Issue of
October 13, 1999

Who Needs a Library Anyway?

This is the text of President Gerhard Casper’s remarks to the Stanford community at the dedication of the Bing Wing of the Cecil H. Green Library on October 12, 1999.

One of the great figures of the European Enlightenment of the 18th century, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, professor of mathematics and physics at Göttingen, once commented: "One can hardly imagine more curious merchandise than books. Printed by people who do not understand them; sold by people who do not understand them; [catalogued and purloined by people who do not understand them --no, this one I made up for the occasion] bound, reviewed and read by people who do not understand them; and to top it all, written by people who do not understand them."

I am not suggesting that, a century later, Jane and Leland Stanford were equally perplexed when it came to this "curious merchandise." But, let us face it: Our Founders did not make a library, or books, their top priority. Sen. Stanford, in a communication to President David Starr Jordan, thought that, as a nucleus, a library "such as a gentleman would have for his own use" would be sufficient. In this suggestion it is not the masculine reference that is surprising. Rather, one wonders about the peculiarity of the concept "gentleman's library" in relation to the task at hand --the formation of a university library.

One explanation is possibly found in the fact that, approximately up to the time when our university was conceived, large university libraries were the exception. As late as 1893, 43 percent of college students in the United States had access to college libraries with fewer than 5,000 volumes, 83 percent to libraries with fewer than 25,000 volumes. All of this began to change dramatically in the last quarter of the 19th century. Until then, of course, students were generally not expected to do research but to study from a small number of standard textbooks.

At the time of its founding in 1737, the University of Göttingen, where Lichtenberg was a professor, recruited faculty in part on the basis of what was known about their personal library holdings. Students had access to these professorial collections if necessary. Likewise, at Stanford, more than 150 years later, John Casper Branner, the geologist, and later president, arrived on the Farm with a "freight-car" of books, which constituted his personal library that he then opened to student use.

Another explanation for the reference to a "gentleman's library" may lie in the dollar amount Leland Stanford had in mind for books: $4,000 to $5,000. Indeed, how much money to allocate to book purchases remained a sore point for years to come in the relationship between the Founders and Jordan. The latter considered a great library the most important element in creating a great university.

By contrast with the more modest ambitions of our founders, Thomas Jefferson's plans for the University of Virginia earlier in the 19th century estimated the cost of books for his new library, even then, at more than $24,000. Of course, Jefferson was notorious for not being overly concerned with budgets when it came to matters he cared about, such as books or wine. In the summer of 1824, Jefferson spent four hours a day for two months preparing a catalogue of books for the library of the planned University of Virginia, and the list ran to almost 7,000 volumes. This was roughly the number of books that the former president had sold to Congress in 1815 for about the same amount of money. Jefferson's books formed the foundation for the Library of Congress that has since grown ever so slightly to 29 million volumes, making it the biggest library in the world.

Of course, Jefferson's interest in libraries was not confined to the books themselves; it also embraced the question of how to house them. As concerns the library building, Jefferson found his inspiration for it in the Roman Pantheon and considered what became known as the Rotunda essential to give unity and consolidation to the academical village. Paul Turner has commented: "This was clearly an expression of Jefferson's aspiration to create a true university, where research played a role it never had in the traditional American college. For the first time on an American campus, the central focus was the library."

If Leland Stanford's differences with Jefferson's outlook were largely fiscal, Jane Stanford's were of a more spiritual nature. She believed that education, to serve any good purpose, must have "intelligent guidance," which was to be found in the church, not the library. And, in her cosmology of the Stanford universe, the church was followed by the museum in terms of importance. In 1902, Mrs. Stanford wrote President Wheeler of the University of California that she considered the church "the Kohinoor in the setting of the entire institution." I must confess that the term "Kohinoor" stymied me. The British crown jewels, especially this diamond from India, have not been part of my upbringing nor is it easy to learn about the Kohinoor by osmosis. Thus I went to the Oxford English Dictionary to look up the word. I did so "online" --a subject to which I shall return.

