My favorite definition of the function of a university is "teaching and learning in a climate of research." Ball State University has long embraced just such a definition, and I am sure that most of my academic colleagues will have their own cherished personal anecdotes that exemplify my maxim. that exemplify my maxim.
Arguably the most satisfying research arises from or Arguably the most satisfying research arises from or imbues one's teaching. It is just such a story, based on a imbues one's teaching. It is just such a story, based on a serendipitous discovery in the preparation of a senior serendipitous discovery in the preparation of a senior seminar, that I wish to share with you. seminar, that I wish to share with you.
I arrived at Ball State in the fall of 2002. In my second academic year here, I was encouraged to offer a senior seminar, entitled "From Gutenberg to Ben Franklin: The Impact of the Hand Press." This is an intensive course in book history that examines the dissemination of knowledge from antiquity through to the age of the Internet, but concentrates most particularly on the cultural impact of print. I had taught this course earlier in my career, and I print. I had taught this course earlier in my career, and I knew that reorganizing it in a new environment always poses interesting challenges.
When I taught book history at my previous university in New York City, I was able to take advantage of the proximity of the Pierpont Morgan Museum with, among other treasures, its extraordinary collection of medieval illuminated manuscripts and private press books from the late-nineteenth century, and also Bowne & Co. Stationers, at the South Street Seaport, where my students were able to practice hand printing using a Victorian-era Albion press. But how was one to translate such opportunities to Muncie, Indiana?
Bracken Library's Archives and Special Collections has a respectable holding of early books and manuscripts that is adequate to support the teaching of book history. In addition, the Ball State Museum of Art has among its holdings individual sheets taken from late-medieval illuminated manuscripts and fifteenth-century printed
books. Many of these are in the process of being digitized and will soon become available for examination online.
In planning my book history course, I was able to arrange two field trips. One was to the Lilly Library in Bloomington, where students saw brilliant examples from one of the world's finest collections. Many of the rarest early books for children at Lilly came from the collection of Elisabeth Ball. The library at Bloomington also owns a replica of the kind of wooden hand press that would have been used by Benjamin Franklin, and my students were able to see first-hand how printing was done at the advent of the United States.
The second trip was to the beautifully renovated Carnegie Library in downtown Muncie and its adjacent Local History and Genealogy Center, where my students learned about the history of the library, were shown significant items from the collection (including early Muncie newspapers), and were instructed about the value of archives. During the renovation, which had just been completed, a cache of ledgers and other documents pertaining to the library had been discovered in the attics. None of these documents had seen the light of day for practically a full century.
The full cache contains the records of the Muncie Public Library from its inception in 1874 through to 1902, when plans for a new Carnegie Library were nearing fruition.
Librarians have the reputation of not wishing to discard anything. Apparently, when the Carnegie Library was opened, the records of the old library were carted across
town to the new building, and very soon banished to the purgatory of the attics. The documents are extensive, and I have space here only to describe several of the most
important.
Primary among the ledgers are the detailed itemization of all the books that were acquired and a parallel volume that contains the names and addresses of library patrons and their guarantors. Each of these is in the neat handwriting of the city's
early librarians, and every book and every patron was respectively given a discrete library number.
However, what makes these records so significant is the survival of another set of ledgers that reveal the day-today borrowing activities of the library. Inscribed here in pencil alongside each other are the two sets of numbers that link the books to their borrowers. These seemingly unpropitious ledgers are the glue that connects the book and patron records. Not all these ledgers have survived but for the period from 1894 to 1902, 23 out of 24 are extant.
As readers of the Ball State Alumnus will know, Muncie has been the chosen location since the pioneering work of Helen and Robert Lynd in the 1920s of Middletown Studies, whereby it is deemed the prototypical Midwestern small city. My colleagues at the Center for Middletown Studies, Professors Bruce Geelhoed and James Connolly, immediately recognized the significance of the discovery.
For the first time, it has become possible to study in detail one of the most important aspects of the cultural life of early Muncie, its library, and the reading habits of its citizens. The research project that has arisen from this we have named "What Middletown Read."
Our plan is to digitize all the surviving records within a fully searchable database that will have worldwide access. We are fortunate that city directories for Muncie exist
for the 1890s, and the 1900 U.S. Census gives us much fuller profiles of many of the readers.
Typical questions that users of the database will be able to pose once it is complete might include "What percentage of the borrowers were women readers?" "What were the most popular turn-of-the-century children's books?" "Was Mark Twain or Charles Dickens widely read in the Midwest?" "What local authors were represented in the library?" "Were there minority readers with access to the library?"
"What was the social status of Muncie's readers?"
Other records will permit us to explore the socio-economics of book borrowing, the existence of book clubs, and the special place accorded to the library itself within the community.
Since its inception in 2003-04, "What Middletown Read" has made great strides. The provost's office at Ball State provided the project with seed money to get it started, and we have been most fortunate in receiving invaluable help from University
Computing Services in constructing our database. During our first two years, we have had the benefit of two outstanding graduate assistants, Maria Staton and Abigail Comber, who together developed a pilot study culled from four full weeks of records. The final database will record and make searchable approximately 190,000
transactions.
This academic year, we are being aided by two Honors College senior fellows, Kelly Hacker and Sarah Bradbury, who have been doing sterling work. Without exception, our student assistants have found working on the project a wonderful
way of cutting their teeth as novice researchers. It is proving a first-rate learning experience for all of us.
Leading scholars in book history have come from across the United States and even from Great Britain to see the newly discovered records first-hand. Members of our team have given papers about the discovery at the Small Cities Conference in Muncie, the National Collegiate Honors Council in New Orleans, and the British
Book Trade History conference in Birmingham, England.
Fall semester, I conducted the book history course again, this time as a colloquium in the Honors College, and the students participated in the project as an integral aspect of the course. The completion of the database, an international conference at which we shall more fully share our fi ndings with the larger academic community, and a book length co-authored study of "What Middletown Read" are for the future. In the meantime, our byword remains teaching and learning in a climate of research. Can there be anything more heady than that?
Photos in this spotlight provided by permission of the Muncie Public Library
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