Karen Attar Rare Book and Special Collections in Overview: Producing a National Directory Describing library collections by location is nothing new. In the mid-nineteenth century, Luther Farnham published A Glance at Private Libraries, about libraries in the Boston area of the United States. Reginald Arthur Rye produced his highly praised Students’ Guide to the Libraries of London in England just over fifty years later.1 That we, no less than our forebears, value such discovery tools collocating collections is evident from their continued publication, whether in print or, more recently, electronic form. National, annual library directories still produced include The American Library Directory. In Britain, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP)’s Libraries and Information Services in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, a list of libraries by sector with contact details, remains available. Yet up-to-date, all-encompassing national directories targeting special collections are uncommon. Most countries seem not to have tackled a national special col- lections census at all. Of the exceptions, America’s extensive Subject Collections, originally published in 1958, arranging and describing collections in subject order by Library of Congress Subject Headings, was last issued in 1993.2 There remains the Directory of Rare Book and Special Collections in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. First published by the Rare Books Group of the Library Association in 1985, this reached its third edition under the aegis of what had become CILIP’s 1. Luther Farnham, A Glance at Private Libraries (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1855); Reginald Arthur Rye, Students’ Guide to the Libraries of London (London: University of London, 1908). Praise for the latter includes: “Probably it has been a revelation to most of us that so many non-municipal libraries exist to which access is allowed on fairly liberal terms”; and: “Perhaps Mr. Rye’s handbook may lead to a belated recognition of the immense resources existing among the numerous libraries of London, and to some movement for co-ordination…” E.A. Baker, “A Guide to the Libraries of London,” Library Associa- tion Record 10, no. 6 (1908): 257–58. 2. Lee Ash and William G. Miller, with the collaboration of Barry Scott, Kathleen Vickery, and Beverley McDonough, eds., Subject Collections: A Guide to Special Book Collections and Subject Emphases as Reported by University, College, Public, and Special Libraries and Museums in the United States and Canada, 2 vols., 7th ed. (New Providence, N.J. : R.R. Bowker, 1993). The American Library Directory names special collections but does not describe them (see American Library Directory Online, www.americanlibrarydirec- tory.com/). © 2018 by Karen Attar (CC BY-NC [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/]). 14 Rare Book and Special Collections in Overview 15 Rare Books and Special Collections Group in 2016.3 This article discusses some issues encountered in publishing the third edition. It hopes thereby to assist colleagues who may contemplate such a venture in an age in which special col- lections are becoming increasingly important as a status symbol and for public engagement as well as for research—but also at a time when print reference mate- rial and directories are becoming increasingly obsolete. Content and Purpose The Directory of Rare Book and Special Collections in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland (henceforward Directory) describes in 535 pages the rare book and printed special collections holdings of 873 institutions with at least fifty items across the British Isles. Repositories cover national, university, school, public, subscription, ecclesiastical, professional, club, and company libraries; libraries in stately homes, museums, and archives; and even a prison and a palace. Each library is listed as a single entity. Arrangement of the entries is geographical, with separate alphabetical indexes for library names, collectors, and subjects. The Directory’s purposes are: • to provide a national overview of rare book and special collections across sec- tors, especially valuable for the many without a web presence; and • to direct researchers of all levels to the most relevant libraries for their re- search needs, answering such questions as where they can best find clusters of books from a given time period on a given subject—in the wording of the first edition, ‘to bring to the notice of scholars and researchers the location of rare book collections …and to provide such information about their nature, size and importance as will enable them to assess whether or not further investiga- tion is likely to be to their benefit.’4 The emphasis is on the current whereabouts of collections available either rou- tinely or as a last resort. Collections in private hands or in institutions that will not admit non-members are therefore excluded. The Directory is intended neither as a substitute for a catalogue, listing individual titles, nor as a policing tool to track the movement of collections, covered competently elsewhere.5 3. Moelwyn I. Williams, ed., A Directory of Rare Book and Special Collections in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland (London: Library Association, 1985); B.C. Bloomfield, with the assistance of Karen Potts, ed., A Directory of Rare Book and Special Collections in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland, 2nd ed. (London: Library Association, 1997); Karen Attar, ed., Directory of Rare Book and Special Collections in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland, 3rd ed. (London: Facet Publishing, 2016). Within the British Isles, Ireland has an electronic directory, RASCAL (Research And Special Collections Available Locally), available at www.rascal.ac.uk. 4. Williams, ix. 5. Descriptions of sales, dispersals, and acquisitions typically appear in the quarterly journal The Book Collector and sometimes in the triannual Bulletin of the Historic Libraries Forum (see www.histori- clibrariesforum.org.uk/hlf/publications.html), with summaries in the chapter “Rare Books and Histori- cal Bibliography” in the serial British Library and Information Work, published at five-yearly intervals. Spring 2018 | Volume 19, Number 1 16 RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage Why Print? Like Subject Collections, previous editions of the Directory were published before the advent of the Internet and in its infancy respectively. Correspondence was by post. The third edition could not have been produced without the Internet and is affected by the Internet. E-mail communication sped up the production process and rendered the financial outlay for the project minimal. The only major cost was indexing.6 The World Wide Web helped to establish the status of collections listed in the previous edition that no longer existed in the same place and to check details from OPACs and from digitized books. Most obviously, the earlier editions, given the time of their production, had to be all-sufficient entities, including informa- tion about the repositories as well as about the collections. By contrast, the third edition, appearing in an electronic age, is a portal. It provides uniform resource locators and expects users to follow them to obtain greater detail both about the content of specific collections where available and practicalities surrounding their consultation and use, such as the service hours and rules about making reproduc- tions (both liable to change). “Why print?” is an obvious question, with the implication “Why not opt for an on- line publication in the first place?” The query may be particularly pertinent in the United States, where the printed directory of special collections was last printed be- fore the Internet age and the major current directory is online. A pragmatic reason for us was that an electronic tool, beyond an e-book, was not an option: a printed volume is what Facet Publishing, CILIP’s publishing arm, could offer, so that the choice was between a printed update and no update at all. Of these alternatives, a printed update was deemed preferable. I was appointed editor for the new edition. To judge possible demand for a printed directory in an electronic age, I asked via various e-mail lists whether librarians thought their institutions might purchase such a book for a guesstimated price of between 75 and 100 pounds ($US 114–152 at the time of asking).7 The targeted listservers included general and specific British e-mail lists; lists targeted at the American and European rare book communities; and, most broadly, the IFLA Rare Books and Manuscripts Section. Almost eighty li- braries responded affirmatively, mostly from the United Kingdom but also from the United States, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, and CILIP felt that the response justified proceeding with the project. The price named 6. Telephone calls could have added to the budget; callers generously chose not to claim. Cf the second edition, which received a grant from the Leverhulme Trust for the work of revision, travel, computing, and secretarial costs (Bloomfield, xv). 7. The lists were: [email protected]; [email protected]; archives-nra@jiscmail. ac.uk (British lists for rare books, library history, and archives respectively); [email protected] (a general British library list); [email protected] (America); members of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (www.cerl.org). For the IFLA Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, see www.ifla. org/rare-books-and-special-collections. Spring 2018 | Volume 19, Number 1 Rare Book and Special Collections in Overview 17 in the query turned out to be a wild underestimate, but brisk sales, far exceeding the publisher’s expectation, subsequently proved the genuineness of the desire. Criticism of a printed reference tool was that it dates quickly and is slow and expensive to update.8 True as this is, the implication that a database will necessar- ily be current, merely because updating is technically easy, is erroneous.