From a librarian's point of view, Mrs. Stanford did redeem herself just before her death in 1905. In the address she had written that year for the laying of the cornerstone for the library building that vanished a year later in the earthquake of 1906, she explained that, in 1899, she had conveyed her "diamonds, rubies, emeralds and other precious stones" to the trustees to be used for the completion of the Memorial Church if necessary --when she referred to the church as "the Kohinoor," she apparently meant it quite literally. With the completion of the church in 1903 --the jewels were not any longer needed as a backstop --she directed the trustees to sell the jewels after her death and use the proceeds as an endowment fund for the library to be known as the "Jewel Fund." The endowment exists to this date, with a present value of $751,249.89. For any book lover, the metamorphosis from jewels to books is delightful.

Let me return to the question of the location of the library on our campus. As Paul Turner has shown, Olmsted and Coolidge had proposed a layout for the campus that the Stanfords rejected. According to the architects, the north-south axis was to have an unimpeded vista and the church was to be on the western side of the Main Quad. The Stanfords, instead, insisted on Palm Drive leading north-south to a memorial arch as the main campus entrance and on the church as the visual end point. This resplendent Beaux Arts arrangement made the university chapel all important and any library a wholly secondary element.

Indeed, until 1919 the university library was not, in a major way, a distinct, visible aspect of our campus. Initially and temporarily housed in a room of Building 1 on the Main Quad, the library, in 1900, occupied the first building of the Outer Quad and was named for the Senator's brother, the "Australian" Stanford, Thomas Welton Stanford. At present, that building houses the Political Science Department and, in a change fraught with symbolism, will in the future become the Wallenberg Center for Global Learning.

Given the growth rates of the collection at the turn of the century, space needs were felt so intensely that, only a few years after the opening of the Thomas Welton Stanford Library in the year 1900, a new large library, designed to accommodate future growth, was commissioned to take its place. It was not to be part of the existing or any future quadrangles. Instead, it rose outside the Main and Outer Quads in approximately the space now occupied by the Graduate School of Business. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake demolished the new structure before it could be dedicated. It is said that we should consider its demise a blessing since the building would have turned out to be mostly dysfunctional. The university librarian of the time was never consulted about the program nor even shown the plans.

The building whose restoration we celebrate today, 80 years after it opened in 1919, represented an attempted return to the original plan for campus expansion: quadrangles east and west of the Main Quad.

From the beginning, university officials and trustees had high hopes for this new library and there was much discussion about the appropriate architect. In making one recommendation to the Board of Trustees, John K. Branner, the architecturally trained son of Stanford's president, John Casper Branner, noted that Stanford would do well to hire the best possible architect from the East. "Unlike painters and sculptors, the best architects charge no more than the mediocre ones," Branner wrote. Alas, I must report to you that this professional inequity no longer exists.

Eventually a San Francisco firm was settled upon. The architects of what many of you know as the "old Main Library," Bakewell & Brown, stated that in designing a second quadrangle it was felt that the transverse axis of the first, that is, the west-east axis on which we are located this afternoon, should be preserved and emphasized. "Thus the library was placed in such a position as to terminate west-east this cross vista in the same way the Church terminates the vista of the central axis." In short, the university library was at last located in a way that wove it prominently into the fabric of the campus. And, as we have finally, this year, added a science and engineering quadrangle west of the Main Quad, what Bakewell & Brown called the "transverse axis" has become even more significant and, consequently, this large-scale, fairly massive building as its eastern terminus has acquired yet greater architectural force.

For complex reasons, a genuine library quadrangle was in the end not accomplished. However, while we did not get a library quad, we certainly do have a library "region" with the Cecil H. Green Library, the Meyer Library and Hoover as its main components. The Hoover Tower, for the archival and book collections of the Hoover Library on War, Revolution and Peace, was dedicated in 1941. The J. Henry Meyer Memorial Library opened its doors to undergraduates in 1966. An addition to the Main Library, Green East, provided for by President Richard Lyman and opened in 1980, roughly doubled its floor space and book capacity. Imagine the situation we would have found ourselves in after Loma Prieta, only nine years after the dedication of Green East, had this addition not been built. A generous gift for the enlargement by Cecil Green, a nonalumnus, led to naming the entire main library the Cecil H. Green Library.

