Cultural Policy
An International Treasure
The Dutch and Flemish Library Collections at Harvard University
The Dutch and Flemish Library Collections at Harvard University were nondescript until 1906, when an anonymous gift made possible the purchase of substantial numbers of historical periodicals, society publications, and local histories. In fact, the history of the Low Countries - from federal and regional levels to cities and small towns - is a real strength of Harvard's collections today. Researchers interested in a particular place in the Netherlands or Flanders can consult Harvard's resources with the confidence of being able to find what they seek.
Until his death in 1927, Archibald Cary Coolidge - professor of history, director of the Harvard Library, and perhaps Harvard's greatest librarian ever - built up the Dutch and Flemish collections by his own means. Coolidge also cultivated any potential donor who might be interested in the Low Countries. One was the Dutch-born Edward Bok, whom Coolidge approached to found the John Lothrop Motley Memorial Collection of Dutch and Flemish History, Literature and Art. Although Coolidge's plan failed in this rare instance, Edward Bok did leave an important legacy in his grandson Derek Curtis Bok, Harvard's 25th president.
Since the middle of this century Widener Library, Harvard's primary library covering the humanities and the social sciences, has endeavoured to collect books from the Low Countries comprehensively. Approximately 14 percent of the Harvard Library's 13 million volumes are Germanic by language. These collections support some 70 Germanic courses taught at Harvard. Recent courses related to the Low Countries have included elementary Dutch, the cultural history of the Low Countries, The Survival of the Past in Dutch Golden Age Painting, and Dutch Seventeenth-Century Landscape Painting. Many other courses at Harvard feature topics specific to the Low Countries.
The Harvard community of students and faculty is not restricted to the faculty and students of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures or the Minda de Ginzburg Centre for European Studies. Harvard libraries also consider the needs of each of the University's undergraduates, graduate students, teachers, officers and staff with an interest in Low Countries Studies, as well as the national and international scholarly communities.
The history of Dutch and Flemish studies at Harvard, like the history of the University, is not merely of excellence but of continuous improvement upon excellence. In the last 100 years Harvard's Dutch and Flemish library collections have enjoyed a seamless blurring together of their own golden ages. Why? Because library administrators, librarians, proponents of libraries, and generous donors have exerted themselves to ensure the magnificence of the collections. Thanks to the generous support and personal commitment of many individuals and organisations, Harvard remains a significant locus of Low Countries studies outside the Low Countries.
That's the good news. The bad news is that the Dutch and Flemish book trades continue to place the Harvard's acquisition budgets under severe duress, due to three main factors: proliferating titles, fluctuating currency exchange rates, and high book prices (especially for serials and monographic standing orders, which require long-term commitments).
Currently about 17,000 Dutch and Flemish titles are published annually, Harvard's Widener Library acquires - normally via purchase - approximately 10 percent of these, or 1,700 titles, as monographs, and a similar amount as serial items. Twenty percent of the annual bibliographic output may not appear to be extensive coverage. It is, however: Widener Library is able to collect essentially every original work of fiction, history, philosophy, social science produced in the Low Countries. And other Harvard libraries acquire Dutch and Flemish materials in their respective subject areas: music, law, medicine, business, fine arts, and so on.
In order to continue documenting the bibliographic universe from the Low Countries well, Harvard libraries need to increase their financial resources. Sustained financial growth is necessary if Harvard is to maintain the depth of its Dutch and Flemish collections for future generations. Sadly, what is happening today at many research libraries in the United States is a deepening chasm between the number of titles published and the number of titles actually collected by the libraries. When these libraries reduce their acquisitions budgets, they have no choice but to concentrate on fewer and fewer core collections.
The library of yesteryear, the ‘algemene bibliotheek’, is today only possible at a handful of libraries in the Anglo-American world: the Library of Congress, the British Library, the University Libraries of California in Berkeley and Los Angeles. And of course Harvard, whose Dutch and Flemish collections at more than 90 libraries ensure the full expression of human thought.
michael p. olson
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