Controversy Shatters a Librarian’s Quiet : Dead Sea Scrolls: The Huntington’s William Moffett says he does not enjoy the uproar. But he cites a guiding principle of freedom of access to information.

Huntington Library Director William A. Moffett, who once helped catch a big-time rare-book thief, is now being accused by some Dead Sea Scrolls scholars of stealing away years of their work on the rare documents.

After Moffett announced this weekend that the San Marino library would make photographs of the scrolls available to scholars, several of the controlling editors in the 40-year-old scrolls translation project said the Huntington had obtained the photos illegally.

The irony of the situation is not lost on Moffett.

“It’s . . . going from combatting theft to the flip side of freeing up access,” Moffett said with a chuckle. “One side is releasing things that some say have been stolen and the other is to prevent the theft of materials so they can be available to scholars.”

Late one night in 1981, alone in the library of Oberlin College--where he was director until he came to the Huntington last year--Moffett observed a large man cutting pages out of a rare book. When the man, James Shinn, tried to leave, Moffett said, he blocked the exit and challenged him. Shinn was later arrested and authorities said he may have stolen at least $500,000 in rare books from 140 college libraries across the country from UCLA to Princeton University.

Moffett, working with the FBI and library security forces, alerted other librarians to Shinn’s activities after he jumped bail and disappeared. Shinn was caught in Philadelphia, where he pleaded guilty to the theft of more than 500 rare books.

Although Moffett says he enjoyed his “short-term celebrity status” in connection with catching the thief, he admits that the present media attention over the Huntington scroll photos dwarfs that.

“Threatening talk from a sovereign power abroad is not an experience I would recommend,” he said wryly, speaking of Israel’s possible court action to stop him from releasing the scroll photos.

The 1st Amendment and the Bill of Rights have been very much on his mind. “Basically what we have is a conflict between the sanctity of agreements made by these scholars years ago among themselves, and the higher principle of freedom of access to information in the public domain,” Moffett said Monday. “Exclusivity of access has no place in modern scholarship.”

It was some time in midsummer, as the library staff set up an exhibit in its west foyer to honor the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights, that the group known as the Dead Sea Scrolls “cartel” intimated that it wanted the library to hand over its photographic set of the scrolls.

Moffett says he uses the word intimated advisedly. He is a historian as well as a librarian, and he uses all his words advisedly, with care and footnotes.

There was something amiss here, Moffett thought. Under the same roof were documents by men such as Madison and Jefferson lauding free thought and free speech . . . and, cached in a secret library vault, photographs of the scrolls, their contents supposedly controlled by a handful of men who claimed hieratic rights over who could read them.

At best, Moffett thought it was an anachronism, and at worst, immoral.

His decision, endorsed by staff, administrators and the board of directors, may be more controversial than anything that turns up in the scrolls. Moffett has thrown a pebble into biblical scholarship’s Grand Canyon and heard an avalanche come roaring back at him.

It has, as the saying goes, thrust him into the spotlight. That was not unexpected, even if it was unwelcome. Coming barely a year after his first anniversary as the Huntington’s director, it has made him a public figure in an essentially private profession.

“I don’t welcome it, you might make that clear. One does not welcome the hassle,” he said.

In May, 1989, as vice president of the Assn. of College and Research Libraries, Moffett gave a speech in an Atlantic City casino-hotel entitled “The Librarian as Gambler.”

He talked about the risks librarians have to take, wooing money away from football teams, standing up for the integrity of their collections. “If they weren’t prepared to take political risks, they were being naive.

“There are things worth taking chances for.”

Moffett, 58--a scholar trained in English history with a doctorate from Duke University and postgraduate research at the University of London--said switching to library administration after teaching history was “a very natural transition: The library is to the historian what the chemistry lab is to the chemist.”

“Ever since I was a small child I have been interested in libraries,” he added. “I grew up in a home where books and ideas and principles were important. Fairness was . . . my father’s motto.”

Moffett admitted that he is also a risk-taker and detests the status quo.

The public payoff of his most recent gamble has been mostly good, if tactically overwhelming. One man called from Jordan to congratulate the library. Heedless of time differences, a Florida well-wisher phoned Moffett’s home, waking him out of a sound sleep to say “Good for you!” A few “intrepid news hounds” on the East Coast have been equally heedless of the California clock.

Since early Sunday, the library has been engulfed by calls from people who think it has instantly become the authority on all things Middle Eastern. The public information office had to dissuade a man from bringing in a Jordanian coin he wanted appraised.

Mostly, though, the calls have been from reporters. Moffett has tried not to be drawn into their aggressive shuttlecock game of so-and-so said this, what do you think about that?

But he has turned down no interview requests. “That’s one of the conundrums in this. We can’t very well uphold freedom of access and then refuse to make ourselves accessible.”

In courtly North Carolina cadences, he detailed the genesis of the decision, the years of jealousy over access to the scrolls, the scandal over how long it had taken to translate so little, and how the secrecy of it “gives rise to paranoia.”

The Huntington is “simply (the) custodian of information embedded in images,” he told listeners. It cannot be copyrighted. “It’s unethical and improper to do so. And in essence we’re simply providing access to information. And that’s what libraries do. That’s what we’re all about.”

One need not go as far back as the 2,000-year-old scrolls to find challenges to that philosophy. Last year, the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda said it would decide who would be allowed to use its archives and who would not, based on the slant and content of the proposed work. The library retreated from that decision almost as soon as it was announced.

For Moffett, for his staff and administrators, the 200-year-old Bill of Rights documents on display in their own west foyer helped them decide what to do about the photos of the 2,000-year-old documents in their vaults. Freedom of access “is not specifically spelled out in the Bill of Rights but, it flows from the 1st Amendment, clearly.”