Beginning with its reopening today, the old Main Library, which in the vernacular had become "Green West," will be known as the "Bing Wing of the Green Library." The Bing Wing represents --I apologize: I cannot resist the temptation --one of Peter and Helen Bing's many Stanford flings. An "Uncommon Man" and uncommon supporter of his alma mater, Peter has been a major donor for the library restoration. Helen and Peter have made their benevolent presence felt in almost all activities of the university. Peter is also Cecil Green's friend. The lead gift, and the first substantial response to my pleas for help with the library restoration, came from Mel Lane, who had earlier led the Memorial Church restoration effort --thus preserving Jane Stanford's priorities. It goes without saying that he had Joan Lane's support. Other friends of the university who have contributed in major ways to the library restoration are Charles and Nancy Munger and Greg and Dion Peterson. To them, and all other contributors, our deep gratitude.

This project has posed extraordinary challenges. When I first came to the university in 1992, the damage to the 1919 building had been assessed (alas, the consultants were proven wrong once construction began: the damage was considerably greater than first understood), FEMA assistance had been applied for and we were wondering how to pay for the rest. The costs had been projected to be high (they turned out to be much higher than thought). I began to wonder whether FEMA contributions to a restoration effort notwithstanding, we would not be better off if we demolished the building and started from scratch with a truly modern library. I placed a hold on the project and asked for a new cost-benefit analysis. In the end, we decided to proceed with restoration. There were strong historical preservation arguments. Also, the university's overall financial situation was so strained that FEMA support was essential. Thanks largely to the personal involvement and the care of Michael Keller, the University Librarian; Kären Nagy, his deputy; and many other members of the library staff, we may now celebrate an achievement that is beautiful and as miraculous as the restoration of many historic buildings in Europe after the destruction of World War II. Indeed, when all the necessary tearing down and opening up had occurred, this library reminded me of the bombed-out buildings of my Hamburg childhood.

The question we did not ask in 1992 was whether the building simply should have been demolished and not replaced at all. We assumed that the need was clearly there. Were we right? Who --in particular, in this day and age --needs another library anyway? What did we need libraries for in the past? These are questions I should like to take up in the remainder of my remarks.

While the digital world has expanded at a dizzying speed since 1992, even in those ancient days seven years ago, when I came to Stanford, electronic alternatives to libraries were already well established and heavily used by, for instance, the legal profession. Since then, the information and knowledge resources available on the World Wide Web have become "lowercase-c" catholic --some of it pretty low indeed.

Catalogs of the library holdings of many universities are available to researchers without the necessity of undertaking a physical trip to those libraries. Today, data banks with scientific, demographic, economic and political information are accessible worldwide, as are legal decisions, not to mention newspapers. Increasingly, complete texts from world literature can be consulted online, as can be scholarly journals and preprints. Entire archives are being created worldwide: Government documents can be found in their entirety, photos can be reproduced, film and audio material can be downloaded. Because these data bases can be searched with great specificity and because links to relevant sites and documents are easily created and accessed, there are possibilities for research that, not long ago, could not even be dreamed of. I shall return to this latter point in a moment. The web is wonderfully unlimited, robust and wide open, catholic and chaotic. It has no physical location and, other than for its servers, it needs virtually no space.

Furthermore, let me remind you that, as to storage, another area of revolutionary change, nanotechnology, is proceeding to bring us closer to the time when we may see the realization of Richard Feynman's prediction of 1959 that all of the information that man has accumulated in all the books in the world can be written "in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide --which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye." Feynman's famous talk was titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom."

As far as I am concerned, I have little doubt that, before long, the university library, as we still assume it today, will experience extraordinary challenges. We are in a transformation period. As you may have inferred from my earlier reference, I prefer the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary to its paper embodiment. Indeed, there is a most powerful reason for that preference --I do not even own either of the two paper versions and why should I waste time going to the library, as I used to, to look up a word. The next edition of the OED, we are told, may be available only electronically.

The search, and that means, research capacity that has come with the digital storage of information is already offering us extraordinary opportunities. I am not just referring to instantaneous availability of information, search speed, links, hypertext, computing capacity and the like. The electronic medium makes possible, even in areas of traditional humanities scholarship, a thoroughness that was previously unattainable. To coin a phrase: The medium is the method.

