College and Research Libraries University Library Branches Abroad By E L I Z A B E T H D. C O N F E R IN C O L O N I A L times American college li-braries depended largely upon a flow of books from Europe. Many of their shelves were filled with volumes brought back by professors who had studied abroad or were donated by benefactors who had traveled in the old continent. While colonial librarians may have antic- ipated that a current in the opposite direction would be stimulated when Eu- ropean libraries began to find it worth while to acquire books published in the New World, it is unlikely that they fore- saw that American college library re- sources for actual use by American stu- dents in American reading rooms would eventually cross the Atlantic. T h i s has happened now on a small but mounting scale. It takes the form of the library of a university branch abroad, and it poses for the parent university library some new and not easily solvable problems in respect to the acquisition, service, and protection of overseas collections. These libraries are part of instruc- tional branches that American universi- ties have begun to set up in other lands during the last five years. Formerly there were only two choices open to students who sought some kind of formal study outside of their country: to enroll in a foreign university, or to join one of the junior-year-abroad programs offered by a number of American colleges and uni- versities. Both alternatives demanded a greater previous knowledge of a foreign language than most students possessed. T h e new program, giving instruction in English except for the required language course, offers an opportunity to larger numbers if they want four to six months of experience in a foreign country and J A N U A R Y 1 9 6 2 Mrs. Confer is Bibliographer, Syracuse University Library. She served as library con- sultant to the Syracuse-Semester-in-Italy in 1959-60. are willing to learn, after arrival, the language of the country of their choice. It provides fully recognized American course credit without interruption of normal academic progress toward an American degree. T h i s trend toward the branch abroad has begun to attract serious surveys and evaluations. J o h n Garrety and Walter Adams, in their From Main Street to the Left Bank} recognize the problem of having books available for students re- ceiving instruction in English. But they mention it only in terms of the use of an already-established foreign university li- brary. T h i s article is concerned with the idea of a new American university library overseas which supplements a curriculum approximating that which the student would have taken on the home campus (with emphasis, of course, upon the cul- ture and history of the native locale). T h e author was library consultant to the Syracuse Semester-in-Italy from May 1959 until the end of J u n e 1960. T h e last four months of the period were spent in Florence at the scene of the operation. Later a visit was made to the library of the Stanford branch at Beutelsbach near Stuttgart, the only Stanford branch which had been opened at that time. Since then, Stanford has established branches in Tours, France, and Fiesole, 1 John Garrety and Walter Adams, From Main Street to the Left Bank (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1959). 41 Italy. Syracuse now has a branch in Guatamala as well. Most new and experimental academic programs are conducted within a narrow budget. T h e overseas branch is no ex- ception. Furthermore, it is affected by the necessarily small scale of the enter- prise. Enrollments are usually restricted to under a hundred students by such factors as housing problems, limited course offerings, and the somewhat greater financial burden to be borne by the stu- dent or his parents. For the overseas library this means that the collection will probably begin with only three or four hundred books, comprising general reference works and the four or five sub- ject fields in which courses will be taught. In most cases, this is perhaps too small a collection to be considered a branch of the main library in the customary on- campus sense. In most cases also, the budget of the overseas project will not allow the employment of a full-time trained librarian in the foreign center. T h i s may leave the library something of an orphan. Its books will probably be purchased out of the budget of the over- seas branch, not from the general library budget. And it probably will have access only occasionally to professional advice and on-the-spot supervision. B O O K S E L E C T I O N T h e book selection in the four sub- jects offered by the Syracuse Semester-in- Italy (fine arts, history, Italian, and po- litical science) was made by the professor teaching each course and the director of the program. A few books for leisure reading were chosen; some of these were purchased and some were duplicate cop- ies from the home library. T h e presence in Florence of two libraries with books in English—the British Institute and the USIS library—influenced the selection of reference materials. Since the students would have access to these established collections, the Syracuse branch refer- ence collection did not need to be as ex- tensive as the one at the Stanford branch at Beutelsbach, which is a number of miles from a large city. But it did include Webster's New International Dictionary and Spinelli's Dizionario Italiano e Ing- lese e Viceversa; The Columbia Ency- clopedia and The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences; The World Almanac and The Statesman's Yearbook; and Muir's Historical Atlas. T h e British Institute was also a helpful source for additional books needed for the study of all the subjects except Italian. While American students could use the USIS library free of charge, a modest group fee was re- quired by the British Institute. Both li- braries offered good periodical collections from their respective countries. T h e Syracuse-in-Italy library placed subscrip- tions for two Italian newspapers, La Stampa and II Tempo; the European edition of the Sunday New York Times, L e Monde, and the Manchester Guardian Weekly, II Ponte, an Italian quarterly published in Florence, and The Italian Quarterly (Berkeley). T h e bulk of the new collection (about three hundred titles) was purchased in the United States, gathered in one place, and sent in the ship which took the first group of thirty students (now grown to sixty) and the faculty to Italy in August 1959. In many instances paperback edi- tions were chosen to save money in pur- chase and shipping costs. More recently additional acquisitions have been made with books bought in Florence or or- dered from England and the United States. A few gifts from people inter- ested in the program have come in. T h e materials selected for reading in the courses given in history and political science ranged from the Middle Ages to the present in time and over Western Europe and Great Britain in scope. Since special emphasis was given to Italy and to Florence, some of the books pertaining to those areas may be noted. For history and culture in the Renaissance there 42 C O L L E G E A N D R E S E A R C H L I B R A R I E S were Cecilia Ady, Lorenzo de Medici and Renaissance Italy, Harold Acton, The Last of the Medici; Hans Baron, Hu- manistic and Political Literature in Flor- ence and Venice at the Beginning of the Quattrocento; Federico