A Bancroft Library for the 21st Century
In Bancroftiana, n. 120 (Spring 2002), I sketched out our plans to renovate and expand the Doe Annex, the building that houses Bancroft. Here I would like to explain in more detail the kinds of programs and activities that such an expanded and renovated building would allow.
We start from the fact that Bancroft stands at the very heart of the Berkeley campus, in the middle of one of the richest assemblages of academic talent in the world, physically within several hundred yards of the English Department, the School of Library and Information Studies, the Center for Studies in Higher Education, the Department of History and the various departments of foreign languages, the Department of Philosophy and the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Department of Physics, the Colleges of Chemistry and Engineering . . .
Since I began my term as director of Bancroft in 1995, I have always wanted both to tap this collection of academic talent for its expertise in helping Bancroft decide what to collect as well as offer to it the riches already lining our shelves, the riches of almost 150 years of sustained collecting effort, beginning with Hubert Howe Bancroft in 1860.
Bancroft already collaborates actively with faculty from many of these colleges and departments. Over 35 faculty members serve on various Bancroft faculty advisory committees; and last year faculty from fifteen different departments worked with curators to bring students into Bancroft, either for a single class or for an entire semester. In an hour class some fifteen or twenty different items might be examined, to start to give the students some insight into the different kinds of primary sources we have—letters, diaries, photographs, archival collections, newspapers, and a rich assortment of graphics materials (oil paintings, watercolors, woodcuts, engravings, lithographs, etchings)—and how to analyze them. In a semester-long class we can lay out systematically the resources in Bancroft for the exploration of a given field. In my case, for example, I have used Bancroft's superb collection of manuscripts from Spain and Spanish America, ranging from the 11th century to the 18th, to teach graduate students paleography (how to read the very difficult scribal hands of the period and use them to date undated manuscripts), codicology (how to analyze the physical characteristics of manuscripts), and textual criticism (how to compare differing versions of a text in order to establish the most authoritative version). My colleagues Joe Duggan and Jennifer Miller teach similar courses for the Departments of Comparative Literature and English respectively; while Carla Hess in the Department of History focuses on the history of the book in 18th century France.
In many respects, however, these kinds of collaborations, however useful, are almost serendipitous, the result of a chance encounter between a Bancroft staff member and a faculty member, although sometimes such relationships go back many years; and they have now been considerably strengthened by the contacts with the faculty advisory committees.
But what if we tried systematically to foster such collaborations between Bancroft staff, faculty, and students, both for instruction and research? Why couldn't Bancroft become the nucleus of a group of faculty with common research and instructional interests in the history of the book, for example, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century? We have the books and the scholars who know how to use them. What we lack is space, seminar rooms where students and faculty working on long- or short-term research projects could gather their secondary source materials together and have ready access to Bancroft's primary source materials.
While Bancroft's collections, amazingly deep, broad, and varied, have been the primary source of its world-wide reputation, it has been a challenge to provide access worthy of those collections in the existing facility. A renovated and expanded Bancroft, by allowing us to integrate research and teaching into the warp and woof of Bancroft programs, would turn Bancroft into one of the intellectual centers of the Berkeley campus, just as it is today the physical center. We can create a national, indeed, an international, model of the special collections library as a laboratory for researchers, faculty, and students in the humanities and qualitative social sciences.
I mentioned in my last column that Bancroft already has three strong research programs that could serve as nuclei and models for the vision I have sketched here: The Regional Oral History Office, the Mark Twain Project, and the Tebtunis Papyri Project. With adequate space, each of these could begin to develop joint research and teaching projects with other academic programs on campus. Bancroft could then also contemplate serving as a home for other programs on campus that have close ties with our collections, such as the Center for California Studies, the Emma Goldman Papers, the University History Project of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, or the long-contemplated program in the history of the book mentioned above.
As I write this, we are planning a survey of major donors, people and organizations who have already demonstrated their interest in Bancroft, to gauge the potential for raising sufficient external funding to create a Bancroft Library for the 21st century.
Volume 121
Fall 2002
Table of Contents
The Wasp: Stinging Editorials and Political Cartoons
From the Director: A Bancroft Library for the 21st Century
Imagining Women's Work Bancroft Collections Contribute to Web-based Visual Culture
Undergraduate Research: A Brave New World
Fifty-Five and Counting! The Friends Annual Meeting, April 27, 2002
Scholars in the Making Graduate Student Instructors and History 101
"Permission to Drink Anything" Mark Twain's Letters to Eduard Pötzl
From the Regional Oral History Office Berkeley Anthropologists Have Their Say
The Bancroft Library Study Awards
William Penn Mott, Jr. Papers A Celebration
Email Farewell from a Graduating Student Employee
Donors to The Bancroft Library July 1, 2001 through June 30, 2002