I should like to give one illustration that has affected me personally. Two years ago, I published a book on separation of powers practices in the federal government during the last decade of the 18th century. The book captured research that I had done off and on over a decade or so working primarily with paper volumes of the Annals of Congress. I was fortunate in that at Chicago and Stanford I had access to research libraries that owned this multivolume title. In order to get at the substantive content of the congressional debates that I was examining, I had no choice but, day after day, to work my way through the sessions of Congress. This material that occupies considerable shelf space is now available online through the Library of Congress to any person anywhere in the world. Its content can be searched systematically and meticulously in a manner that, even with quirks, I believe surpasses leafing through in reliability. This is an important point. Digital library resources, including in the humanities, do not only provide virtual storage but enable us to pursue research methods that were not as practical or thorough in other media; they were not really "available."

So, where are we going with the library as a system for selecting, organizing and managing information and knowledge according to the special needs of its users? I ask your indulgence for an illustrative historical excursion. Two months ago, in the Southern Peruvian town of Arequipa, I came across a library whose classification system struck me as eminently suited for its users --Franciscan monks. The Franciscan convent, La Recoleta, which dates back to 1648, has a library that contains about 30,000 volumes. Labels, in Latin, clearly mark the shelves. For instance: Hagiography, Franciscanism, Catechism, Mariology, Science, Church History, Secular History, or --I switch to Latin --Theologia Moralis et Pastoralis, Mystica et Ascetica, and then --behind locks but clearly visible --the most useful of all categories: Prohibita --prohibited books. It gave me great satisfaction to learn that the Franciscans knew what they needed most among prohibited books: all volumes of Diderot's Encyclopédie, the embodiment of the rationalist, secular aspects of the Enlightenment, in an 1807 edition.

James J. O'Donnell, in his recent book Avatars of the Word, contrasts the library as a well-ordered institution with "infochaos" on the web:

The vital difference between present and future practices will be that the forms of organization of knowledge in electronic media do not resemble those of the traditional codex book. . . . Where the library has traditionally been one of the few such enterprises cooperating (if sometimes at arm's length) with a finite community of publishers (and thus both together functioning as gatekeepers on a limited set of narrow information pathways from authors to readers), a community is now growing where there will be as many publishers as readers. The possibility of even imagining totality in such a world rapidly disintegrates. What would be the contents of the electronic virtual library? Everything? Every what? Just to ask the question makes it suddenly obvious that one of the most valuable functions of the traditional library has not been its inclusivity but its exclusivity, its discerning judgment that keeps out as many things as it keeps in.

As to inclusivity and exclusivity, you recall that Feynman wanted to store "all the books in the world" in his nanocube. The goal to collect "the books of all the peoples of the world" in one library had been pursued as early as at the beginning of the third century B.C. by the Ptolemy kings of Egypt for the Museum library in Alexandria. Ptolemy II Philadelphus supposedly composed a letter to all the rulers on earth imploring them to send him works by authors of every kind. The Ptolemies not only wanted to collect all books but also translate those in other languages into Greek. The most famous example of the latter is the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible by allegedly 70 scholars at the Museum in Alexandria. And then, at Alexandria, there was Kallimachos, the poet and cataloguer, who divided authors into classes, such as rhetoric or philosophy or law, and arranged them alphabetically within classes providing biographical data and lists of titles. Hundreds of thousands of scrolls were well ordered.

The Alexandrian temple of the Muses, the Museum, located within the confines of the royal palace, was not only a place where scholars worked on philosophical, scientific and literary problems, but it was also a place where Hellenistic civilization attempted to understand the cultures and identities of the peoples whom the Alexandrians ruled. Therefore the effort to build a universal library, therefore the translation enterprise. While Greek in language, customs and self-understanding, Hellenism had a truly global aspect and desired greater knowledge about the non-Greek world.

In that sense it was the first time in world history that inclusivity became part of the intellectual agenda. In the last 2,000 years, we have waxed and waned in that respect, though, at the turn to the third millennium, there can be no question that inclusivity is here to stay and that the new digital medium may finally help us secure the Alexandrian ideal, if in a version that incorporates misaligned miscellanies of a numbing variety, a kaleidoscopic virtual marketplace of goods, services and ideas.

While it is clear that in this virtual world we will continue to need "librarians" as managers to provide navigational aids and comfort, what about libraries as physical spaces?

