ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Special collections in the Southeast

By James B. Lloyd Special Collections Librarian University of Tennessee, Knoxville

and William B. Eigelsbach Senior Library Assistant University of Tennessee, Knoxville

A special report on special collections.

This survey of mid-sized academic libraries in the southeast came about in response to a specific administrative need—the perhaps universal desire for more staff. One way to prove our need was to prove that we had fewer people performing the same functions than other repositories of comparable size. Since it did not seem appropriate to ask colleagues to fill out another survey to meet such an immediate and personal need, we surveyed by phone. And we limited ourselves to mid-sized academic libraries in the southeast, since that is our environment, purposely omitting places like the University of Virginia because they are so much larger, and going no farther west than Arkansas.

As might be expected, we had some difficulty in interpreting our statistics, and sometimes were forced to call back for clarification. There seem to have been several reasons for this. For one thing the faculty, paraprofessional, clerical staffing structure which we use here does not exactly match classifications used elsewhere. For another, the figures themselves may be deceiving. Staff may be dedicated to non-visible functions, i.e., functions which we did not survey, such as microfilming or staffing an isolated public service point. The size of a repository sometimes proved difficult to compare, since conversion formulas between items and feet differed so widely that we were forced to make some adjustments on our own. And sometimes even the volume count for rare books may be unreliable. In our case, we have a second collection of some 100,000 volumes which, though not rare books is part of Special Collections. If we had chosen to count these volumes, we would have appeared much larger than we really are.

We discovered a number of different administrative configurations which, though not part of Table 1, may be of some interest. Perhaps the most unusual is the University of Louisville, where, though there is one administrative unit, the physically separate archives/records center also collects regional manuscripts, and the book collection is maintained in thirty-five separate entities, some of which contain manuscripts as well. In the most common arrangement, found in ten of eighteen institutions, special collections is responsible for university archives but not for records management. Only two schools have separately administered archives; three, including Louisville, have separate archives/records management facilities; and only two special collections department are responsible for records management in-house.

Tables 1 and 2 require little explanation, but in the interest of completeness several conclusions might be drawn. The average special collections department in the southeast is supported by an enrollment of 18,200 and has a staff of 10.7—4.9 professionals, 4.7 paraprofessionals, and 1.1 clerical staff—who perform three functions. They administer rare books, 61,900 volumes; manuscripts, 6,300 linear feet; and archives, 4,000 linear feet. The University of Georgia has the largest rare book collection and the most processed archives, LSU the largest manuscript collection and Duke the largest staff.

And we should add a final caveat. It could be argued, and rightly so, that our choice of institutions was arbitrary. We included Duke, but not the University of North Carolina or North Carolina State. In our single foray across the Mississippi we included the University of Arkansas, but not the University of Missouri or any of a number of comparable institutions in Texas. We included East Carolina but not Western Carolina, the University of Southern Mississippi but not Mississippi State, etc. All true. And we have no defense to offer other than to point out that we were aiming for a representative sample, not comprehensiveness.