Blueprints: Falvey Library

Contents: December 2003
 

• Herpetology and  antiquarian books: Biological research in the age of information technology
   
• Christmas in Special Collections
   
• "The University and the Intellectual Commons": a public forum with Hal Abelson
   
• Santa makes an appearance on campus
   
• "Fahrenheit 451: An appreciation": Celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication
   
• Noteworthy
   
• Also contributing to this issue...

By Teresa Bowden, Reference librarian and liaison to the biology department

On November 19, Dr. Aaron Bauer, professor in the biology department educated and entertained the crowd as a guest speaker for Falvey Library's Faculty Research Talk series. Describing his two main areas of interest to be herpetology and book collecting, Dr. Bauer discussed how these come together in his research. In order to complement and support his current field research, Dr. Bauer must consistently refer to many seminal print works dating from the 1700s and 1800s.

Dr. Bauer emphasized that even in the sciences, there's a world of literature beyond the electronic databases. He noted that, although it is true that biological research is strongly dependent on the recent literature, it is false to believe that literature more than 5-10 years old is irrelevant to biologists, or that most of the biological literature is available electronically. “Although recent literature is essential to all fields of biology, certain sub-disciplines have an inherent historical component, and as a consequence, older literature in these fields remains relevant for decades or even centuries,” he stated.

Most electronic access to biological literature begins in the late 1960’s – BUT it is far from comprehensive.  Dr. Bauer declared, “The relevant biological literature extends back to at least the 1700s.”
	Electronic databases are also strongly skewed toward research published in English and in the countries of the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia. This obviously excludes the research conducted in other areas throughout the world and published in other languages.

Some specific areas in biology where antiquarian literature can be useful are natural history, morphology and systematics. Within systematics, Dr. Bauer presented one example from his experience with nomenclature, specifically the fixed naming of species. “Without reference to the older literature,” he noted, “you can’t really unravel how the history of these names came to be.”  In this case, Dr. Bauer emphasized the importance of such works as the tenth edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1758) and Albert Seba’s Locupletissimi Rerum Naturalium Thesauri (1735).

Unfortunately, one of the challenges of using antiquarian sources is obtaining access to them. Since they are rare, most often the only options are to visit extensive libraries at places such as Harvard, the Academy of Natural Sciences and the Smithsonian Institute or to purchase the items, often for impressive sums of money. Dr. Bauer has an extensive collection of antiquarian books, and following the talk, attendees were treated to a display of works from his personal collection as well as books from Falvey Library’s Special Collections.

Overall Dr. Bauer gave an intriguing presentation which serves to remind us that in this age of information technology only a fraction of the world’s literature is accessible electronically.

Christmas in Special Collections
 

To commemorate the holiday season, this month the Special Collections exhibit features illustrations of Christmas related topics found in books housed in the Collections.

One interesting title on display is The Christmas Vesper Hymn, for one, two or three voices, as sung in the churches of St. Marys and St. Augustines (published in Philadelphia in 1830). You will also have the opportunity to admire the hand-colored plates in a copy of Missale Romanum, the Roman Catholic Church’s Latin missal, published in Antwerp in 1773. Christmas in Colonial times is remembered in Christmas with George Washington, a collection of reprints of accounts contemporary to that period.

You can view these and other interesting books in the Special Collections exhibit cases across from the Circulation counter on the first floor of Falvey Library.

Electronic Gloria in Profundis, by G.K Chesterton.  London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927. Wood engraving by Eric Gill.

“Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball.”  Christmas Books. Tales and Sketches, by Charles Dickens. Boston, New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1894.

By Darren G. Poley, Reference/Catalog Librarian

We live in a changed and changing world. One could even make the case, as distinguished visitor Dr. Hal Abelson did when he was here on campus, that digital technology has had the greatest impact on the ivory tower because of the “propertization” of thinking. While rights are the foundation of individualism and a core value of the American public square, those of us in the academy who do what we do under the banner of intellectual freedom are not immune from the commercialization of higher education.

On November 4 Falvey Memorial Library had the distinct honor of hosting Hal Abelson, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to address this very subject. The forum, a wide-ranging public conversation with University librarian Joe Lucia, Villanova University faculty and others in attendance, took its substance from the theme of his talk the night before, “Universities, the Internet, and the Intellectual Commons." Dr. Abelson was on campus for two days of lectures and discussions in several venues open to the public as a visiting scholar sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa chapter, with special assistance from numerous Villanova University offices, programs and departments.

What exactly is the “intellectual commons” and isn’t that simply what we, as a place of learning, are?  Dr. Abelson pointed out that the problem has arisen that the marketplace of ideas has become just that, a marketplace, and he provocatively asked if the university’s purpose is to be the “place for promoting and fostering intellectual property."

Sadly, a change in higher education, which is being allowed to happen by less than proactive universities across the board, was demonstrated by his lecture in the Connelly Center given the prior evening. Dr. Abelson prompts one to ask if the university’s role is to pass on the torch of civilization through the generation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge? If ideas become intellectual property, which was shown so often to be freely given away by academics to commercial purveyors of content, the freedom of inquiry is compromised, and the repositories of knowledge will then no longer be able to stimulate intellectual growth for fear of litigation stemming from the derivative work of students and colleagues.

