Priceless and fragile, USC’s Special Collections are handled every day by thousands of virtual visitors.

by chris horn

Patrick Koske-McBride had his sights set on winning a junior-high essay contest in Bishop, California. What he needed was solid information about his subject, Charles Darwin. What he didn’t know was that a virtual treasure trove on Darwin, including rare books and other publications, was 3,000 miles away at the University of South Carolina. Fortunately, the resourceful Patrick did what thousands of people do every day: he surfed the Web and rode a cyber wave to Carolina’s Thomas Cooper Library where he found just what he was looking for.

“The Darwin [Web] site at the University of South Carolina was awesome,” said Patrick, now a high-school sophomore. “I called the library there and got a phone number for the man who gave the collection of Darwin books to the university.”

Patrick chatted with C. Warren Irvin, a retired cardiologist and Darwin enthusiast whose donated collection to USC is valued at more than $100,000. With Irvin’s insights and information from USC’s online Darwin exhibit, Patrick penned an essay on Darwin’s contributions to society. His winning composition made it all the way to the National History Day competition where he placed fifth in the nation.

“The thing is, he would never have known about our Darwin collection or Dr. Irvin if it were not for our Web site,” said Patrick Scott, curator of Special Collections in Thomas Cooper Library. “Five years ago, we had nothing on the Web, so you would have had to come to the library to see our collections—and only specialized researchers were expected to handle the rarer items.”

How USC’s cloistered special collections were bared to the world—via the World Wide Web—is a story of technology and pragmatism converging.

Like other rare books curators, Scott and his colleagues have had to protect Thomas Cooper Library’s special collections from misuse. Some of the items such as parchments and papers are hundreds of years old; many are fragile, priceless, and irreplaceable, which in librarian-speak translates, “Don’t touch (without a very good reason)!” In the past, that meant the closest most people would get to Audubon’s first edition of Birds of America was by looking through a glass display case.

Now, tens of of thousands of visitors—including essay contest writers from California—can explore the collections, virtually speaking, without so much as bending a page.

“We wanted to introduce Carolina students to rare books without having lots of students repeatedly handling the same items—that was our first impetus for creating Web-based exhibits,” Scott said.

So about the time America began to discover the Web in the mid-1990s, USC’s libraries began to mount their own Web pages. For the Special Collections area, that meant creating online exhibits to showcase collections that are cumulatively valued at $100 million.

“It used to be that only other rare book collectors or librarians would know about what we had here,” Scott said. “Now, it’s everybody! Some of these collections get thousands of hits a month.”

That’s especially gratifying to people like Irvin, who donated the Darwin collection to USC.

“I spent 35 years or so collecting all of these Darwin-related items and used to invite people to look at the collection when-ever they came over to my house,” Irvin said. “It gave me a lot of pleasure to donate the collection to USC, but I never imagined that this many people would ever see it.”

Scott likes to tell the story of the Princeton University student who was writing a senior thesis on F. Scott Fitzgerald but couldn’t find everything he needed in Princeton’s Fitzgerald collection.

“He got material from the Bruccoli Collection here that Princeton (where Fitzgerald went to college) could not supply,” Scott said.

Other Web users who have tapped into USC’s Special Collections include South African schoolteachers who accessed USC’s on-line exhibit about early African exploration to develop new history courses. Medical school students from around the country account for thousands of hits logged on USC’s Jenner Vaccination exhibit on the Web. The exhibit recounts the history of the development of smallpox vaccination, a textbook case for immunology courses.

During an average week, more than 16,000 hits are registered on the various Web sites that highlight USC’s Special Collections, which are crosslinked with the Smithsonian Institute and other international archives.

The numbers are pleasantly high, and Scott is pleased that the library is able to show off much more of its collection on the Web and leave it online far longer than a traditional glass-case exhibit permits. “When you put a rare book inside a display case, users can only see two pages of the book. A Web site can potentially display every page and picture of the book,” he said.

The future looks even brighter—and probably clearer—for Web exhibits such as those found at Thomas Cooper Library.

“As the bandwidth of Internet connections widens, you’ll start finding even more information available on these sites,” said David Chesnutt, a 30-year veteran history professor at USC who has extensive experience with electronic publishing and archiving.

For instance, pictures of historic documents on Web sites will be offered in much higher resolution, giving viewers a truer image than current low-resolution images allow. Faster and larger connections also will allow displays of more elaborate video and audio files to accompany simple text and photographs, Chesnutt said. And more libraries and archives will make their collections available on the Web. The Library of Congress, for example, plans to put five million documents on line by 2001.

“We’re interested in making our exhibits more educational instead of merely documentary,” Scott said. “We’re planning to provide more links to related sites and more complete text. For instance, we just put up a page on the Lords Proprietors’ grant from 1699, which is written in Latin, and there’s a link to a completed English translation so that students can read it.

“In short, we want to make our collections—which, by necessity, have been limited in access for so long—available for everyone to use.”