrote on a scrap of paper torn from an envelope, or the bill of sale for a slave.  As Lee Levison ‘77 does, they remember the specific moment when they pulled a particular book from the stacks and discovered “something so powerful as to awaken a dormant passion.”

These memories give us clues to our fundamental role.  We think of libraries as existing to collect, organize, and provide access to information, primarily in support of the curriculum.  Our true role, however, lies in our power to change lives, and the task we face in 2005 is to discover how to maintain and strengthen our ability to fulfill this role as libraries, and information, and higher education itself change to meet the needs of the next generations of young people, the so-called “N” generation and beyond.

Jim Dator, Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, includes among his laws of the future, “Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous.”  Indeed, perhaps it would have seemed ridiculous to many of us if in 1985 we had heard predictions that in 20 years overstuffed armchairs, incandescent lighting, and coffee shops would be the trend in academic libraries.  In 1985, we were beginning to hear that the library of the future would not be a place at all, that the role of librarians would be transcended by technology, that all information would be virtual.

The reality is that in 2005 one of the most acclaimed buildings of the (admittedly very new) century is Seattle’s Central Public Library; that academic libraries across the country are adding space not just for study and collaboration, but also for physical collections; that undergraduates are clamoring for 24-hour library service and access to more technology, more services, and more specialized resources.  It is true that as a group N-geners – born between 1980 and 1995 -- are accustomed to multiple information streams and their facility with technology means they are capable of working any time, anywhere.  They have spent their lives in an interactive, collaborative environment, and we know that the places to which they gravitate are those that support such a learning style.

For several years, staff at the Amherst College Library have been working to develop within our existing facilities a physical atmosphere tailored to the work- and lifestyles of the N-generation, and through our own investigations and those of our colleagues, we know quite a lot about what works.  This is an ongoing process -- there are projects in process this summer and others that we will pursue.

However, the existing facility imposes significant limitations, and we have given much less attention to two other factors that represent recurrent themes in student memories of library experience – collections and staff.  We have continued to build extraordinarily rich collections, but know only a little about how to catalyze student connection with and use of those collections.  We have an exceptionally committed and creative staff, but know even less about how to foster the kind of transformative interactions we know are possible.

During the last academic year, the Library developed a report to the Committee on Academic Priorities (CAP), the college committee charged by the President with responsibility for deliberating with the campus community to develop proposals to meet the academic needs of Amherst College over the next decade and beyond.  The President requested that, in addition to submitting a report to the CAP, the Library undertake a separate long-range planning process, focused on the possibility of renovation and expansion of the Frost Library.  The library staff began planning this summer, and in the fall a committee comprised of faculty, administrators and students will join us.

Our plan is to engage the Amherst community – and the Friends of the Library are a vital part of that community -- in a semester-long series of discussions involving leaders in education, scholarship, publishing, organizational theory, and the intersection of society and technology, drawing on their energy and expertise as we try to imagine what lies in the future for scholarship and publishing, for teaching and learning.  Our ultimate goal will be to conceive a future in which student memories continue to be enriched by the Library’s role as a place of sanctuary and a place of transformation.

References

“Reflections of a Black Son,” Change, May-June 1994, v.26, p.22 (first printed in February 1977).

Levison is headmaster of Kingswood-Oxford School in Hartford, Connecticut. The quote is from personal correspondence, Lee Levison to Daria D’Arienzo, July 7, 2005.

Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/, updated 5 July 2005, accessed 12 July 2005.