Professors produce knowledge, librarians manage it, and technology has been an enormous boon to these two tasks. But, as he stated, “will sophisticated research tools be made stillborn by limited access” on account of “conflating of freedom of inquiry with freedom of property” even now in the age of the Internet? Dr. Abelson spoke about “two coordinated initiatives to strengthen the intellectual commons” being undertaken to counter this trend, at MIT.

“OpenCourseWare” permanently publishes on the Web for free world-wide access the syllabi and supporting materials of classes from across the schools of MIT. “D-Space”  is a collaborative academic project which creates a digital archive of faculty research using state-of-the-art technology together with the traditional role of libraries to capture the intellectual output that is inaccessible and often seeps away from academic usability unless purchased or leased back at exorbitant rates.

Dr. Abelson provided food for thought on the purpose of universities and why they should use the available technology to generate and manage knowledge in more fruitful ways. As he illustrated, if Einstein had patented E=MC2 with the copyright protections of intellectual property the way trademarks like Micky Mouse are, then the clarion call of Hal Abelson for a quiet revolution by academe to reclaim its educational mission as the intellectual commons would already be too late.

Santa greets Gerald Dierkes at the                    Falvey Christmas party.

Once again Santa is expected to make an appearance at the annual Falvey Memorial Library Christmas party. According to his close friend, Taras Ortynsky, head of Technical Services, Santa has made appearances at academic libraries in the area since 1970, coincidentally at the same libraries where Mr. Ortynsky has held positions.  Santa also appeared at the University Christmas party last year. Like Santa, Mr. Ortynsky also likes to say “Ho ho ho,” likes to hand out presents, has a sense of service to the community, and maintains the ideal Santa weight, avoiding the necessity for pillows to fill out the familiar red and white suit.

Fahrenheit 451:  an appreciation Celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication by Darren G. Poley, Reference/Catalog Librarian

Raising my children, there are several basic things which I want them to appreciate: sleep, hygiene, the beauties of the natural world, quiet contemplation and books. I realize that even in our high-tech and media saturated society book sales are surprisingly sky high, and written works are being printed at an unprecedented rate. Yet social commentators like Will Manley caustically link cultural decline with people's inability to use libraries.

This type of sentiment renews my appreciation for Ray Bradbury’s classic little book, Fahrenheit 451 – the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns. I realize science fiction is not everyone’s cup of tea, but the premise is not so far fetched in a world where zealotry may lead to the fire-storm of terrorism, or far worse, the erosion of personal human dignity by means of a slow cancerous intellectual degradation.

Not that Bradbury is the greatest American storyteller, and despite being published first in serial form in “Playboy,” a new magazine in 1953, this insightful morality tale is certainly one of the most inspired novels of the 20th century. Bradbury makes his deep and abiding love for ideas, books, libraries, and human liberty apparent in his many short stories, including most notably “The Pedestrian,” “Bright Phoenix,” and “April 2005: Usher II,” all of which are in Bradbury Stories: 100 of his most celebrated tales (HarperCollins, 2003). These are the precursors to the slim volume whose unassuming 50th anniversary is being celebrated in 2003.

Bradbury’s ardor for the great repositories of knowledge and the book itself, that depository technology for conveying human thought which is more readily torched than satisfactorily replaced, is most apparent in this novel, about which Bradbury exclaims, “I did not write Fahrenheit 451 – it wrote me."

In Fahrenheit 451 we are introduced to Guy Montag, a fireman of the future. Firemen are no longer needed to extinguish the flames of burning buildings, now globally fire-proof; now they have the job of social engineers. The firemen use chemical matches from “eternal” matchboxes to set ablaze the supposed source of social unrest, books, while doing, “Janitorial work, essentially. Everything to its proper place. Quick with the kerosene! Who’s got a match?” When Montag questions whether he and his comrades were chosen for the task based on their “looks as well as their proclivities,” and becomes suspicious of the official history of the “Firemen of America” outlined in the rule book, he also fears his name will show up on an “alarm card” when his guilty secret of intellectual curiosity is discovered.

Bradbury imagines a world frighteningly like the impersonal one around us now, with “fun parks,” drugs, sound bite news, reality entertainment, sports galore to satisfy, and a future not so far off with mind-numbing wall-TV’s, super fast cars, gadgetry for simple human tasks, digital pornography, and electronic earplugs that allow one to constantly tune in to a cacophony in order to tune out the world around us.

You may want to turn again to Fahrenheit 451 to have a good read which comments on the horrors, technological or otherwise, of modernity with brutal frankness while it celebrates the human spirit, and the joys and pleasures of the simple life.

Teresa Bowden, Reference librarian, Falvey Memorial Library, recently published an article entitled "A Snapshot of State Prison Libraries with a Focus on Technology" in Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian (Vol. 21(2) 2003).