Harvard Library System to Go High-Tech

One of the world’s largest libraries is joining the computer age and rescuing some of its oldest books from obscurity.

The catalogue of the unparalleled collection of the Harvard University libraries is being transferred from old-fashioned paper cards that date to Abraham Lincoln’s first term.

“It’s like an archeological dig,” said Maureen Finn, project manager for Online Computer Library Center Inc., the contractor on the six-year, $15-million undertaking.

The Harvard library system, with 12.2 million volumes, is larger than that of any other university, and one of the five largest libraries of any kind.

It also is one of the last large libraries to transfer its complete catalogue to computers.

“Many, many other libraries converted their collections years ago, but the scope of this one was such that we thought it wasn’t feasible,” said Karen Carlson Young, a Harvard cataloguer who is coordinating the project.

Only acquisitions since 1977 were already computerized, meaning researchers have to use the card catalogues to find older books. Increasingly, they haven’t bothered.

“The danger has existed that the older books would become a dead collection,” said assistant library director and historian Kenneth E. Carpenter.

The so-called retrospective conversion project is the most ambitious since the university hired someone in 1790 to write down all the libraries’ titles for a printed catalogue.

There are exclusive collections on angling, cooking, housekeeping, Spanish theater scripts, Siam, Icelandic literature, Congolese languages and French scientific works.

“We’ve housed it, we’ve preserved it, we’ve taken care of it and it makes sense to make it more accessible,” said Richard De Gennaro, librarian of Harvard College.

The breadth of the 354-year-old collection, Carpenter said, stems from “the desire by Harvard librarians that they possess everything.”

The idiosyncrasies of those librarians also make it hard to find a book today. Some of the library’s index cards were handwritten or catalogued by rules now obsolete. Some are in Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese and other writing styles.

“They have people who have been with the library for what seems like 100 years and they have to bring them out to decipher what the different markings mean,” Finn said.

Some student dissertations are arranged under the name of the adviser, often professors long dead. A collection of material about American private schools is shelved by school. Business school publications are catalogued by corporate name.

“It’s like running a business with only part of the inventory computerized,” Carpenter said.

Officials from the Dublin, Ohio-based contractor say Harvard’s is the largest project of its kind they’ve undertaken, and as many as 30 people may eventually be assigned to it full time. The company has 200 operators and six librarians who catalogue about 1 million titles a month for 15,000 libraries.

An estimated 5% of Harvard’s holdings are duplicated nowhere else in the United States, officials said.

Harvard’s riches include a Gutenberg Bible, a 1623 Shakespeare first folio, a 1520 treatise by Martin Luther and Benedict Arnold’s journal of the 1775 American expedition against Quebec. It owns the papers of Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, Leon Trotsky and John Updike.

Harvard’s librarians won’t agree that the cataloguing may turn up unknown treasures buried in the vast numbers of books. But Carpenter concedes he once pounced on the chance to buy a rare second edition of a Danish book, convinced the Harvard library didn’t have it.

“Not only did Harvard have the second edition,” he said. “It had the first edition.”