Chabod, Machia- velli and the Renaissance; David Her- lihy, Pisa in the Early Renaissance; Gar- rett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, and Pius II, Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope (new edition). For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some of the titles were Gaetano Salvemini, Mazzini; Denis Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi; by the same author, Italy, a Modern His- tory; A. C. Jemolo, Church and State in Italy, 1850-1950; and Norman Kogan, Italy and the Allies. T h e classics in paperback editions in- cluded Boccaccio, Decameron; Cellini, Autobiography; Burckhardt, The Civi- lization of the Renaissance; Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses; The Portable Dante; and Vasari, Lives of the Painters. Background material for visits to churches and galleries of Florence and other cities was provided by Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renais- sance; Millard Meiss, Painting in Flor- ence and Siena after the Black Death; Nikolaus Pevsner, Outline of European Architecture; Jules Struppeck, The Cre- ation of Sculpture; and Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of the Renaissance. Among the titles selected for an un- derstanding of political and social con- ditions in Italy today could be found Edward Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society; Robert Dickinson, Population Problems of Southern Italy; Danilo Dolci, To Feed the Hungry: Re- port from Palermo; T h e Presidency of the (Italian) Council, Ten Years of Ital- ian Democracy, 1947-1957; and Elizabeth Wiskmann, Italy. T h e problem created by a limited budget becomes most obvious in the ad- ministration of the overseas library. With no professional librarian or even a non- professional adult in charge, it may be handled in either of two ways. On a formal basis, paid student assistants may administer a library operating for certain hours in a designated reading room and establishing loan periods, fines, and cer- tain other regulations. On an informal basis, a collection of books may be placed on the shelves in a classroom or lounge with no one in charge and the students permitted to borrow them as they please. When it became apparent that during the first semester of Syracuse-in-Italy all library duties would be performed by student assistants, following directives sent with the books, it was decided that the library must be set up according to a simple classification. T h e books for each subject field were to be arranged on the shelves alphabetically by author. An author-title catalog and a shelf list were prepared and sent, although with so small a collection the tendency is for the students to go to the shelves and look rather than consult a catalog. T h e books were cataloged and provided with book cards. S T U D E N T S " S E T UP S H O P " Immediately after their arrival in Florence the four student assistants (one of them had had previous library experi- ence and so was "in charge") unpacked the books and placed them on shelves in a pleasant room designated as the library in the villa rented by Syracuse Univer- sity. A certain section was set aside for reserve books wanted by professors for special use. T h e student staff was ready then to handle circulation and to see that the simple rules were followed. T h a t they found it difficult to collect fines from their friends seems to have been the principal criticism of their work. Perhaps the small size of the student body engendered more esprit de corps and a greater sense of responsibility than is frequently shown by students on the home campus, for when an inventory was taken at the beginning of the spring semester the collection was intact. J A N U A R Y 1 9 6 2 43 On the whole, these budding libraries have served their programs well. Prob- ably some of their success can be attrib- uted to the enthusiasm of students and faculty who sensed that they were en- gaged in a pioneering venture. T h i s momentum may be no guarantee of effi- ciency in the future, particularly if for- eign branches take permanent root in American academic life and their en- rollments expand. Opponents of the branch abroad idea are alert for any signs of academic inadequacy, and the quality of the library properly becomes one of the tests. Distance is not alone the danger. More serious is the looseness of the tie between the overseas library and the parent li- brary. Since later acquisitions are or- dered from a separate budget, the main library has little notion of changes going on in the overseas collection. It is possi- ble for the parent library to have no ac- curate conception of holdings unless the university branch should fail and close its doors, presumably leaving the collec- tion to be returned to the United States. Just as the home library should not be allowed to remain in the dark about the overseas collection, so the library abroad will in the long run need to profit from the professional experience of the home library. When overseas university branches achieve permanence and eco- nomic security, untrained student assist- ants will have to be supplemented with adult personnel capable of managing growing collections. How can these two interests, separated by thousands of miles, be brought together? Since the need for librarians trained in foreign languages and cultures continues to grow, library schools might be willing to consider the university branch system as a training ground for a certain num- ber of their students. While continuing their course work in academic subjects, library students would have the inesti- mable benefit of language preparation in a foreign country, as well as the oppor- tunity to observe some great public and private libraries abroad in action. Library 21 Project TH E L A S T time that ALA participated in a world's fair was at San Francisco, in 1915. At that fair, seventy-five square feet of floor space was devoted to the dis- play of books by ALA. One of the ex- hibit's distinguished visitors was Teddy Roosevelt, who, after spending about an hour browsing, uttered a very satisfied "bully" to Joseph Wheeler, the librarian. Forty-seven years later, an automated Library of the Future occupies nine thousand square feet of floor space, and features electronic machines employing the latest techniques in storage and re- trieval of information, book browsing areas, and a unique children's library, at the Seattle World's Fair, April 21- October 21, 1962. Library 21 was stimulated by a grant from the Ford Foundation's Council on Library Resources and a grant from the U. S. Office of Education. Joseph Becker of Washington, D. C., is co-ordinator, and Gordon Martin, assistant university librarian at the University of California, Riverside, is local project director. Irving Lieberman, director, School of Librarians ship, University of Washington, is chair- man of the ALA Advisory Committee. T w o A C R L committees are working with exhibitors: a committee of the Rare Books Section of A C R L , under the chair- manship of Mrs. Frances J . Brewer, chief, rare books division, Detroit Pub- lic Library, is working with Radio Cor- poration of America; and a second com- mittee, under the chairmanship of Law- rence Clark Powell, director, School of Library Service, University of California, Los Angeles, is advising I B M . 44 C O L L E G E A N D R E S E A R C H L I B R A R I E S