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Newsletter Fall 1996

The new University Librarian, Karin A. Trainer, has come home to the library where she began her career in 1970 as a descriptive catalogr. A vivacious and articulate woman, she is obviously delighted with the challenge of her new job. She is intrigued by the fact that she has so much in common with Ernest C. Richardson, who served as Librarian at the end of the 19th-century. Much more than a coincidence of timing is involved; as Ms Trainer says, "Exactly this time a century ago, the Princeton University Library was recast as a modern library." Richardson's innovations included extended hours, an overhaul of the way the Library provided bibliographic access, and a philosophy of service to readers that was unprecedented. His arrival signalled a new era, too, in the physical structure of the Library. The Pyne Library opened in 1897; it had been designed in accord with what were then considered scientific principles to provide the most efficient access for readers.

At the end of the 20th-century, Ms Trainer says, "the Library is again poised to recast itself as a modern library" in the new sense of the term. Much has changed, but Richardson's philosophy of service to readers remains the cornerstone of the physical and organizational structure. "The Library works very hard to make its extraordinarily rich holdings known to people on campus and throughout the world, and to put Library materials (books and artifacts) into the hands of our users," she says.

Just as in Richardson's time, libraries are changing radically. At the end of the 19th-century, for example, classification systems were being invented and reinvented (Richardson was a leader in that endeavor). Today, according to Karin Trainer, "we need to become more aggressive in harnessing technology to get information to users." A library that houses millions of books, manuscripts, and artifacts, with hundreds of special collections ranging from cuneiform tablets to the latest electronic journals, cannot operate efficiently even with a first-rate card catalog. Information must be made available by means of a variety of new systems, many of them unfamiliar to readers. "Because libraries have become so large and complicated to use," Ms Trainer says, "we need to step up our efforts to teach people on campus how best to take advantage of the Library's collections."

Karin Trainer is equally aware of the importance of the physical infrastructure that supports Library use. The collections must be housed in quarters that preserve them, of course, but just as important is "the need to offer well-designed space within our Library for our readers--space that fosters concentration and learning, and that allows the librarians to do the teaching they need to do" to make the collections fully accessible.

These are the tasks that define Ms Trainer's mission at Princeton, and she is well prepared to meet the challenges they pose. Earlier in her career, she was director of technical and automated services at New York University Libraries; at Yale University Library, where she was Associate University Librarian before coming to Princeton, she was responsible for keeping the system abreast of the latest developments in librarianship while dealing with the rapid growth of collections and readership, and this in the context of shrinking resources. She brings with her the insight and experience acquired elsewhere, and the ability to apply that knowledge to the rapidly changing conditions at Princeton.

She recognizes clearly, however, that Princeton is different. "One of the things that excites me about Princeton," she declares, "is the fact that the Library has for so long played an important role on campus, and one of the ways we measure that is by looking at circulation." With a proud smile, she produces the telling statistics: "The number of books and bound periodicals circulated at Princeton every year is the same as the number at the University of Michigan, where there are about 36,000 students. At Princeton, there are only about 6,500 undergraduate and graduate students. This shows that the contents of the Library are absolutely essential to a Princeton education."

And that, in Karin Trainer's eyes, is what makes the Library an exciting place to be.

Papyri at Princeton

For Members Only

Graphic Arts and Books for Children

As head of the Visual Materials Division, of which Graphic Arts is a part, John is responsible for the coordination and preservation of the non-book, non-manuscript collections, mostly illustrated books, prints, and drawings, and for facilitating access to them. His special interest, of course, is in the graphic arts, which document ways in which meaning is communicated by images, especially by the juxtaposition of image and text. In an article he published in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society in 1988, John found an ideal example of the importance of that juxtaposition. The article focused on the history of the image of the Declaration of Independence as it was transmitted in facsimile early in the 19th-century. "I got interested in this," he says, "because the text is important, and yet it was the image of the text that fascinated Americans of the 1820s and 1830s. They didn't want a reprint; they wanted to see the actual handwriting and signatures of American Founding Fathers. I still get phone calls," he reports, "from Declaration of Independence fanatics who collect these facsimiles, some of which are now very expensive."

Andrea Immel is overseeing the transfer of the Cotsen Children's Library to Princeton--some 23,000 items. Why should the Library be interested in a collection of books for children? Andrea approaches the answer from the perspective of a historian who is interested in making connections between a text and the circumstances of the time in which it was written. "Social and cultural historians have yet to mine children's books as source material," she says. "What children read can provide invaluable clues to the kinds of values a generation is picking up."

Nursery rhymes, which have circulated orally and in print for several centuries, are an example of the problems that children's books can pose. "I can't think of a single 18th-century writer on childrearing or education who would have agreed with modern arguments in favor of traditional nonsense poetry," Andrea says. "They associated rhymes with the rabble on the street, itinerant entertainers, and ignorant servants. Enlightened people of that period thought children ought not be allowed to learn them."

Andrea confesses that she, too, has difficulty with the question of what children should be encouraged to read: her eight-year-old daughter, Claire, has strong opinions about what she likes, and knows too well how to resist her mother's attempts to select books for her. Her father has no better luck; Claire does not limit her acquisitions to beautifully printed and illustrated books, as John Bidwell encourages her to do. John and Andrea are husband and wife, and the Library is as fortunate as Claire in having them on hand to make us aware of the delights of bookish lives.

The Friends' Calendar

Exhibitions in Firestone Library

"'Out of Tensions, Progress': Princeton as University." The exhibition will remain on view through 12 January 1997. Main Exhibition Gallery, Firestone Library.

Main Gallery and Milberg Gallery hours: Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. until 5 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, Noon until 5 p.m.

Exhibitions in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library

Mudd Library hours: Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. until 5 p.m.

Events

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