Even the most futuristic of thinkers would have to admit that we are likely to have physical libraries and paper books for decades to come. We are far from the point where everything we need is on the web or where the web is the preferred method of distributing and receiving knowledge. Also, navigation devices remain primitive, the mapping function rudimentary.

You will be much relieved to learn that we do, indeed, need the Bing Wing. It will not only bring 1 million of Stanford's 7 million volumes back to the main campus and provide a central place for rare books, manuscripts and archives, but it will refer students and faculty to the subject specialists and curators in the two resource centers for humanities and area studies, on the one hand, and the social sciences, on the other, that will be located in the Bing Wing. As a sign of the digital future, these traditional functions will be supplemented by humanities digital information services and by a social sciences data center. Power and telecommunication links will be available at the places of study. In short, the Bing Wing comprehends two worlds, the old world of printing and the new world of digitization. It will be --to quote, in this year of his 250th birthday, Goethe's metaphor for a library --"a large capital that quietly pays incalculable interest."

Also, and perhaps even more important, it will restore to our students a place of relative solitude, a place for reading, not deciphering, a place where there can be, as Professor [Hans U.] Gumbrecht [the Albert Guerard Professor of Literature] put it recently, joyful and painful oscillation between losing and regaining intellectual control or orientation in relation to intellectual complexity. This Romanesque library is a powerful reminder of the need not only to be "with it," but also to be "away from it." I may quote Jacques Barzun: "Making research profitable and ecumenical has brought about a damaging shrinking of time within the university. Time now flows there at the same rate as outside, which accounts for the pressure and strain that every academic denizen groans under. . . . Good work takes time, not alone for reflection but also for non-purposive reading." The Bing Wing will provide, I hope, a sense of time regained.

Will "joyful and painful oscillation" in the face of the books and knowledge of the world make better people of us? Will the library provide, to use Jane Stanford's expression, "intelligent guidance"? To some extent, I think Mrs. Stanford was right to be skeptical. Harold Bloom, in his recent book, The Western Canon, with the subtitle The Books and Schools of the Ages, has made the point powerfully, indeed too powerfully, with respect to Western writers. His argument is equally applicable to a canon that would have a Ptolemaic, worldwide reach. I quote:

The West's greatest writers are subversive of all values, both ours and their own. Scholars who urge us to find the source of our morality and our politics in Plato, or in Isaiah, are out of touch with the social reality in which we live. If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation. . . . Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. . . . All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

I am inclined to agree with Harold Bloom in a qualified way, to say "yes, but . . .". The "but" is not so much addressed to Bloom as to the more general question whether "intelligent guidance" can be found in the university library. In this I am not only referring to canonical texts, but to the university's work in its entirety, as supported by our libraries.

If anybody were to do something that I firmly advise against --read, in one sitting, all the 516 speeches that I have given so far since becoming president of Stanford, beginning with the Inaugural Address of October 2, 1992 --that person would quickly make a shocking discovery: In writing a speech, I frequently borrow from an earlier one. If I were a composer or a novelist, these self-plagiarisms might be called leitmotivs --which, indeed, they are.

Thus permit me to repeat, with all the passion of which I am capable, a theme that you may view as trite but that I believe bears --how do I put it? --repeated repetition as a leitmotiv.

Universities and their libraries "are the custodian not only of the many cultures of man, but of the rational process itself," as another university president, my friend Edward Levi, once said. Guarding the rational process is the Western university's major contribution to civilization. The commitment to, and practice of, reasoning clearly is what we must uphold. In that this is a commitment to search for "intelligent guidance," it is also a normative, a moral commitment. It is a demanding one. The search to know --the search for truth --has always been characterized by the need to doubt, the need to be critical, including being self-critical: looking not just for the evidence, but for the counterevidence as well. The holdings of the university library --paper, object and digital --are one of the means by which the university performs its role as the custodian of that rational process.

As you may recall, Aldous Huxley, in the novel Brave New World imagined infants who would be conditioned so that they grew up with a hatred of books because otherwise "there was always the risk of their reading something which might undesirably decondition" the Pavlovian reflexes that had been instilled in them.

May many reflexes be deconditioned in the Bing Wing by means of the joyful and painful oscillation. SR