I just saw the special issue on “Entangled Temporalities” from the Journal of the History of Knowledge (open access: check it out here!) and was particularly taken by Hansun Hsiung’s “Complete, Accessible, Now: What is Living and What is Dead in the Research Library” which deals with the history of academic library collections in the United States, particularly the “crisis” faced by Harvard and other major research universities during the late 19th century, as the number of scholarly books and journals being collected by academic librarians began to outweigh the campus spaces designed to hold them.
This, of course, is a problem well-discussed in the LIS literature (though I was surprised to see no mention in Hsiung’s piece of Yale historian of science Derek de Solla Price’s seminal work on research obsolescence as shown by journal article citations— he has been far more influential on the field than the fulminations of any university president, not excluding Harvard President Charles Eliot’s 1902 intentions to “destroy the books now considered worthless” in order to keep the Harvard library’s budget in check as described by Hsiung.) The piece also mentions the issue of library deselection, though I am not sure that academic librarians are as influenced by public library weeding policies as he seems to believe. (See my “The Pragmatics of Weeding” for an explanation of how public library collection policies have changed during the same time period that Hsiung discusses for academic libraries.)
Hsiung goes on to review the academic library’s twin goals of access to and completeness of its collections, the debates over the value of open stacks browsing, and the varieties of technologies (off-site storage, academic library consortia, electronic systems) that have been put in place to achieve these goals, referring to a shift from “accumulative completeness” to “communicative completeness” over the past decades. (Though, again, he omits any mention of such initiatives as the RLG Conspectus project, which would add a bit more depth to the history of “accumulative completeness” for major American research libraries.)
He concludes, “We might thus wish to ask: how has the now-ness of virtual access altered temporalities of relevance and obsolescence, not only in individual disciplines, but across those disciplinary entanglements once deemed so essential for the emergence of unexpected research? What are the epistemic consequences of browsing through “miscellaneous” keyword searches across dispersed collections, rather than browsing as a practice that occurs in single well-classified collections?”
Speaking as someone who relishes those “disciplinary entanglements,” I would argue that “miscellaneous” keyword searches across dispersed collections can be highly productive. At least, they have been for me (and helped me to discover this particular piece!)
I would also note that there are still academic libraries throughout the world in which “accumulative completeness” [at least for certain subjects] remains a desirable goal, as they are unable to construct the type of consortia or electronic infrastructure now common in the United States, and “communicative completeness” is a very distant vision for them. It would be fascinating to know whether university presidents in these situations distinguish between the “living” and “dead” books in their libraries as did Elliot in 1902.
Keywords In and Out of Context 