Reflections on the ISAW Library's Digital Bookplates project
As a student currently earning two master’s degrees, one in Library and Information Science from Long Island University and the other in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, the project work I completed during the fall of 2021 for ISAW’s library was remarkably well-suited to my interests in promoting discoverability of library resources, and historical research and writing. Over approximately three months, I researched significant scholars of ancient civilizations whose libraries were either gifted to or purchased by ISAW, and now comprise a significant portion of the library collection. Armed with this information, I wrote biographies on the lives and scholarship of the former owners of these library materials, along with bibliographic information on the collections. These texts are a portion of a larger project that the library is currently undertaking, to create pages on the website that will more clearly introduce researchers to the former owners of parts of ISAW’s library collection.
Working on this project prompted me to ruminate on the value of communicating a library collection’s origins and history to its users. Particularly in a specialized collection like ISAW, I imagine that the historiographic information available from studying an individual scholar’s personal library could be relevant to a number of projects. However, even detached from the utility of this information in a research context, explaining the collection management strategies of ISAW’s library has the potential to clarify the library’s priorities to their user population. For example, ISAW’s acquisition of these personal libraries of notable scholars communicates a broader institutional commitment to understanding the history and lineage of the field of ancient studies.
On a practical level, knowing more about the research interests, careers, and backgrounds of the people whose libraries have been subsumed into the ISAW library gives insight into why certain areas of study are particularly strongly represented in the collection. For example, ISAW has a notable collection of Armenian-language resources, many of which are difficult to find in American libraries, due to the acquisition of the library of Nina Garsoïan, a celebrated scholar of the South Caucasus and the Byzantine Empire. Introductions to these collections can also highlight unique resources, such as a large collection of 35mm slides from the collection of Cornelius and Emily Vermeule. ISAW conducted an inventory of the slides, scanned instances of original photography, and added these images to the Ancient World Image Bank (AWIB).
Overall, contributing to this project was a rewarding learning experience, and I look forward to seeing how the ISAW library realizes the final iteration of the project in the future.