Lights, Camera, Action!

Watch, listen and learn how the Marian Library impacts the study of the Blessed Virgin Mary on campus and beyond

Climate Change: Implications for Professional Best Practices in Special Collections

This presentation responds to research presented by Eira Tansey, Ben Goldman, and Whitney Ray. Both presentations were part of the seminar “Climate Change and Cultural Heritage: Gathering Data and Exploring Professional Implications for a Very Different Future,” presented on June 22 at RBMS 2018

Remarks from Opening Celebration

The story of the juggler, in brief, is a story about vocation and the gifts we each have to offer. On Christmas Eve, a juggler performs for a statue of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, scandalizing the other monks in his community. Juggling is not appropriate — not the kind of gift one should give. In other words, not appropriately intellectual or elevated, like the gift of a book or a poem. But those judgmental observers are wrong because when the juggler has finished his performance and collapsed in exhaustion, the statue comes to life: The Infant Jesus smiles, and the Virgin Mary wipes his sweaty brow. There are connections to other Christmas stories here, such as the Biblical gifts of the Wise Men; or Nativity sets where villagers bring fish or pretzels to the Holy Family; or popular Christmas songs such as The Little Drummer Boy.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/ml_juggler/1005/thumbnail.jp

The Nativity Collection In The Marian Library

The Marian Library was founded in 1943 by the Society of Mary, the Catholic religious order which also founded the University of Dayton in 1850. Those two dates are significant because the library was established to mark the centennial of the university’s founding. With exemplary forethought, the Society of Mary allowed seven years to build a library collection so that it would be ready for the official centennial. This deliberate mindset and commitment to education is still apparent today, even as the decline in vocations means fewer Marianists and more laypeople filling the offices on campus. From the beginning, the mission of the Marian Library was “to make the Blessed Virgin Mary better known, loved, and served.” This has meant that the library collects broadly, with collections representing both the “three Ds” (dogma, doctrine, and discipline) of Catholicism and also traditions that have more popular origins. In the early years, the Marian Library focused on books, but its scope soon expanded to include visual materials and other ephemera. Today, the collections include archival materials such as holy cards, postcards, stamps, scrapbooks, photographs, and, in a more recent approach to collection development, archived websites of Marian shrines. The collection includes approximately 100,000 volumes of circulating books and about 12,000 non-circulating rare volumes dating back to the fifteenth century. There is devotional realia such as rosaries, medals, and even several relics. The art collection includes approximately 14,000 items, some of which are fine art (original prints from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and some of which fall more into the categories of kitsch or illustration (catechetical posters or framed replicas of original artwork). The best-known collection in the Marian Library is the nativity set collection, a subset of the art collection numbering around 3,600 sets

The Marian Library\u27s Flight Plan: Appointments to Ensure Safety

After offering continuous services remotely since March, the Marian Library is taking its first steps to in-person services. Appointments, masks and safe distancing are among new protocols

What Can You Do with Unwanted Holy Cards and Grandma\u27s Religious Statues? Well, that Depends

As librarians at the University of Dayton’s Marian Library, we help curate a collection of religious artifacts that, depending on how you count it, numbers in the hundreds of thousands. It includes postage stamps, wine labels, books, statues and rosaries. Many of the items are Catholic and have been gifted to the library by charitable individuals looking to do the right thing with a family heirloom or the collection of a recently deceased loved one. Donations could include anything from medieval manuscripts to a car air freshener featuring Our Lady of Guadalupe. In many cases, donations are welcome. But we struggle with what to do when donations duplicate items we already have, or if the gifted item is not of particular value. And this happens frequently, especially with mass-produced items such as rosaries or cheap plastic statues

Mary, Undoer of Knots: Unraveling Best Practices for Unwanted Donations and Deaccessioned Collection Items in a Catholic Library

