Ode to a Caltech library

John Sutherland

Like other academics, I am rigidly con-servative about libraries. It takes so long to learn their funny little ways that one resents change. Above all, radical change. It’s not just the labor of having to start over. There is something inherently nostalgic about institutional collections, residues of past scholarship. Do the sums, and around 80 percent of the authors in a university library have gone to their reward. One would no more disturb the shelves and their arrangement than one would dig up a Quaker graveyard.

I grieved when the Clinton K. Judy Library in Baxter Hall was broken up, partly sold off, partly given away, and partly stored. It was a wonderful simulacrum of a gentleman-bibliophile’s mind, circa 1935. Many an afternoon, snoozing alongside the shelves during a Monroe seminar in the Judy, I would idly and furtively browse Alumni Cantabrigiensis, 1750–1835, or whatever. Now the space is occupied by an economics lab. Sic transit, as Professor Judy would have said, with a gentlemanly sigh.

I mildly obstructed (as a member of the Library Committee in the 1980s) computerized cataloging in Millikan. What was wrong with index cards? I was wrong, of course. But the instinct—revere the library as you would your parish church—is, I think, correct.

For humanists the library at Caltech has an unusual character. The scholar based in Pasadena, CA 91125 is, of course, “spoiled.” The Calinet privilege (a cooperative between Caltech and UCLA) means that one not only has unfettered use (including borrowing) of UCLA’s collection but of the UC’s massive central storage deposit. What UC gets out of the deal I’ve never understood. Within civilized walking distance is the Huntington. And, half an hour away, the Honnold at Claremont. If you’re in my field and you can’t find a book, you are probably not looking.

Millikan has, as I see it, defined an interesting and typically Caltech (i.e., unique) niche role for itself. It has moved away from collecting scholarship to distributing it. The InterLibrary Loan system is extraordinarily efficient. And, much more often than one should, I have simply phoned Judy Nollar (the Humanities and Social Sciences librarian). I don’t know another library, anywhere, that combines state-of-the-art delivery systems with a (smiling) human face. Millikan, in my experience, delivers. In other libraries, the user fetches. Once you get the hang of it, it’s addictive.

I now visit Caltech one quarter a year. In the interval of my being away there have been big changes. I’ve tried, but I can’t resent them. In fact, I have to fight the urge to go and play with the new library—or at least its new machinery. The Humanities collection has been removed from the fourth and fifth floors to the basement and was opened for use on the first day of this term.

What is a source of endless pleasure (childish pleasure, I confess) are the new compact shelves in the basement. One is, of course, used to the old manually operated versions in which, like a nineteenth-century washerwoman, you laboriously turn a mangle handle. Librarians hated these compact shelves because library users—incorrigibly lazy—would (despite any number of warning notices) try to move half a dozen at a time, so rupturing the mechanism.

Millikan’s compacts are, however, electrically operated. You can move, with a touch of the finger, five tons of books—waiting, expectantly, for the scream at the other end of the room where, as in some Edgar Allan Poe story, a luckless browser is crushed to a pancake. (I jest, of course; there is a safety feature requiring you to check first that no one is in the target zone.)

I have never felt so empowered in a library before. Is it a bird, is it a plane, is it SuperScholar? And, of course, it makes locating the books easy as pie. Or pancake. The collection doesn’t stand comparison with that at UCLA. But, being Caltech and being Humanities, the books are always there.

The only thing lacking are the marble-mosaic–tiled restrooms, once to be found on every other floor of Millikan. Legend (probably apocryphal) has it that the Institute did not want the donor to be uncomfortable on his or her formal first walk through the high-rise structure. Now relief has to be sought in more functional cabinets. Sic transit, as Professor Judy would say.

Visiting professor of literature John Sutherland is a former Caltech faculty member (1984–1992) and executive officer for the humanities.
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