Our Bright Young Librarians series continues today with Amy Hildreth Chen, the Special Collections Instruction Librarian at the University of Iowa.
How did you get
started in rare books?
My junior year at the University of Iowa, I was reading the New York Times in the cafeteria when I
ran across an
article discussing Emory University's acquisition of the Raymond Danowski
Poetry Library, at the time the largest collection of twentieth century Anglophone
poetry in private hands. When I decided pursue a PhD in English a year later, I
remembered the article and decided to apply to Emory due to the collection.
I wound up working in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare
Book Library (MARBL, now the Stuart A.
Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library) for a total of five
years, three of which I spent assisting Kevin Young, the curator of the Danowski
collection. During this time, I received a well-rounded education: I learned to
process collections, create exhibitions, manage the daily influx of
acquisitions, talk to donors, and visit with rare book and manuscript dealers.
I also brought my library work into the classroom as I designed and taught four
courses for the English department focusing on special collections holdings.
Due to these experiences, I knew I wanted to seek a career
in the field. The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) allowed
me to become a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alabama, where I devoted
two years to coordinating their instruction, exhibition, and outreach programs
while writing a book about the Wade Hall collection. Wade Hall collected
American books, manuscripts, music, and quilts; his collection is the largest
at Alabama and the most eclectic. Sadly, Wade Hall passed away this fall, but
my work honoring his collection should be forthcoming from New South Books in
late 2016.
Where did you earn
your advanced degree?
I have a PhD in English from Emory. My official areas of
expertise are twentieth century British, Irish, and American poetry as well as
archive theory. My dissertation discussed the American market for twentieth-century
literary collections.
What is your role at
your institution?
I became the Special Collections Instruction Librarian at
the University of Iowa in June 2015. The department split Colleen
Theisen's role as Outreach and Instruction Librarian to allow her to focus
on Outreach while giving someone new the opportunity to manage the rapidly
expanding Instruction program.
Now, I oversee the daily ins and outs of booking, preparing
for, and teaching classes, although I certainly don't teach them all on my own.
To give you a sense of the scale of our program, this fall we taught 119
classes as a department. What I like most about my job is the mandate I've been
given to develop innovative curricula using rare materials.
I also run Archive
Journal's Twitter feed and help edit the Notes and Queries section with Gabrielle
Dean and Lauren Coats.
Favorite rare
book/ephemera that you've handled?
I work equally with rare books and manuscript collections,
so can I cheat and name two?
My favorite rare book is Josef Albers' Interaction of Color (1963). I taught a session for Anne Herbert's
Color Theory class nearly every semester I spent at Alabama. During one visit, Anne
mentioned that Yale used the text and images in the book to create an app.
So when Sue Hettmansperger from Iowa's School of Art and Art History just
happened to request a session on Albers, I asked her if she'd be willing to
stretch her concept of the visit to include a discussion of the app. She graciously
agreed. We had a wonderful time analyzing how each plate achieves its surprising
effect and then comparing the physical version to its digital adaptation. I
appreciate the book's beauty as well as how it lends itself to a variety of
curricular approaches.
My favorite manuscript is Lucille Clifton's typescript of
the Book of Days, the poetry
collection left unpublished at the time of her death. Every one of those poems
is striking. I find the poem "birth-day" especially devastating: "what we will
become/ waits in us like an ache."
What do you
personally collect?
I collect poetry broadsides from the institutions where I've
been employed. Broadsides represent my interest in poetry and visual art and
they are a nice way to chart the timeline of my life. I have quite a few
broadsides from Emory as well as a few from Alabama. But, appropriately, the
first broadside I picked up was "There is a Gold Light in Certain Old
Paintings" by Donald Justice. I was given it for free when I attended a
memorial reading at Iowa in 2004. Now that I've come full circle and work where
I used to study, that broadside has a place of pride in my living room.
What do you like to
do outside of work?
I continue to pursue my academic research and I do some
creative writing as well. When I need to turn my brain off, I practice Pilates.
My husband and I also like to try out new restaurants.
What excites you
about rare book librarianship?
I believe rare book librarianship, and special collections
as a whole, is at the vanguard of research and teaching in higher education.
Jacques Derrida may have popularized the concept of the "archival turn," but
rare book librarians and archivists are the ones who get the credit for the
profession's development in the past decade.
Since I teach where I went to school, I have an intimate
perspective on this shift. I watch how courses I took over a decade ago that
didn't come to special collections now dedicate two or more sessions to working
with rare materials. It's an honor to participate in this more inclusive vision
of special collections.
Thoughts on the
future of special collections/rare book librarianship?
It's going to be great. Colleges and universities realize
that using rare books and manuscripts in the classroom generates richer
educational experiences. Students light up when they read a letter from the
past or hold a book from centuries ago. That delight helps them tolerate some
of the challenges that naturally arise when working with our materials. As individual
teaching faculty become more aware of what's possible pedagogically, their interest
only grows. The key for us is to continue to build sustainable instruction
programs that offer quality curricula to our campuses while balancing the preservation
needs of our holdings and working well with our colleagues in other sectors of
the academic library.
More broadly, the future of special collections
librarianship also depends on the future of higher education. As we shift to
new methods of inquiry in the humanities, and more people move into alt-ac
roles, staying cutting-edge in instruction and research depends on continuing
to embrace and incorporate diverse perspectives.
Any unusual or
interesting collection at your library you'd like to draw our attention to?
I must highlight the strength of our book arts collection.
It supports UI's Center for the Book, but it's so rich that students from other
universities regularly visit the collection. My colleague Margaret
Gamm does a fantastic job selecting new acquisitions. The most recent
arrivals get a place of pride in our reading room, where students and faculty
often stop in to pursue what she's bought. I love thinking about how humanities
researchers and artists use the same materials differently.
Any upcoming
exhibitions at your library?
Iowa just remodeled the main library to create a
state-of-the-art gallery. In January 2016, our first exhibition will focus on
James Van Allen, who pioneered magnetospheric research in space. After that, our
next shows include an exhibition on Star Trek and a show devoted to Shakespeare's
First Folio, on tour from the Folger Shakespeare Library.
