Word: bryants
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This school year has been marked by vast changes in the leadership of Harvard's libraries. Louis E. Martin, for six years the College Librarian, left to direct the libraries at Cornell University. Top-level administrators in Widener and other libraries are leaving, and others have died. Bryant, who turns 65 this year, must leave Harvard at the end of this year too. You can tell he's not pleased about leaving half his life behind...
...Bryant has served under three different presidents, and the record of his tenure is, in the words of one longtime staffer, "beyond remarkable." He's built a library staff, which he ceaselessly praises as the most committed and competent in the nation, that has kept Harvard in the fore of the library world. The number of employees in the College Library system--those 15 which come under the Widener bailiwick--has stayed the same for the past ten years. But acquisitions of collections, and hence the workload of the staff, have dramatically increased. Harvard's library system, once labelled...
...nationally-known figure in the libraries and the art of library science, Bryant has transformed this philosophy into actions. He has sat on myriads of library, book and academic commissions. For ten years, for example, Bryant chaired the National Committee on the Preservation of Books. "Practically any book printed since the mid-19th century is on paper which is deteriorating at some rate," he sighs. "The libraries of this country face the enormous problem of preserving man's intellectual memory." Bryant is not used to dealing with problems on a small scale. He designed, engineered and oversaw the massive switch...
...Bryant ranks second only to the Archives he built as a storehouse of University lore. "When Mrs. Widener gave the library," he begins, "she conceived of it as containing Harry Widener's quite phenomenal collection of rare books and manuscripts." In the gift contract, the University agreed it would not change or add a brick to the original structure, although it later explored and rejected the possibility of building in the light courts which separate the east and west portions of the Widener stacks. "The bridge between Widener and Houghton Library is, technically, a temporary structure," Bryant says...
...Bryant fearfully recalls some of the more tense moments he has spent in Widener. Sometime in the 1950s, he recalls, a professor emeritus "of vast age" disappeared into the stacks with coat and hat to read. Sometime later, one library staffer found just the coat and hat where the professor had been. "The rumors flew hot and heavy," Bryant remembers, but the professor had merely forgotten his things. Incidents of theft rattle his memory further. While Bryant was still a student, the story is told, a man stole thousands of books from the collection. The culprit was later caught...