From the Director: Just what is it that you do, exactly?
Most people are too polite to ask, but I’m sure it’s in the back of their minds when they first meet me. And I’m also sure that their idea of what the director of a special collections library does is much like mine was before I actually came to Bancroft: surrounded by medieval manuscripts and rare books, negotiating with book dealers and private collectors, spending quiet hours helping to catalog Bancroft’s treasures.
For someone who had just spent five years as chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, worrying about whether we could replace senior faculty who had taken early retirement or if the Temporary Academic Staff Budget could be stretched to squeeze out another section of beginning Spanish, Bancroft’s Olympian doors looked very appealing.
It didn’t take me long to learn that the reality is very different. Like any manager, I spend most of my time in meetings, writing letters, on the telephone, and, now, answering e-mail.
Nevertheless, the endless variety of subjects with which I deal does lend a special flavor to my days in Bancroft.
To give some idea of that flavor, I’d like to take you through a fairly typical day — Tuesday, Sept. 29, 1998, about a month after fall classes started.
8:30 a.m. I meet with Wendy Hanson,director of the annual campaign in the Library Development Office, to choose artwork for our holiday greeting and note cards.
8:50 a.m. I begin to return telephone messages that came in the previous afternoon while I was teaching my undergraduate seminar on the Literature of Love in Medieval Spain.
The first call goes to a major donor who has agreed to fund the position of a supervising archivist for three years, at a cost of $50,000 per year, to help us clear up our backlog of unprocessed manuscript collections.
Next I talk to a specialist in distance education in Waco, Texas, who has called to inquire about our experiences in setting up the joint Berkeley-Columbia medieval studies seminar using the Bancroft-Columbia Digital Scriptorium project (see the Spring 1998 Bancroftiana).
9:20 a.m. I call Stanley Cohen, professor of genetics at Stanford and co-discoverer, with UCSF professor Herbert Boyer, of recombinant DNA technology, to invite him to participate in a symposium on “Biotechnology at 25: History, Science, and Society” (see page 1). He accepts, persuaded, I think, by the fact that James Watson, Nobel laureate for the discovery of DNA, will give the keynote address.
9:45 a.m. Louise Braunschweiger, director of the Library Development Office, comes to discuss strategies for approaching a potential donor who has expressed interest in setting up an endowment fund for Bancroft.
10 a.m. I begin my two-hour shift on the Reference Desk, bringing with me invitations to a Friends function to address. Between queries from patrons I start to work my way through the 68 e-mail messages that have accumulated since yesterday.
Among my queries at the desk: the superintendent of the Sutro Tunnel in 1860, the corruption trial of Eugene Schmitz (mayor of San Francisco in 1906), areas of San Francisco devastated by the 1906 earthquake and fire, permission to publish photographs of Berkeley’s Haviland Hall and physicist Edward Teller, and the correspondence of former Bancroft director George Hammond.
Noon: I hand over the Reference Desk to Teri Rinne, head of public services, giving her a quick run-down on the patrons in the Reading Room and the sorts of materials they are seeking.
12:15 p.m. I meet Harrison Fraker, Dean of the College of Environmental Design, over lunch at the Women’s Faculty Club, to discuss establishing a course on typography, funding for a curatorship of CED’s enormous collection of architectural drawings and blueprints by Bay Area architects, and the reintegration as a single collection of the landscape architecture library donated to the campus by Beatrix Farrand in 1959 and misguidedly dispersed in the main stacks, Bancroft, and various branch libraries.
1:25 p.m. I begin to draft a letter to Jean Ashton, director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia, concerning the Digital Scriptorium Project.
1:45 p.m. I take a visitor from Uruguay on a short tour of Bancroft.
2:30 p.m. Willa Baum, head of the Regional Oral History Office, comes down to discuss the possibility of organizing a 45th anniversary celebration for ROHO. We also discuss a possible oral history series on grassroots environmentalism and fundraising for the transcription of interviews with long-time Italian- American residents of San Francisco’s North Beach.
3:15 p.m. I take a call from Jean Ashton about setting up a Digital Scriptorium meeting in New York. I want to combine it with a November trip to Madrid, where I will present the project to the Consortium of European Research Libraries.
4:00 p.m. Tony Bliss, curator of rare books and literary manuscripts, shows me a copy of the Histoire de Jean de Calais, offered to us as an unusually fine 18th-c. French chapbook. He will return it to the dealer, since it is almost certainly a modern facsimile (a polite word for fake).
4:25 p.m. Mary Morganti, head of manuscript processing, stops by to discuss procedures for hiring the supervising archivist funded by the donor with whom I had spoken that morning.
4:45 p.m. Stephen Black, head of acquisitions, drops off the week’s invoices for my approval. Among the purchases are A Catalogue of the very valuable library of Phillip Carteret Webb (London, 1771), Histoire de la belle Helaine de Constantinople (Caen, n.d.), Dagger at your Heart by the late Beat poet Jack Micheline, and William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell, the latest production of San Francisco’s Arion Press.
5:00 p.m. With the staff out of the way, with the exception of Bancroft deputy director Peter Hanff, I hack away at my email. I forward to Bancroft’s managers a request to fill out a survey of student library employees.
Other messages come from a former doctoral student seeking job-hunting advice, a colleague in Spain interested in our experiences creating electronic finding aids, an invitation from Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Affairs Genaro Padilla to attend a student-faculty dinner, and a request from a Spanish department colleague to find a venue for an exhibition sponsored by the Spanish consulate on the 100th anniversary of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca.
I spend a few minutes with Peter, bringing him up-to-date on the day’s events.
7:00 p.m. I turn out the lights and check the staff roster to see whether I’m the last one in the building. I’m not; Jack von Euw, curator of the pictorial collections, is still at work.
It’s fascinating and exhausting, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Volume 114
Spring 1999
Table of Contents
Bancroft Launches Bioscience Program with Stellar Symposium March 12–13
From the Director: Just what is it that you do, exactly?
The Business of the Humanities The “Trade”— what it is and how Bancroft uses it
The Thrill of the Chase Or, How the Biography of Poet Jack Spicer Came To Be
“The Times, They Are a’ Changin’” Bancroft Launches Free Speech Movement Archive
The Many Uses of Bancroft Collections
Joseph Esherick’s Oral History Illuminates an Architectural Icon
Where Do You “Find” Mark Twain’s Letters?
1999’s Keepsake: San Francisco in the Early 1850s
Bancroft Fellows Research Women and Space, Tobacco and Chocolate