When humorist Tommy Tighe tweeted that he is “so Catholic I bury old parish bulletins instead of throwing them out whenever I clean out the van, just in case,”1 many on #CatholicTwitter felt a twinge of recognition. In addition to the human tendency to accumulate material things, there is also legitimate concern in a Catholic context about discarding materials associated with the practice of faith. The parish bulletin is an extreme example; we can safely relegate that to the recycle bin once we have read about the ladies’ breakfast and the Christmas wreath fundraiser. In the routine practice of the faith, sacramentals such as palms from Palm Sunday and broken rosaries are examples of materials that ought to be appropriately destroyed or repurposed. The Catholic Church provides specific canon law and commentary about the treatment of “sacred objects,” as well as historical directives for how to dispose of altar vessels and other liturgical objects. But there are also materials of popular devotion that raise questions; we simply cannot know how every item has been used by its previous owners. The sacred nature of some objects is not determined exclusively by what they are but also by how they have been used. The 1964 Collectio rituum literally contains a “blessing of anything” or “blessing for all things” at the end of its section of blessings of objects for ordinary use, meaning that just about anything in a Catholic library collection may have been blessed.2 In Catholic cultural heritage institutions, we need to take into account library best practice and standards for deaccessioning, weeding, discarding—even, rarely, destroying—Catholic objects. At the same time, we need the freedom to make responsible decisions about what does not belong in our collections

Rethinking Special Collections Moves as Opportunities, not Obstacles

In the summer of 2017, the Marian Library—a special library devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary within the larger University of Dayton Libraries system—completed a move of its rare book and archival collections into a new space within the main library building. The space, previously leased to the Society of Mary provincial archives, was already outfitted with a Liebert system for temperature and humidity controls, as well as shelving and some furniture. Prior to the move, the rare book collection and archival holdings were stored in less than ideal conditions. In 2014, a consultant from Lyrasis conducted a preservation assessment that confirmed much of what we already knew: the space had wildly fluctuating temperature and humidity levels, which were causing damage to the collections. Most of the shelves were filled to capacity, an issue that challenged our ability to expand our holdings. Finally, the physical layout of the stacks room, with multiple entry points from the public areas of the library, made it difficult to secure the materials effectively. The Marian Library has approximately 12,000 rare books and 1,300 linear feet of manuscript collections. The rare book collection includes medieval manuscripts and incunabula, as well as theological and devotional material from around the world; one area of strength, for example, is early Mexican imprints on the topic of the Virgin Mary. The archival collections include personal papers; institutional records; collections of postcards, holy cards, and photographs; and realia such as rosaries, scapulars, and medals. The relatively small size of the collection made it possible to undertake the move with library personnel, something that would not be an option for a larger collection (for comparison, consider recent collection moves at the Bancroft Library and the Beinecke Library). The planning process for the move took several months, starting in spring 2016. The move itself was delayed by some of the surprises of the process—it took significantly longer than anticipated for some work to be completed by the facilities department and their external contractors—but the time of the delay was filled with work on an inventory and preparatory work in the new space. The rare book move was completed in spring 2017, with the archives move completed in summer 2017. All of this work was completed in addition to the regular duties of library personnel; it was typically done in short shifts of several hours at a time. The opportunity to move our most precarious materials into a better-controlled space was welcome. It also came at an advantageous time; in addition to the aforementioned preservation assessment, library staff had recently completed revisions to the library’s disaster plan and collection development policy that helped frame decision-making throughout the move process. Having recently worked on these documents put library personnel in a frame of mind to consider collection care as part of the workflow for a collection move. Knowing just how overdue the collection was for improved conditions prompted prioritization of processes (such as an inventory and a basic conservation assessment) that elongated the timeline but also made the move more successful. Moving special collections is a challenge under any circumstances, and our move was not without difficulty. However, we found that a large-scale collections move was more than just a series of obstacles to overcome; it was an opportunity for the library to improve physical space, stakeholder relationships, library practices, and the condition of the collections

Rethinking Special Collections Moves as Opportunities, not Obstacles

In the summer of 2017, the Marian Library—a special library devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary within the larger University of Dayton Libraries system—completed a move of its rare book and archival collections into a new space within the main library building. The space, previously leased to the Society of Mary provincial archives, was already outfitted with a Liebert system for temperature and humidity controls, as well as shelving and some furniture

The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century

This book brings together an international body of scholars working on eighteenth-century botany within the context of imperial expansion. The eighteenth century saw widespread exploration, a tremendous increase in the traffic in botanical specimens, taxonomic breakthroughs, and horticultural experimentation. The contributors to this volume compare the impact of new developments and discoveries across several regions, broadening the geographical scope of their inquiries to encompass imperial powers that did not have overseas colonial possessions—such as the Russian, Ottoman, and Qing empires and the Tokugawa shogunate—as well as politically borderline regions such as South Africa, Yemen, and New Zealand. The essays in this volume examine the botanical ambitions of eighteenth-century empires; the figure of the botanical explorer; the links between imperial ambition and the impulse to survey, map, and collect botanical specimens in “new” territories; and the relationships among botanical knowledge, self-representation, and material culture